The Islamic Republic of Iran operates a network of prisons that function as instruments of systematic terror, where the most vulnerable—children—are forced into roles that strip away any remaining shred of humanity. Blindfolded women, their eyes covered to amplify fear and disorientation, are guided by the small hands of their own sons and daughters down cold, echoing corridors toward rooms where pain is methodically inflicted. This is not fiction. This is the lived reality documented by survivors, human rights investigators, and smuggled testimonies from inside facilities such as Evin, Gohardasht, and countless lesser-known detention centers across the country.

N., now in her late thirties and living under a new identity in the United Kingdom, agreed to speak on condition of anonymity. Her voice remains steady, yet every pause carries the weight of memories she cannot fully escape. “I still hear the sound of those tiny footsteps leading mothers who could not see where they were going,” she says. “The child knows the way because they have walked it many times. They know which door leads to the whip, which corridor ends at the electric shock table. No child should ever learn such geography.”

Her own path into this system began in the spring of 2009, weeks before the disputed presidential election that ignited the Green Movement. Plainclothes agents arrived at 2:17 a.m., according to the timestamp she later reconstructed from memory. They did not knock; they used a battering ram. Within minutes her laptop, external hard drives, notebooks, and even childhood photo albums were stuffed into black plastic bags. A coarse fabric was tied tightly across her eyes. She remembers the smell of motor oil and stale cigarette smoke inside the van that carried her away.

For the next twenty-three days she occupied cell number 47 in Ward 209 of Evin Prison—a space roughly 1.8 meters by 2.4 meters. The light never went off completely; a 40-watt bulb burned day and night behind a metal grille. Meals arrived through a slot in the door: a piece of flatbread, a small container of watery lentil soup, sometimes a bruised apple. Interrogations occurred in irregular bursts. She would be pulled from the cell at 4 a.m. or 11 p.m., marched to a room where two or three men sat behind a desk. They asked the same questions in endless loops: Who recruited you? Which foreign embassy paid you? Name your accomplices. When she answered truthfully—that she was simply an ordinary university graduate who had attended a few peaceful rallies—they moved to threats.

They described in clinical detail what they could do with a pair of pliers. They promised cigarette burns arranged in the shape of the MEK logo on her thighs. They played audio recordings of women screaming and claimed the voices belonged to her friends. Yet physical violence against her never materialized. “That absence became its own form of torture,” she explains. “You wait every second for the blow that never comes, so your mind supplies it instead.”

What she did witness, however, scarred her far more deeply. During one transfer between cell blocks she passed an open visitation room. Through a narrow window she saw a girl, perhaps eight or nine years old, holding the hand of a blindfolded woman who shuffled forward hesitantly. The child spoke in a low, practiced monotone: “Three more steps, Maman. Now turn left. Careful—the floor is wet here.” Guards stood watching, one smoking, another checking his phone. The scene lasted perhaps fifteen seconds before N. was pushed onward, but those seconds replay in her mind almost daily.

Stories like this are disturbingly common. Former prisoners released in prisoner exchanges or through rare amnesties have described similar scenes in multiple facilities. A mother arrested during the November 2019 fuel protests recounted how her six-year-old son was kept in the same detention center for seventeen days because no relative could immediately take custody. Each time she was summoned for questioning, the boy was ordered to lead her. “He learned the route better than I did,” she later told a researcher with the Abdorrahman Boroumand Center. “He warned me about the step that always made me stumble. He was trying to protect me in the only way he could.”

Medical personnel who have defected or been interviewed after fleeing Iran confirm that many child detainees exhibit symptoms consistent with prolonged exposure to extreme stress: night terrors, selective mutism, regression to earlier developmental stages, and an eerie, almost mechanical calmness when discussing violence. Psychologists use the term “coercive caregiving” to describe the dynamic in which a child is compelled to participate in the abuse of a parent. The psychological damage compounds across generations. The child who once guided a blindfolded mother may, decades later, struggle to form trusting relationships or may over-identify with authority figures as a survival mechanism.

The architecture of these prisons facilitates such cruelty. Many facilities were originally built as military barracks or factories before 1979; after the revolution they were repurposed with minimal modification. Narrow hallways force single-file movement. Blindfolds and handcuffs are standard procedure from the moment of arrest until release—or execution. Sound echoes easily off bare concrete, so screams carry far. Children quickly learn which sounds signal danger: the metallic clang of a heavy door, the jangle of keys, the sudden silence that precedes a beating.

Amnesty International’s most recent comprehensive report on Iran’s detention system, updated in late 2025, lists thirty-eight distinct methods of torture that have been credibly reported since 2017. Beyond beatings and flogging, interrogators employ:

Suspension by wrists or ankles for hours or days (known as “chicken kebab” when arms are tied behind the back and the body is hoisted)
Repeated immersion of the head in filthy water tanks
Administration of electric shocks via cables attached to sensitive areas
Rape or threat of rape, including with objects
Mock executions in which a noose is placed around the neck and the trapdoor is opened then closed at the last second
Forced ingestion of large quantities of salt water followed by refusal to allow use of a toilet

Children are not exempt from many of these practices. In some documented cases they have been beaten in front of parents to extract confessions. In others they have been threatened with the same fate as their mothers or fathers. The message is unmistakable: no one is too young to serve as leverage.

Since the eruption of nationwide protests in late December 2025, triggered by spiraling food and fuel prices compounded by anger over decades of mismanagement and repression, the scale of arrests has overwhelmed even the regime’s own capacity to process detainees. Unofficial estimates compiled by the Human Rights Activists News Agency place the number of people detained between December 28, 2025, and mid-January 2026 at between 17,000 and 22,000. Many are held in makeshift facilities—sports halls, school gymnasiums, abandoned warehouses—where basic hygiene has collapsed entirely. Reports describe overflowing toilets, no access to clean drinking water, and outbreaks of scabies and respiratory infections spreading rapidly among closely packed prisoners.

Executions have accelerated in parallel. Between January 1 and January 18, 2026, at least 147 individuals are known to have been hanged, according to Iran Human Rights. Several were juveniles at the time of their alleged offenses; Iranian law permits the death penalty for crimes committed under eighteen if the individual has reached “maturity” (a vague standard frequently interpreted in the state’s favor). Public hangings have returned to certain provincial cities as a deliberate show of strength.

Inside the prisons the atmosphere is one of barely contained panic. Guards, facing an unprecedented volume of new arrivals, have grown more erratic. Former detainees released in the past month describe shifts that last thirty-six hours or longer, with exhausted personnel lashing out at random. One man, held for eleven days in a temporary detention site in Isfahan, said he saw a seventeen-year-old boy kicked unconscious after he asked for water. “The guard just kept saying, ‘You think you’re special because you’re young? Everyone here is the same.’”

For N., the present wave of violence feels like a return to the 1980s she thought she had left behind. Her father, imprisoned from 1983 to 1988, survived only because a sympathetic guard occasionally slipped him extra bread. He never fully recovered. Chronic back pain from repeated falaka (beating on the soles of the feet), recurring nightmares, and a profound distrust of authority followed him until his death in 2014. N. believes the current generation of children forced to participate in their parents’ suffering will carry similar wounds for life.

She has chosen to speak now because she fears the world has grown numb to Iran’s suffering. Western media cycles move quickly; each new atrocity briefly trends before being displaced by the next crisis. Yet inside the country the machinery of repression continues uninterrupted. “People ask me why I don’t give up,” she says. “I tell them the same thing every time: because somewhere tonight a child is counting steps for a mother who cannot see. As long as that continues, giving up is not an option.”

The international community’s response remains fragmented. The United States and European Union maintain targeted sanctions against senior judiciary and security officials, yet the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps continues to generate revenue through smuggling networks and proxy militias across the region. The United Nations Human Rights Council has appointed special rapporteurs and passed resolutions, but Tehran routinely denies access to independent investigators. The International Criminal Court has received multiple referrals concerning possible crimes against humanity in Iran, yet jurisdiction remains contested because Iran is not a state party to the Rome Statute.

Meanwhile, inside Iran itself, small acts of resistance persist. Lawyers file appeals they know will be rejected. Doctors treat injured protesters in secret clinics. Teachers smuggle banned books into classrooms. And mothers, even when blindfolded, whisper words of love to the children leading them forward, hoping those words will outlast the concrete and steel that surround them.

The prisons of the Islamic Republic are more than buildings. They are a system designed to break the human spirit across every generation it can reach. Until that system is dismantled—whether through internal collapse or decisive international pressure—the sound of small footsteps guiding a terrified parent will remain one of the most haunting symbols of our time.