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Girls constitute 11 percent of runaway children in Iran capital |
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Monday, 26 December 2005 |
Iran Focus
 Tehran, Iran, Dec. 26 – More than ten percent of street-children in the Iranian capital, Tehran, are girls, according to a report in the Fars news agency, which is close to the office of Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.
The report quoted a senior official in the Ministry of Welfare and Social Affairs as saying that 11 percent of runaway children in the capital were girls.
It added that the most common age group for street-children is 15-19 years old, most of whom have only attended junior school.
A recent study last year revealed that fourteen percent of all children in Iran are currently working so as to provide income for their families.
The report pointed out that many of these children were forced into illegal employment such as smuggling, selling narcotics, and prostitution and had to forgo any opportunity of studying in school. Most are facing malnutrition and prone to diseases due to lack of hygiene, according to the latest statistics.
Iranian authorities had recently announced that the number of street children throughout the country was in the hundreds of thousands.
According to a separate report in the state-run daily Iran on Sunday, organised gangs are selling many young Iranian girls to wealthy men in places such as Dubai.
The daily hinted that the groups may have been given a green light by Iran’s hard-line judiciary, which has given lenient sentences to individuals arrested for selling the girls.
It said that some were freed straight away after paying a small sum as bail.
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