Brainwashing Backfires

Many years ago, I was a woman teacher in Iran. The following story happened in the early 1990s.

As any teacher or student has experienced, there is always some noise in the classroom. There is no way to achieve absolute silence, and I don't believe any attempt should be made to change that. Students need to talk, and sometimes talking helps them to understand better. I tried to keep them focused and busy in order to keep them from becoming distracted. I only interfered in extreme cases, for example when someone deliberately tried to disturb my class.

During my career, like many teachers, I learned to listen to little whispers while I pretended that I'm not hearing. That way I could discover attempts to cheat in exams, conspiracies for avoiding homework or copying it, etc.

Such whispers were very common and were mostly unimportant. But one day I heard something that got my attention. Some students were talking about seeing something which sounded pornographic, or to be more exact, a rape scene. I knew boys in that age are like that and no matter how much you try, they will always find ways to get pornographic materials. Although that disturbed me, I didn't take it very seriously. I thought some parents, older brother or ... had slipped and left an inappropriate VHS tape in the video player, or something like that.

But I began to worry when I heard similar whispers in different classes and by different students. That was alarming.

I lived in an Islamic country with a theocratic dictatorial government, where any relationship between single men and women was banned, even simple friendship. Sometimes people were arrested, faced with harsh charges and lashed for small transgressions, for example asking an address from the opposite sex, etc.

Most of the principals and teachers who were installed in schools were religious fanatics as well. Many of them were Iran-Iraq war veterans who the government had employed in order to replace the professional school staff, which was purged during the 1980s for ideological reasons. They didn't know how to treat children. Whenever a student showed a sign of disobedience, the usual solution was beating him until he started crying and begging for mercy!

It was surprising to see my students were subjected to inappropriate sexual material in such a society, despite all the religious lessons they went through, all the censorship which even banned showing women's hair and their singing, harsh rules which restricted the relationships between opposite sexes, banned cassette and video tapes and players, etc.

One day I paid a closer attention to a conversation between my students. They were talking about the same pornographic scene. I deliberately pretended that couldn't hear and let the conversation to go on. They were talking about how women were forced by some men to do horrible humiliating sexual acts, like it's no big deal. What worried me more was that they expressed their interest to commit such crimes that men were committing in that scene. I overheard things like "It's so much fun", "I wish I was there to take part", "If I was there I would have also forced those women to do this or that", "That's the utter fun you can have", etc. At the end of the conversion, I heard one of them say that he had the tape and was going to give it to his friend after the class.