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Girls as young as 9 living in the streets in Iran |
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Saturday, 21 October 2006 |
Iran Focus
 Tehran, Iran, Oct. 21 – Girls as young as nine are running away from their homes and living on the streets in Iran, according to a classified report issued by the Ministry of Education.
The report was made public by several Persian-language news websites run by former government officials.
It notes that there is an exceptionally high number of run-away girls near Iran’s holy cities of Qom and Mashad.
Iran has one of the highest record of runaway girls and women in the world.
The state-run news agency ILNA reported in July that there were some 300,000 run-away women and girls in Iran and that 86 percent of girls who ran away from their homes for the first time were raped. The majority of such victims are rejected by their families if they choose to return after having been raped.
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