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14 percent of children in Iran forced to work |
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Friday, 31 December 2004 |
Iran Focus
 Tehran, Dec. 31 - Recent studies reveal that fourteen percent of all children in Iran are currently working so as to provide income for their families.
Many of these children are forced into illegal employment such as smuggling, selling narcotics, and prostitution and have to forgo any opportunity of studying in school. Virtually all such children are facing malnutrition and are prone to diseases due to lack of hygiene, according to the latest statistics.
The figures show that at present there are over a million Iranian children living in extreme poverty, with more than half a million children living under the $2 poverty line and another half a million living under the $1 poverty line.
Since the start of the Iranian New Year, March 21, at least 8,219 children have been rounded up from the streets of Tehran by authorities and the figure is expected to rise to 40,000 by the end of the year. The majority of the children rounded up so far are under the age of fifteen.
Iranian authorities had recently announced that the number of street children throughout the country was in the hundreds of thousands. |
