Three years after the "Woman, Life, Freedom" protests, the Iranian state faces a problem it cannot solve by force: millions of women have simply stopped wearing the hijab in public, and the regime lacks the capacity to confront them all without triggering another uprising. The morality police that once patrolled Tehran's streets have not returned in force. The compulsory hijab law remains on the books, but its enforcement apparatus has been functionally dismantled by mass noncompliance. The replacement strategy is diffuse and deliberate. Judiciary chief Gholamhossein Mohseni Ejei has called on prosecutors to coordinate with police, intelligence bodies, and government institutions to target what he labels social "abnormalities" and "indecency." Conservative campaigns online promote "conscious purchasing" — a euphemism for economic boycotts of businesses run by women who don't cover their hair. The logic is straightforward: if direct coercion is too costly, deputize ordinary Iranians as enforcers. This is not deregulation. It is the privatization of ideological enforcement. A bank teller who refuses service to an unveiled woman, a clinic receptionist who turns away a patient, an employer who fires a noncompliant worker — each becomes a node in a distributed coercion network that has no visible command structure and no single pressure point for protesters to target. The state retreats from direct confrontation while the cost of noncompliance rises through a thousand small exclusions. The internal contradictions are real. President Masoud Pezeshkian speaks of national unity and social cohesion while judicial and conservative factions demand tougher enforcement. This produces what Saeed Paivandi, a professor at the University of Lorraine, calls a system in which "the government is turning women's bodies into a social, moral, and even security issue" — a woman without a headscarf is treated not as an individual making a personal choice but as a visible challenge to ideological order. A Tehran-based lawyer, speaking anonymously, identified the core hypocrisy: "When economic sanctions are imposed on them, they call it pressure, injustice and economic warfare. But when they use the same logic domestically to force part of society to change its behavior, it becomes 'support for values.'" The regime applies the very economic coercion it denounces internationally. The strategy carries its own risks. Shirin Shams, director of the exiled Women's Revolution Organization, argues the campaigns attempt to reconstruct divisions between women that the 2022 movement eroded. Paivandi warns that linking religion to humiliation and exclusion could further alienate younger Iranians from religious institutions entirely. Women who choose to wear the hijab risk being instrumentalized as markers of political loyalty, drawn into a confrontation they didn't seek. What emerges is neither the old enforcement regime nor its abolition, but a liminal system in which compliance pressure appears intermittently through courts, workplaces, administrative procedures, and social campaigns. The regime is testing whether distributed coercion can accomplish what centralized force could not — and whether it can do so without generating the concentrated public anger that nearly toppled the system in 2022.
