Imagine for a moment, that you are a fifteen or sixteen-year-old, as many of you are, walking home from school one day. Your route home includes a street full of people protesting for their civil rights. As you try to rush through the area to get home, you feel a shooting pain in your back. You turn to see a policeman shot you with a bullet, and has now moved on to shooting others near, and in the protest.

As you lay on the street bleeding out, no one comes to your aid. While there are many government officials and police officers around, they simply leave you, hurt, and continue shooting more activists. You never come home that day. After a while, your mother starts to worry. She goes to the police station to see if anyone has heard anything about you. When she gets there, she is informed that you commit suicide. Your mother is smarter than that though. She knows you were a happy kid that loved and cherished everything about life.

She asks to see your body and that request is denied. She is given a short amount of time for grieving and no other questions are answered. Days later, she learns that police forces were killing people for protesting against the government and covering it up. On many occasions, they claimed it was suicide and denied the family the chance to see a body. Your mother is sad because of your death, but sadder that so many others had to go through the same situation.

This may all sound foreign to you, like it would never happen in the United States.

Unfortunately, though, this is the reality for so many in Iran. What I’ve asked you to imagine is very similar to what happened to a young girl named Sarina Esmailzadeh. She loved life and wanted to be a vlogger. She spoke up and was silenced.