Forough Ataollahi gets tense when she sees the police.
She can’t help it, even after eight years in Australia the sight of their cars or passing them on the street makes her nervous and it doesn’t matter that deep down she knows she’s safe, her trauma runs deep.
Growing up in Iran, the police were not there to protect and serve the community, but as a woman they were there to police her body and harassment was a constant.
“When I see police, a police car, I’m just scared. I panic,” she said.
“You see police as something to protect you. I see a police as someone to just attack me.”
“Imagine everything related to government we experience back in Iran is the same, the same stress, the same panic. But as women, it is double.”
Since the 1979 revolution many Iranians have lived under the yoke of a theocracy, but the regime has been rocked by six months of intense protests in the wake of the murder of 22-year old Mahsa Amini.
Police accused the young woman of wearing her hijab too loosely and arrested her – three days later she slipped into a coma and died.
Read the article by Conor Burke in The Canberra Times.