"I was whipped 40 times. For wearing a miniskirt."

The night that changed Tala Raassi’s life started with a simple get-together at a girlfriend’s house. About 30 teenagers were gathered to chat and listen to music; they weren’t drinking, nor were there any drugs.

The night should have ended as innocuously as it began. Instead, it ended with 16-year-old Tala shackled in a jail and facing 40 lashes – just for wearing a miniskirt.

Tala grew up in post-1979 Revolution Iran, where morality police patrol the streets to enforce conservative Islamic modes of dress and behavior. These government-funded religious police punish women for showing anything but their face and hands on the street, as well as public displays of affection or drinking alcohol.

Mixed parties are prohibited under the strict regime, but Iranians regularly hold co-ed parties in the privacy of their homes.

Tala Rassi as a child. Image source: Supplied.

“When I became a teenager, we used to go to these house parties and we had to wear the hijab, the scarf, the manteau or long coat, and underneath it we’d wear our fashionable clothing, Raassi explains.

“So we’d get to the house, remove our clothing and then we’d be wearing what teenagers wear anywhere around the world.”

Tala was attending one such party on her 16th birthday, wearing a short skirt, when the host’s jealous ex-boyfriend tipped off authorities about the gathering.

What followed was far more brutal than he, or any of the teenagers present, could have imagined.

“I was at the party just chatting with my friend and I just heard her scream, ‘Run,’ and I turned around and saw three men with beards and guns storming into the house,” Raassi recalls of that fateful night.

“I started running after my best friend outside the back door into the streets in a miniskirt and high heels. We were stopped by the government officials. They said, ‘If you don’t stop, we will shoot’.”