Setareh Tajik (ستاره تاجیک) was a 17-year-old high-school student killed in Tehran during the October 2022 Mahsa Movement protests.
Repeatedly struck in the face, head and body with batons by Iranian security forces. Her family was prevented from holding a public funeral and was pressured to remain silent. No criminal investigation was opened. The UN Independent International Fact-Finding Mission on Iran documented dozens of child killings in this pattern across the 2022 protests.
She was 17, and Iranian security forces beat her in the face until she was dead, and her family was told to keep quiet about it. That sentence is the entire moral architecture of the 2022 uprising in one girl's name. The state did this to children, repeatedly, on camera, and forty-six years into the Islamic Republic it still does it and still names no one. Setareh Tajik is in this glossary because saying her name out loud is the smallest thing a foreign-language learner can do that the state did not want done.
Because the 2022 protest casualty rolls include dozens of children whose families were forced into silence. Setareh Tajik is one of the youngest documented victims of that pattern.
Who she was
ستاره تاجیک (Setareh Tajik) was a 17-year-old high-school student killed in Tehran in October 2022, the youngest of the named protest victims documented in this batch. Witnesses cited by Wikipedia’s compiled record of Mahsa Movement deaths reported that she was struck repeatedly in the face, head and body with batons by security forces. Her family was pressured into public silence and was not permitted to hold a public funeral. Like many child victims of the 2022 uprising, her case appears in Iran Human Rights Documentation Center casualty rolls but has never been investigated inside Iran. No officer has been identified.
Sources
- Wikipedia: Deaths during the Mahsa Amini protests (compiled from IranWire, HRANA, Iran Human Rights)
- Iran Human Rights Documentation Center: casualty reports
- UN Independent International Fact-Finding Mission on Iran (A/HRC/55/67, March 2024)
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