This article was originally published in Khat-e Solh Persian Magazine.
Human beings — these two-legged creatures — have passed through strange epochs. Turning the pages of each reveals alternating chapters of progress and regression: moments that evoke pride and exhilaration, and others that bring shame, cruelty, and the loss of human dignity. Yet the truth is this: if today we find certain issues of the past strange or abhorrent, they were often neither strange nor abhorrent in their own time. On the contrary, they might have been the pillars of that era — its source of energy, even its moving force. One of those issues is sexual slavery.
Sexual slavery did not emerge overnight. It took form when human daily life became bound up with religious rituals — practices born largely of fear and curiosity. People clung to spells, prayers, and rites without hesitation; the divine hid itself behind dense layers of superstition, while humans divided their existence between the poles of strength and weakness. In the eras when people were devoured alive to appease a tribal god — or later, when they were cast into burning pyres to win divine satisfaction — servitude was incomprehensible without submission.
But when agricultural life replaced the hunting life, private property appeared, economic results accelerated, and human meaning was redefined. War soon became a means to wealth. Humans began to enslave one another — first as prisoners of war, later through sheer power and ownership. Yet that was only the beginning. In every society, the strong found ways to enslave the weak, under various pretexts. Thus slavery born of war produced further wars, and the captives became the first slaves. From that moment, the slave belonged entirely to the master, and the bitter legacy of sexual slavery entered history — a poisoned gift to the ages that followed.
A slave, by definition, is a person devoid of will. They exist under the absolute control of whoever has enslaved them. If we are to seek the roots of sexual slavery in our contemporary world — to understand its causes and origins — the psychological and mental conditioning behind it must be examined first. Because even today, the weight of traditional religiosity — polished by centuries of clerical marketing — keeps the human mind trapped in rigid frameworks. People live within these unchanging contracts of belief, mistaking the illusion of order for peace of mind.
Meanwhile, greed, intellect, power, and capital have embedded slavery deep within modern social layers — both hidden and visible. Today, many forms of labor or dependency are so normalized that millions cannot survive without submitting to them. This has been imposed on modern humans despite the tireless noise made by global human rights organizations. It is no secret that when a person no longer owns their body or their mind, their life, under certain conditions, is effectively carried in daily funeral processions — the coffin marked with the name “sexual slavery.”
If we extend this diagnosis to a closed society such as today’s Iran, sexual slavery exists on both overt and covert levels, corroding the population like a hidden disease. In such societies, women and children are its primary victims.
Every war may bring sexual slavery in its wake, yet the Iranian society of today, even without open war, suffers from crises that resemble a war zone. Repression of civil activists and the suffocation of public life have multiplied these crises. Out of a cultural obsession with “saving face,” and because of the regime’s deliberate secrecy, there is no access to the real scope of this phenomenon. In open, democratic societies, movements like #MeToo emerged — waves of collective testimony that forced psychological and social reevaluation, pushing governments and civic groups to seek solutions.
Sexual slavery recognizes no gender. Yet women, for historical and religious reasons, have borne its pain more often — and children form the next largest group of victims. This plague exists worldwide, but Iran’s officials conceal it so thoroughly that real statistics remain out of reach. Still, a brief look beneath the surface of society reveals that each passing day brings new victims.
Here we face a deep paradox: beyond the irresponsibility of the regime, local subcultures also impede honest diagnosis. Consider India, a society still entangled in ritualistic and caste-bound traditions. There, the government, despite its flaws, collaborates with activists to understand and address the social roots of sexual exploitation. As a result, India — though deeply afflicted — has at least taken major steps toward confronting the issue. In Iran, however, the regime itself functions as one of the chief engines of sexual slavery.
One example is the practice of temporary marriage — or sigheh. Many scholars and ordinary citizens rightly call it religious prostitution. Throughout its history, temporary marriage has harmed women most. For a small sum — often out of financial desperation — women enter short-term unions with men they barely know or trust. This is a form of sexual labor, a transaction of body for survival. Because it involves one party’s exploitation of another, it bears all the marks of sexual slavery. Some Shi’a clerics even declare it “virtuous,” a pious loophole stitched together for the purpose of using women’s bodies under the cover of faith. In my view, once a person loses control over their own body and another assumes command, that act belongs squarely within the realm of sexual slavery.
Another major factor is rape and sexual exploitation, affecting both young men and, even more often, women and children. Poverty and shame drive concealment. Sexual violence in Iran is rampant — and the regime itself has long used rape as an instrument of suppression. In prisons, where the inmate has no defense, sexual assault signifies total loss of bodily autonomy: the body belongs to the jailer or, more precisely, the rapist. Testimonies suggest that some security officers exhibit a form of sexual sadism, deriving pleasure from acts of brutality and humiliation.
Rape leaves a wound deeper than the physical: it enslaves the victim from within. For many, it breeds disgust toward their own body, erasing the sense of ownership. Such slavery of the psyche, I believe, is the most excruciating of all. We have heard many stories of sexual violence — but we rarely sit face to face with survivors to grasp the psychological and social depth of their pain. Whether the assault occurs in prison or at home, once a victim loses control over their own body, they become part of the landscape of sexual slavery.
Child rape adds another layer — not only sexual abuse but also a conditioning into lifelong servitude. It is a massive exploitation that is growing in Iran. One of its darkest forms is the use of children in drug trafficking. International and domestic gangs abuse children as expendable tools: they rape them, addict them, and force them to carry drugs or perform other illicit acts. Many children working on the streets are constantly exposed to assault. The state offers no serious plan to protect them. Those activists who try are harassed, silenced, or imprisoned — their fate resembling that of Atena Daemi and others.
Child sexual slavery is most prevalent among families living below the poverty line. In such households, it is not uncommon for children to be raped by brothers, fathers, uncles, or cousins, turned into obedient servants through repeated abuse.
Meanwhile, the Islamic Republic’s clerical regime has openly normalized child marriage, promoting it on state media and with clerical approval. The result: a rise in child brides. A child, physically and emotionally unprepared for marriage, develops deep psychological voids. Under Iran’s restrictive laws, she becomes a man’s property in every sense. The trauma lies not only in the body but in the mind — the child learns to perceive life only through the lens of subjugation. Many of these girls can only say: “I have no choice.” That sentence alone encapsulates the height of helplessness.
Western research reports speak of a “middle class” of sex workers in countries like the U.S., where individuals voluntarily engage in sex work to earn extra income. That may qualify as voluntary sexual labor, yet in Iran, we have no access to even such statistics. Here, sexual slavery takes other forms — families renting or selling children out of economic desperation. Often these children are trafficked abroad, passed between criminal networks.
Even by the regime’s own figures, prostitution in Iran now begins at age twelve. When a child sells their body to feed their family, it reveals a collapse not only of governance but of moral order and social empathy. The ruling clerics — many over eighty-five — interpret the modern world through medieval eyes, branding all dissent as heresy or immorality. Their dogmatism has cut Iranian society off from the global conversation about human rights and gender equality.
Children shape the future. But when their formative experiences are of forced marriage, hard labor, rape, and lovelessness, they will inevitably reproduce the same pain for the next generation.
Our collective imagination still associates sexual slavery solely with sex trafficking — the smuggling of bodies across borders. Yet beyond that historic root lies a broader reality: when a society abandons moral responsibility and ceases to uphold the social customs that sustain empathy and justice, slavery and other pathologies bloom like toxic mushrooms in the dark.
Environmental conditions and lack of education normalize this exploitation, embedding it as a local “custom.” Reports indicate that the internet has dramatically expanded such abuse — yet the Iranian regime remains completely silent.
Undoubtedly, modern sexual slavery differs from that of the past. In former times, women were expected to be humble, obedient, and voiceless, their fate decided by fathers, brothers, or husbands. That patriarchal code — sanctioned by both tradition and state — still governs much of Iranian life. Even today, marriage negotiations involve dowries and bride-prices, vestiges of treating women as property.
From the outset, this system gives men the upper hand: they can buy consent with money, jewelry, or gifts — or withhold sustenance as punishment. Depending on his class and worldview, a man may treat a woman as merely a household accessory, a necessary but undesirable part of life. To exploit a woman sexually without considering her perspective is to reduce her to a one-sided source of pleasure — a condition indistinguishable from domestic sexual slavery.
Some Iranian youth are gradually freeing themselves from this archaic pattern, but without any legal protection. The regime, meanwhile, exerts all its power to deny women basic human rights. To grasp the extent of Iran’s moral and social collapse, one must live within it — a society oscillating between tradition and modernity, drowning in ethical confusion, where women’s bodies have become battlegrounds.
Certain believers still insist that women “have no soul.” In a deeply religious culture, that belief is devastating. The core relationship in such a society is not between man and woman, but between man and God — rendering woman a distraction, a source of temptation, an obstacle to piety. This is not unique to Islam; similar patterns appear among ultra-Orthodox Jews and conservative Christians. In all such settings, when women are stripped of autonomy, sexual slavery becomes a silent social norm embedded throughout their lives.
Another pervasive form today is online sexual exploitation. The internet enables new kinds of slavery: human beings are lured into digital traps, then sold, coerced, or blackmailed. In Iran, with its climate of censorship and surveillance, little is known about how these networks operate, but traffickers and abusers certainly make full use of the web’s reach.
Sexual slavery has never existed without violence. To ensure submission, abusers use threats, blackmail, and physical harm. Through psychological and bodily torture, they maintain control, extracting pleasure and profit. Sexual exploitation, whether coerced directly or masked as choice, remains a crime against the inner consent of the human being. Even in the guise of “modern sex work,” when conditions of life or mental distress compel a person to yield, the act does not cease to be inhuman.
Iran’s collapsed economy, deepening poverty, and cultural despair have driven people toward the oldest survival mechanism known to humankind: prostitution and sexual servitude. Political paralysis and the regime’s contempt for women, children, and the poor have intensified the crisis. Whether hidden or visible, sexual slavery in Iran is on the rise. Most painful of all, the state has no plan whatsoever to curb or eliminate this profoundly anti-human reality.