Alarming numbers… Iran’s children are in danger
As a result of the successive crises that Iran has recently witnessed, increasingly among all classes and groups, especially children who have no means to claim their rights, governmental and non-governmental demands have increased to warn against the phenomenon of street children in the biggest cities of Iran.
Several entities also called for a follow up on the rise in the percentage of working children, in return for an increase in adult unemployment as a result of the demobilization of workers and the deterioration of the living conditions, according to the Iranian news agency ILNA.
At a meeting of the Tehran City Council, Zahra Shams, a member of the Council, announced that there are 20,000 working children in Tehran, adding that according to the report of the Parliamentary Research Center, social damages increased by about 132% during the years of the implementation of the sixth development plan law, and the social situation remained less than half a percent of the total public credit of the government over the past five years.
“The funding budget of Iran’s 16-agency State Social Welfare Organization is estimated at more than $300 million per year, but this has not stopped the rise of working and homeless children on the roads”.
“Work and street children are problems in biggest cities, such as Tehran, Tabriz and Meshhad”.
Statistics from the Statistics and Strategic Information Center at the Ministry of Co-operatives and Labor for 2017 show that there are half a million child workers and job seekers, and the number of street children is in the tens of thousands.
According to the 2018 statistics of the Islamic Consultative Assembly, between 3 and 7 million children work in Iran due to economic problems and parental disease in incinerators, production workshops, collection of iron and plastic waste, etc.
According to a study previously conducted by Marwa Famaghi, a psychologist and assistant professor at the University of Social Welfare Sciences in Tehran, the most prominent problems experienced by children in some areas are addiction and prostitution. She noted that children working in Tehran fall into three categories: 59.4% “Iranian children”, 36.3% “Afghan children”, 15.2% “Gypsy children of Iran”, and the latter are the most street children in Tehran.
Last April, Expediency Council member Ahmad Tavakkoli confirmed that 60% of Iran’s population lives below the poverty line. The Parliamentary Research Center reported in late 2020 that 40% of Iran’s population live in danger of poverty, while 8 million middle-class Iranians became poor due to the economic crisis through which Iran is going through and its increasing repercussions in light of the spread of the coronavirus.
