Feminist attention is not neutral. It is shaped, directed, and unevenly distributed.

In 2022–2023, Western feminist institutions mobilised loudly in support of protests in Iran, celebrating women’s resistance to compulsory hijab as a defining feminist struggle. Today, as war kills women and girls and destroys their access to education, that same infrastructure has fallen conspicuously silent. This contrast is not accidental. It exposes a deeper logic of selective solidarity, one that determines which forms of gendered violence are recognised and which are allowed to disappear. I write this as an Iranian woman and academic working on law, society, and gender, situated within that uneven terrain of visibility.

In the 40 days of strikes, the Iranian Health Ministry reported that 251 women and 216 children were killed. Among them were the victims of the missile strike on the girls’ school in Minab, where more than 165 children, most of them young girls, lost their lives. These were not casualties in transit or by chance; they were children sitting in classrooms, learning, when an American strike ripped the space around them apart and buried them under the rubble. Their desks, their books, their voices, all the traces of the future they once had, were buried with them. And yet, despite the scale and visibility of this violence, it has not generated the kind of sustained feminist outrage that we witnessed in 2022. When Iranian women removed their headscarves, their images circulated globally, amplified across academic institutions, activist networks, and media platforms for weeks and months. This year, that visibility was never afforded to the hundreds of women, girls, and children torn to pieces by American and Israeli missiles. What we........

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