Constantly Under the Spotlight: How Families in Tehran Monitor Adolescents and Young Adults

The increasing depth and spread of surveillance methods and equipment in all levels of private and public life in recent decades has led to the emergence of the new interdisciplinary field of “surveillance studies.” In Iran, although the formal and governmental forms of surveillance and control have been much emphasized, different forms of surveillance and control employed inside homes and by family members upon each other have mainly escaped scholarly attention. In this article, we will give a report of our research on the various mechanisms of surveillance and control employed within families in contemporary Iran. In this research, conducted in the years 2015 to 2017, 35 Tehran-based families with children between the ages of 13 and 23 were interviewed. In choosing the interviewees, attention was paid to their economic, ideological, professional, and neighborhood characteristics to insure that various social groups are represented as much as possible. Research results painted a picture of the transformations of surveillance methods inside families within a three-decade period, and pointed to some factors influencing these transformations. They also showed how inequalities in family resources or various kinds of “capital” can result in drastically different levels and methods of surveillance and control inside homes at a time when protection measures are mostly privatized and commercialized. The results also made clear the contestations that exist in contemporary Iran over the contours of surveillance and control between families and other institutions such as the government, public media, and schools.