Iranian police hunt girls who launched viral Selena Gomez dance trend
- Oops!Something went wrong.Please try again later.
Iranian police are hunting for a group of girls who launched a viral Selena Gomez dance trend.
A video was posted online last week showing five young Iranian women performing a dance routine to the Afropop hit Calm Down by Rema and Selena Gomez.
The women danced without headscarves in front of tower blocks in Shahrak Ekbatan, a west Tehran housing development that has been a flashpoint of anti-government protests.
The next day a popular Twitter account sharing news from Ekbatan said police had visited looking for the girls.
"They looked for CCTV footage of Block 13 to identify the girls who were only dancing and were not involved in any political activity. Police were seen checking the footage and questioning the guards," it said.
Since then Iranian women across the country have responded by posting videos of themselves performing the dance.
I wonder if @heisrema knows that his song #CalmDown is the backdrop of an incredibly courageous act of defiance by young Iranian women?
It started when 5 girls danced to his music in @shahrak_ekbatan- risking persecution by a regime that has murdered women for simply protesting. pic.twitter.com/V9zIbaF8og— Nahayat Tizhoosh (@NahayatT) March 12, 2023
Activists have hailed the women in the 41-second video for their courage in defying the Islamic Republic’s ban on public dancing, and strict public dress codes mandating the wearing of headscarves in public.
Opposition to public dress codes sparked a nationwide protest movement that started last September after the death in police custody of Mahsa Amini, a 22-year-old Kurdish woman who was detained for “inappropriate attire”.
Young women removing their headscarves have become a staple of a protest movement that has grown into calls to overthrow the Islamic republic.
Iranian security forces have responded with a crackdown in which rights groups say more than 500 people have been killed and thousands arrested. At least four protesters have been executed.
Amid a climate of fear in which young women are scared of being targeted by security forces, schoolgirls across the country have reported falling ill, raising fears that they are being deliberately poisoned. While the government is investigating the incidents, several officials have suggested the illnesses could be caused by “hysteria”.
In January a young Iranian couple was reportedly sentenced to 10-and-a-half years in prison each for publishing a video of themselves dancing together in Tehran's central Azadi - or Freedom - Square.
