Guidance Patrol
Based on Wikipedia: Guidance Patrol
The Vans That Changed Everything
On September 13, 2022, a twenty-two-year-old woman named Mahsa Amini was pulled off the streets of Tehran. Her crime: a few strands of hair were visible beneath her headscarf. Three days later, she was dead.
The official cause was heart failure. But bruises covered her legs and face. Witnesses who were arrested alongside her described something different—they said officers tortured her in the back of a van before they even reached the police station.
Her death ignited protests unlike anything Iran had seen in decades. Tens of thousands were arrested. Over five hundred people were killed. And at the center of it all was an institution that most people outside Iran had never heard of: the Guidance Patrol.
What Is the Guidance Patrol?
The Guidance Patrol—known in Persian as gašt-e eršâd—is Iran's morality police. Think of it as a vice squad, but instead of targeting drugs or gambling, it enforces a religious dress code. Its primary obsession: ensuring women cover their hair.
The force was established in 2005, but its roots stretch back to the 1979 Iranian Revolution, when the country transformed from a secular monarchy into an Islamic republic. Since that revolution, Iranian law has required all women—regardless of their personal beliefs—to wear a hijab covering their head, neck, and hair.
For the first two decades after the revolution, enforcement fell to the Islamic Revolution Committees. The Guidance Patrol replaced them, reporting directly to the Supreme Leader of Iran. This isn't a local police matter. It comes from the very top.
How It Works
Picture a van parked near a shopping center or metro station. Inside: male officers. Standing nearby: women draped in the chador, the full-body covering that represents the government's preferred style of modest dress. Sometimes Basij paramilitaries—volunteer religious militia—assist them.
They watch. They wait. And when they spot a woman whose hijab has slipped, or whose clothing is too bright, or whose jeans are too tight, they move.
According to Amnesty International, girls as young as seven are subject to these rules. The United Nations has documented officers violently slapping women across the face, beating them with batons, and shoving them into vans.
Once detained, women are taken to a correctional facility. There, they're lectured on proper dress. Police photograph them and record their personal information. Officers sometimes force detainees to destroy their "indecent" clothing with scissors. Most are released the same day to relatives.
But not everyone gets off so easily.
Under Article 683 of Iran's Islamic Penal Code, women who don't wear the hijab face ten days to two months in prison, fines ranging from about one dollar to twelve dollars in American currency, and—perhaps most shocking to Western observers—up to seventy-four lashes.
It's Not Just About Women's Hair
While the hijab receives the most attention internationally, the Guidance Patrol's mandate extends further. Officers monitor what they consider "Western-style" haircuts on men. They watch for male-female fraternization—an unmarried couple simply taking a walk together can draw scrutiny. They police makeup, bright colors, tight clothing, torn jeans, and short pants.
Trans women face particular harassment. When an Iranian trans woman was beaten in April 2018, police refused to help her. The patrol treats her existence as a violation in itself.
Perhaps most troubling: ordinary citizens are encouraged to report one another. Traffic cameras scan for dress code violations. CCTV footage from cafes, universities, and even kindergartens flows directly to police. Iran has built an entire surveillance apparatus around the question of what people wear.
The Numbers Tell a Story
In 2014, Iran's Interior Minister revealed some startling statistics. That year alone, approximately 220,000 women were hauled to police stations and forced to sign promises that they would comply with hijab requirements for three months. Another 19,000 received formal notices about covering their hair. Nine thousand were detained outright.
But those numbers only capture the serious cases. In that same year, police reportedly issued warnings and "guidance" to 3.6 million Iranians for dress code violations. In a country of roughly 85 million people, that means about one in every twenty-four citizens received some form of admonishment.
In 2015, Tehran police stopped 40,000 drivers for dress code violations over just eight months. Most had their vehicles impounded for a week—a punishment that seems almost absurdly disproportionate until you realize the government treats visible hair as a serious moral offense.
By 2016, Tehran had deployed 7,000 undercover Guidance Patrol officers. They dressed like ordinary citizens, watching and reporting. You might be standing next to one at the grocery store and never know it.
The Death That Changed Everything
Mahsa Amini wasn't the first woman to die in Guidance Patrol custody. But her death landed differently.
In March 2024, a United Nations fact-finding mission concluded definitively: Iran was responsible for her death. The investigation found she was severely beaten during her arrest, directly contradicting the government's insistence that she simply collapsed from a pre-existing heart condition.
The UN report went further, documenting systematic abuses during the protests that followed—arbitrary detentions, torture, disproportionate force against peaceful demonstrators. Women and girls bore the brunt of it.
The protests that erupted after Amini's death were, in the words of observers, "unlike any the country had seen before." They represented the biggest challenge to the Iranian government in years. For a brief moment, enforcement relaxed. Reports even circulated—erroneously, as it turned out—that the Guidance Patrol would be disbanded entirely.
It wasn't.
The Crackdown Returns
By mid-July 2023, after months during which younger women had largely ignored the headscarf requirement, the Guidance Patrol announced its return to the streets. The timing was deliberate: just before Muharram, one of the holiest months in Shia Islam. On the day patrols resumed, widespread internet outages swept across the country.
The pattern has only intensified since. In October 2023, a seventeen-year-old named Armita Geravand fell into a coma after an alleged encounter with morality police officers. She was declared brain dead. The government claimed she had a pre-existing illness. Human rights groups weren't convinced.
In July 2024, police shut down a Turkish Airlines office after workers refused orders to cover their hair. That same summer, officers deployed 7,000 troops to beaches to enforce the hijab. In August, CCTV footage surfaced showing police severely beating two teenage girls on the street before dragging them away.
Technology as Enforcer
The Guidance Patrol has embraced the digital age with disturbing enthusiasm.
A mobile app called "Nazer" allows vetted members of the public to report women they spot in vehicles without headscarves. Drones now patrol from above, identifying uncovered women. Facial recognition software has been installed at Tehran's Amirkabir University of Technology specifically to catch women not wearing the hijab.
Police issue penalty notices through mobile apps, with fines automatically deducted from citizens' bank accounts. There's no appeal, no court appearance, no due process. Just money vanishing because an algorithm decided your headscarf wasn't on right.
A secret "chastity program" law, partially implemented, aims to prevent women who don't wear the hijab from leaving the country. The government has closed cafes and restaurants it deems insufficiently modest. In August 2024, the Minister of Islamic Culture ordered 1,500 "missionary personnel" to be trained for what the government calls hijab and chastity enforcement. They're called Mujahideen Fatimi—roughly translated, "warriors of Fatimah," named for the prophet Muhammad's daughter.
The Punishment Escalates
The list of consequences for dress code violations has grown increasingly severe. Hefty fines. Banking restrictions that can effectively cut women off from the financial system. Business closures for establishments that don't enforce the rules. Jail time. Forced labor. Travel bans.
And then there's something that sounds almost Soviet in its cruelty: women who repeatedly defy the dress code may be diagnosed as mentally ill. The state pathologizes resistance itself.
International Response
The world took notice after Mahsa Amini's death.
On September 22, 2022, the United States Department of the Treasury announced sanctions against the Guidance Patrol and seven senior leaders of Iran's security organizations. The sanctions specifically cited "violence against protestors and the death of Mahsa Amini." Those targeted included Mohammad Rostami Cheshmeh Gachi, chief of Iran's morality police, and Haj Ahmad Mirzaei, head of the Tehran division. Their assets within US jurisdiction were frozen, and American entities were forbidden from doing business with them.
Four days later, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau announced that Canada would impose its own sanctions on the Guidance Patrol, its leadership, and the officials responsible for Amini's death and the subsequent crackdown.
But sanctions from abroad have done little to change behavior inside Iran.
The Theological Debate
Even within Iran, the Guidance Patrol's legitimacy is contested.
Supporters frame it as fulfilling an Islamic obligation known as "enjoining good and forbidding wrong"—the religious duty to encourage moral behavior and prevent immoral behavior in one's community. They claim ordinary Iranians want this enforcement.
Critics argue the government should respect citizens' freedom and dignity, enforcing civil law but not imposing religious practice. Some religious scholars have gone further, calling the Guidance Patrol un-Islamic. Their reasoning: certain Islamic requirements become forbidden—haram—when enforcing them leads to social upheaval, or sedition.
There's also a question of reciprocity. The concept of "enjoining good and forbidding wrong" was traditionally understood as a mutual obligation—ordinary people could instruct their rulers just as rulers could instruct them. In practice, it flows only one direction: from the state to the citizen, never the reverse.
The Fake Disbandment
On December 3, 2022, as protests raged across the country, Iran's Prosecutor-General made a startling announcement. He said the Guidance Patrol was not under the judiciary's supervision and was "in the process of being disbanded." He added that the hijab law was under review.
Hope briefly flared. News outlets around the world reported that Iran was abolishing its morality police.
They weren't.
Within days, the Iranian government clarified that no official decision had been made. State media denied any dissolution. Enforcement of the mandatory hijab actually intensified, particularly in religious cities. Protestors called a three-day general strike, with shopkeepers closing their businesses. Many suspected the prosecutor's statement had been a deliberate distraction designed to overshadow coverage of the strike.
Iranian state-run Arabic language channel Al Alam News Network explained that "the maximum impression that can be taken" from the prosecutor's comments was simply that the morality police and the judiciary were unrelated. Nothing more.
On July 16, 2023, the Iranian law enforcement force formally announced that patrols by the morality police would be relaunched.
A Pattern of Deaths
Mahsa Amini and Armita Geravand are the names that have reached international headlines. But they are not alone.
Zahra Bani Yaghoub, another Iranian woman, also died in police custody after being arrested for alleged dress code violations. Homa Darabi became known for setting herself on fire in 1994 to protest compulsory hijab. She was a psychiatrist. She was also a mother. She chose self-immolation on a busy Tehran street, crying out against forced veiling as she died.
The enforcement hasn't been without scandal even among its enforcers. Reza Zarei, a former Tehran police chief in charge of the Guidance Patrol—a man whose job was to enforce public morality—was found in a brothel. He was arrested and lost his position.
The Flowers and the Vans
Not everything the Guidance Patrol does involves violence. On Iranian Mother's Day in 2013, officers distributed flowers to women wearing the chador. It was a small gesture—a reward for compliance, a public relations exercise in a country where many women deeply resent being policed.
But the flowers don't change what the vans represent.
In a single institution, we see a collision of forces that define modern Iran: revolutionary ideology maintained by force, technology deployed against citizens, women's bodies as the battleground for the state's vision of morality. The Guidance Patrol isn't just about headscarves. It's about control—who has it, who doesn't, and what happens to those who resist.
Mahsa Amini's hair was showing. Three days later, she was dead. The vans are still on the streets.