Saaed's story (2010) Iranian rape survivor prompted to disclose torture after years of shame

Admitting that he had been raped did not come easily for Saaed*.  Even now, his therapist remains one of the very few people to whom he has disclosed this most painful aspect of his tortured history.

Over the course of four years of psychotherapy at the Medical Foundation for the Care of Victims of Torture (MF), Saaed slowly unravelled the details of a two-year ordeal that drove him out of Iran. 

But it was only in the fourth year of therapy that Saaed, a 52-year-old father who was once held in high regard in his profession as a teacher, was moved to reveal how his life was dramatically altered during his incarceration in Iran.  It is an experience that even ten years after his escape, would leave him often in a state of semi-waking nightmares where he believed he was still in prison and at the mercy of his torturers.

Even now, this articulate and dignified man is occasionally stilted as he recollects the harrowing details of how male prison guards humiliated him and broke his resolve.  Yet despite the anguish of remembering, it is something he insists on doing to lend his voice to the disclosures from victims of last year’s (2009) post-election clampdown, and to expose the reality of Iran’s history of State-sanctioned torture.

President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’’s government has vehemently denied claims regarding hundreds of cases of alleged torture, murder and rape recently unearthed by opposition investigators, who claim to have amassed evidence comprising firsthand accounts from victims and witnesses.

But the proliferation of torture and rape is nothing new, it is a method of abuse that the Iranian government has long used to persecute and degrade people.  Yet male survivors in particular have historically been reluctant to publicly disclose their suffering, owing to the shame and stigma associated with rape.

Like many citizens, Saaed had, with fellow professionals and through various political groups, taken part in lobbying and campaigning initiatives to seek reform of Iran’s governance mechanisms.  He came into contact with many high profile political figures, and with people whose outspoken criticism of the government ultimately placed them under fatal suspicion. 

It was when one such associate was killed, not long after Saaed had met with him during a stay outside of Iran that Saaed began to worry.  Soon after Saaed returned to work following this trip, his employers received a letter from the Iranian intelligence service ordering them to end his contract, with no warning or explanation.

Not long after, Saaed was arrested, taken from the street by intelligence officers, in a hood and blindfold, and detained in a prison in the city of Shiraz where he was accused of a series of random offences that bore no relation to his past – once of smuggling heroin, then of adultery, and finally, on the basis of his political activities, he was accused of working as a spy.

“I have never done anything criminal in my life.  I couldn’t understand why they had arrested me.    I wondered if it was because I had helped to set up a support group for people who had been raped, or because I had been gathering evidence of incidents of rape.  There was no real reason; they just wanted to make me a scapegoat.”

For two years, Saaed suffered regular beatings and electrocutions, and was deprived of food and sleep, while detained in a small, filthy cell, where the walls were covered with bloodstains and with the desperate scrawls of previous prisoners. 

Years after his departure from Iran, when Saaed began to process his experiences during therapy, he revealed how he could still be taken back to that time, imagining he could see blood pouring down the walls.

“The days went by in prison, I don’t know how long it was; it was only when I was released that my wife told me that it had been more than two years.”

As the interrogators became increasingly violent, Saaed recalls being taken to another room in the prison where he knew things would only get worse for him.  He was stripped naked and his hands were tied behind his head.  He was sexually assaulted by the guards and raped anally with a bottle.

Fighting back tears, Saaed recalls: “I begged them not to do this.  They threw me around like meat.  I bled for days afterwards.  This wasn’t human behaviour.  I couldn’t believe they were doing this to me.  They wanted me to admit that I was a spy, but I couldn’t because this wasn’t true.  When they allowed me to take a shower, I tried to kill myself with the shower cable, but they found me and stopped me, and I was beaten more.”

Saaed was returned to his cell.  He says he was given hallucinatory drugs which made him believe his father and his son were in his cell with him.  He was beaten even more when, because of the drugs, he began talking in his cell, as though to his father and son.

Weakened by the torture, Saaed became seriously ill and was taken to hospital.  It was from there that he was able to escape and with the help of a family friend, arrange his passage out of Iran and to the UK, where he arrived in 2005. 

For years after he left in Iran, he struggled to come to terms with his past: “I had always talked about the rape as though it was a friend it had happened to.  My therapist asked me once if I had been raped; at that point I had to leave the room.  When I came again to see her again, she reassured me that I didn’t have to talk about it but if I wanted help it was there. 

“For years I had felt so ashamed.  When the news started to come out about what was happening to people after the elections, my wife would watch videos on the internet where women were saying they had been raped and she didn’t believe it.  If my own family, my wife, couldn’t believe it how could other people understand unless it was spoken about?

“I wanted people to understand that this had been happening before the elections.  People had just not spoken out. I saw two other people in prison like me who had been raped.  I know there were others.  That evidence is real.  It’s still very difficult for me to talk about it, but maybe by talking about this I can help other people to understand the reality.  That is all I want.”

*Certain details in this story have been changed to protect the individual’s identity.