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Society

Iran To Offer Master's And PhD In Morality Enforcement

For those aiming to serve the Islamic Republic of Iran as experts to train the public morality agents, there are now courses to obtain the "proper" training.

Photo of one man and two veiled women in Qom

Properly dressed in the holy city of Qom.

Iran will create new "master's and doctorate" programs to train state morality agents checking on people's public conduct and attire, according to several Persian-language news sources.

Mehran Samadi, a senior official of the Headquarters to Enjoin Virtues and Proscribe Vices (Amr-e be ma'ruf va nahy az monkar) said "anyone who wants to enjoin virtues must have the knowledge," the London-based broadcaster Iran International reported, citing reports from Iran.


The morality patrols, in force since the 1979 revolution, tend to focus mostly on young people and women, particularly the public appearance for the latter. Loose headscarves will send women straight to a police station, often in humiliating conditions. Five years ago, the regime announced a new force of some 7,000 additional agents checking on women's hijabs and other standards of dress and behavior.

A woman in Tehran walks past a mural of an Iranian flag

The traffic police chief recently said women were not allowed to ride motorbikes

Rouzbeh Fouladi/ZUMA

New academic discipline

Last week, for example, Tehran police revealed that they had "disciplined" agents who had been filmed forcefully shoving a girl into a van. Such incidents may increase under the new, conservative president, Ibrahim Raisi.

Speaking about the new academic discipline, Samadi said morals go "much further than headscarves and modesty," and those earning graduate degrees would teach agents "what the priorities are."

Iran's Islamic regime, under the guidance of Shia jurists, continuously fine tunes notions of "proper" conduct — and calibrates its own, interventionist authority. More recently the traffic police chief said women were not allowed to ride motorbikes, and "would be stopped," Prague-based Radio Farda reported.

Days before, a cleric in the holy city of Qom in central Iran insisted that people must be vaccinated by a medic of the same sex "as often as possible," and if not, there should be no pictures of mixed-sex vaccinations.

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LGBTQ Plus

As Colombia Debates "Conversion Therapy" Ban, One Gay Man Shares His Story Of Survival

As Colombia debates banning the abusive practice of "conversion therapy," a Colombian teacher recalls the four years of therapy he undertook as teenager and his path to self-acceptance.

​David Zuluaga

David Zuluaga

David Zuluaga/INSTAGRAM
Mariana Escobar Bernoske

BOGOTÁ — Anguish is the word David Zuluaga, a 26-year-old Colombian, uses to describe his teenage years, when he realized he was attracted to men. Having always heard of homosexuality as a sin, he could barely process his own orientation. And he came to conclude that this was a problem to be fixed.

✉️ You can receive our LGBTQ+ International roundup every week directly in your inbox. Subscribe here.

On March 19, Colombia's lower legislative chamber began to debate a draft law banning so-called conversion therapies known in Colombia as Efforts to Change Expressions of Sexual Orientation, Identity or Gender (ECOSIEG). The bill, known as Inconvertibles ("Unchangeable"), would prevent all forceful and abusive measures on members of the various gay communities (the LGBTIQ+ collective), with the pretext of curing individuals of their sexual orientation or gender identity.


If approved — after several debates and a vote in the Senate — and promulgated, the law would make Colombia the ninth country in the world to ban such practices.

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