Iran shifts hijab enforcement from police patrols to workplace pressure and boycotts

Four years after a woman died in police custody for wearing her headscarf improperly, Iranian authorities have quietly abandoned the street-level enforcement that once defined the regime's approach to dress codes. The morality police patrols that sparked the 2022 "Woman, Life, Freedom" protests have largely retreated. Yet the compulsory hijab has not disappeared. Instead, it has metastasized into something more diffuse and harder to resist: a system of workplace sanctions, service denials, and coordinated economic boycotts that distributes enforcement across society itself.

Women appearing bareheaded in public has become visibly common across Iran—one of the most striking social shifts since those protests erupted. The judiciary chief, Gholamhossein Mohseni Ejei, recently called for prosecutors, police, intelligence agencies, and government institutions to coordinate action against what he termed social "abnormalities" and "indecency." But the language of the campaign has changed. Conservative groups now circulate online calls for "conscious purchasing," urging Iranians to boycott businesses run by women who do not observe the state dress code and instead patronize those who do. The shift is strategic: enforcement without the visibility of confrontation, pressure without the spark that ignites mass protest.

A female lawyer in Tehran, speaking anonymously for safety, described the tactic as a deliberate attempt to weaponize social identity. "This is a deliberate attempt to categorize people by identity and put them against one another," she said. She drew a sharp parallel: when economic sanctions are imposed on Iran internationally, the regime calls it pressure and injustice. When the same logic is applied domestically to force behavioral change, it becomes "support for values." The assumption that women who conform to one dress code uniquely represent Iranian social values, she argued, misreads the actual complexity of Iranian society. Women on social media have reported being denied access to clinics and banks for not wearing headscarves—enforcement appearing not through police but through the everyday gatekeepers of essential services.

Shirin Shams, an exiled Iranian political activist and director of the Women's Revolution Organization, sees the campaigns as an attempt to resurrect divisions that weakened during the mass movement. "The Islamic Republic has tried for years to divide women according to their clothing," she told Deutsche Welle. The compulsory hijab, in her view, represents one of the state's most fundamental ideological lines. The fact that women now move through public space without headscarves shows how far social reality has drifted from official expectation. The renewed campaigns are not merely about clothing; they are about reconstructing a boundary between compliant and noncompliant women.

Saeed Paivandi, a professor at the University of Lorraine, frames the conflict as a broader struggle over social control. Iranian authorities have spent years creating distinctions between women deemed "properly" veiled and those labeled "badly veiled" or "unveiled." "The government is once again turning women's bodies into a social, moral and even security issue," Paivandi said. A woman without a headscarf is not read simply as someone exercising individual choice. For parts of the political establishment, she becomes a visible challenge to an ideological order itself.

This tension exposes fractures within Iran's own leadership. President Masoud Pezeshkian has repeatedly called for social cohesion and national unity. Conservative judicial and political figures, meanwhile, continue demanding tougher enforcement of dress regulations. Parts of the establishment appear aware that a return to large-scale police confrontations could carry significant social and political costs. Others remain unwilling to accept the normalization of women appearing in public without hijabs. The result is neither the old comprehensive street enforcement nor an end to compulsory dress rules—instead, pressure appearing intermittently through courts, workplaces, businesses, administrative procedures, and social campaigns.

Paivandi argues that direct coercion has reached its limits and that supporters of Islamic dress codes are searching for alternative enforcement mechanisms. This could shift the burden from state institutions to society itself. A bank employee, clinic receptionist, employer, shopkeeper, or customer can become an enforcer without a police officer present. The boundary between law, personal discretion, and ideological pressure grows increasingly blurred. Paivandi also warns that linking religion to humiliation, exclusion, and coercion could further alienate younger Iranians from religious institutions. Women who choose to wear a hijab may themselves be drawn into a confrontation they did not choose if their clothing is presented as a marker of political loyalty. The system has evolved, but the pressure remains.