ABSTRACT

This chapter explores the reasons behind the surge in serious crimes and misdemeanours committed by women, as well as feminine involvement in anti-state activities in the post-Islamic Revolution period. It argues that until the 1979 Revolution, Iran's general prosperity, coupled with the monarchy's formal crime control strategies, were effective in the control of serious crimes and misdemeanours in Iran which had a heritage of equating crime with masculine endeavour. Since the 1979 Islamic Revolution, Iran has gone through a tumultuous process of social change, population surge and dislocation–a retrogressive economic differentiation, mostly at the expense of the general prosperity that was the hallmark of the 1960s and 1970s. The Iranian modernization efforts in the 1960s and 1970s liberated, to some extent, a segment of women belonging to the middle and upper-middle classes from the yokes of traditional gender-based restrictions in social, economic and legal affairs.