Child laborers in Iran, the hungriest, the most oppressed

Masoud Dalvand
2 min readOct 24, 2019
Children labor in Iran

The number of child laborers in Iran exceeds 7 million.
Their conditions are the product of organized crime by the mullahs’ religious dictatorship.
Instead of going to school, they are put to work under inhuman conditions to earn a meager living.
They work between 10 to 20 hours every day. This is modern slavery.
They can be seen everywhere in large cities, peddling or panhandling at most intersections.
They are exploited in the brick kilns, or hired in Tehran’s Bazaar to carry heavy loads.
They carry jerry cans of oil through mined routes to Pakistan
They can be seen hungry and distressed wandering in the streets.
5,000 children are working as scavengers in Tehran.
Iron deficiency, lice, skin and ear infections, severe malnutrition, hepatitis A and AIDS are just some of the diseases that girl children sifting through garbage are affected with.
Most of these girls are sexually exploited.
Iranian child laborers are the hungriest, the most innocent and the most oppressed sector of Iranian society.
Economic bankruptcy is one of the main contributors to poverty which in turn contributes to child labor.
At least a quarter of Iranian students are forced to quit school every year, a large number of whom join the estimated 3 to 7 million child laborers. This is according to a member of the mullahs’ parliament. (The state-run salamatnews.com, September 27, 2017)
Drop-out of girl children, 6 years and older, is widespread particularly in the provinces of Sistan and Baluchestan, Khuzestan, Western Azerbaijan, and Eastern Azerbaijan.
Abbas Soltanian, deputy for mid-level education in the Ministry of Education, announced last year, “A total of 4.23 percent of students dropped out of school in the previous academic year. Girl students constituted 4.17 percent of it, meaning that there is a big difference between girls’ and boys’ dropouts.” (The state-run ILNA news agency — June 25, 2018)

Originally published at http://freedomstarblog.wordpress.com on October 24, 2019.

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Masoud Dalvand

Human rights activist and advocate of democracy, freedom, and justice in Iran. http://about.me/m.dalvand