The heart of Genghrui´s greatest heart was hit hard when it rolled over the roof of an electric transformer box on Tehran´s busy Thawra Street a year ago. She lifted her veil in the air and waved it over her head.
People gathered around her and shouted at her and asked her to get out. She knew from the outset that her arrest was doomed. But she did anyway, she says, to change the country for her eight-year-old daughter.
"I kept repeating to myself, ´We should not grow up and be in the same circumstances that we grew up in this country,´" Gengrooy said in an interview this week in an apartment in an undisclosed location outside Iran. "Genjeroy is waiting for an asylum claim.
"I kept saying to myself ´you can do it, you can do it´ ... I was feeling particularly strong. It was as if I was not this secondary sex anymore. "
After her protest, she was arrested and dismissed from her job at a research institute and sentenced to three years in prison for inciting adultery and deliberately violating Islamic law.
The court threatened to deprive her daughter but managed to escape from Iran with Viana before starting her sentence. "I found a smug smuggler," she said. Everything happened very quickly .. I left my life, my house and my car. "
While she was talking, she was drawing drawings for her mother, waving her white headdress in the air.
Since the outbreak of the Islamic revolution 40 years ago, women have been forced to wear headscarves and publicly punish them with felony, fine or arrest.
Amnesty International says Janjeroy was among at least 39 women arrested by the authorities in protests against the headscarf, adding that another 55 people are being held for their rights, including women who tried to enter an illegal football field and lawyers who advocate for women´s issues.
"The authorities" went to the extreme and unreasonably to stop their campaign, "Mansoura Mills, an Iranian researcher at Amnesty International, said." Like searching people´s homes for signs that read ´I am against the forced hijab´. "
The decals are part of ongoing efforts to shed light on the hijab issue as well as a campaign calling on women to wear white headscarves on Wednesday.
"She told me that the revolution caused a great deal of discrimination on the basis of sex and separated men from women," Genjeroy recalled her mother´s tales of life before the revolution.
Janjeroy acted after the arrest of two women for the same reason in the same street.
"Of course, we do not expect everyone to climb the podium on Revolution Street," she says. "But that made our voices audible all over the world. What we girls have done has made this movement continue. "
