[webmobdev]

Kind of true. But the Shah was no champion of anybody's right:

> ... Police reports from the Muzaffarī period (1896–1907) show that the most common punishment for women caught selling sex was a practice known as nafie-balad. This was a form of forceful banishment or eviction from the city targeted at sinful, criminal and undesirable subjects and those who defy social and moral conventions of the society ... Public discontent came to a head at the end of the 1910s with the first series of petitions in 1919 calling for sex workers to be banished from Tehran.

> The political figure and writer Hassan Ezam-Qodsi notes that sex workers from Qajariyah alley in Tehran were moved to this new neighbourhood in order to avoid sexual assaults on "respectable" women in the city ... One day, all the women suspected of selling sex were gathered and moved by military trucks to a nearby caravanserai outside of Tehran’s wall: “the wayward women were all thrown in there like sheep... later, houses were built and a neighbourhood took shape which was named Shahrinaw”.

> The district offered its services as usual until the 1940s when public dissatisfaction surged again ... In this period, the practice of nafie-balad was again deployed as a tool to address the public concern over the rapid spread of sexually transmitted diseases ... the result of an STD test undertaken by Pasteur Institute of Tehran in 1929 showed that 43 per cent of the 3,498 participants were tested positive ... Eventually, in 1953 the municipality bowed to public pressure and ordered the erection of a two-and-a-half-metre tall brick wall around Shahrinaw, restricting entry to a rusty metal gate on the southern edge of the neighbourhood. While the gate was open to men seeking illicit pleasure, women were allowed neither in nor out.