The suicide of Armin, an 11-year-old child, symbolizes the brutal exploitation of child laborers in Iran’s regime
June 12 as the World Day Against Child Labor is a day to raise awareness and work to prevent child labor. The coronavirus outbreak in Iran and the regime’s mismanagement of handling the crisis, have had a significant impact on people’s lives and livelihoods. However, the crisis has pushed a significant number of children into child labor in Iran.
However, the crisis has put additional pressure on the hard and painful lives of child laborers and needy children in disadvantaged Iranian families. These pressures are so enormous that the media often publish the painful news of the suicide of Iranian child laborers or deprived children due to the severity of poverty and the pressures of life that every human being who reads this news, is shocked.
Armin, an 11-year-old child, living in Jafarabad neighborhood of Kermanshah (with the highest number of working children in this province due to poverty and hunger), has committed suicide by taking pills. Statistics from the regime’s welfare office in Kermanshah show that 70 percent of Kermanshah’s working children come from the Jafarabad neighborhood.
Hrana News Agency reported on June 8, 2020, quoting an aide to the Imam Ali society of Kermanshah, who was firmly involved in the social harms of the Jafarabad neighborhood of Kermanshah, and wrote about Armin’s life: “The addicted father, the dead mother, hunger, the constant work of children, the involvement of children in drug use, the history of suicide in children, the unfavorable living environment, the use by relatives for begging, (all this) are conclusive and sufficient pieces of evidence of destruction of children shortly.”
“Her younger sister was still in the welfare state when her mother was hospitalized with cancer and died there. Her sister was sent home on the pretext of her mother’s death.
“Before the Iranian New Year, when her grandmother took her with herself for begging, she was taken to hold centers by welfare.”
One week before committing suicide, Armin fights with his grandmother and, according to his younger sister, takes a tablet sheet for suicide. Armin is taken to the hospital, but the efforts are unsuccessful, and the child dies.
According to the report, Armin’s identity card was requested to be handed over to the child’s body. However, his family said that the identity card was still in the Imam Reza Hospital, due to the nonpayment of the hospitalized debt at the time of the mother’s death. Re-investigations have revealed that Armin’s identity card has been lost.
According to the official statistics of the western provinces of Iran, they have the highest number of suicides. Last winter, two 14-year-old teenage girls committed suicide 24 hours apart in Javanroud, Kermanshah province. The two adolescent girl students of the same class committed suicide by hanging themselves and ended their lives.
In the past five months, 16 teenagers, including eight boys and eight girls, have committed suicide in various cities in Kurdistan. There have been three suicides in Saqqez and in May. In June 2020, 17-year-old Mofideh Hassanjad hanged herself in a village in Saqqez. The teenage girl was planning to get married. However, due to the poverty of her family, she was unable to buy dowry and other expenses and ended her life.
In early June, Danial Hosseinpour, a 16-year-old from Saqez, hanged himself. Danial’s family is weak, and the father of the family has taken on someone else’s crime to make money. He has been serving his sentence in Saqez prison for the past two years. Ala Anbari, a 14-year-old bride, hangs herself in another area of Saqqez for unknown reasons.
In May, an 11-year-old girl committed suicide in Ilam due to family poverty. The family of this child from Ilam buried their child 200 meters away from their house due to severe economic hardship.
In Iran, the number of suicides among teenage students has dropped below the age of 15.
The above facts of the suicide of child laborers or children in deprived and low-income families show the depth of the tragedy that is going on in Iran under the rule of mullahs.
In Tehran and other major cities, tens of thousands of child laborers are doing the most laborious and most inhumane work on the streets and garbage dumps from early morning to midnight.
In addition to doing hard work, these children are being exploited by corrupt and criminal gangs that have been created in the mullahs’ regime. In many cases, these children laborers are brutally tortured by municipal officials and security crackdowns. The example of forcing a flower-selling child to eat his flowers, the video of which shocked people on social media in Iran, is just one example of the inhumane treatment of child laborers by Mullah regime agents.
On World Day Against Child Labor, we will continue to struggle to realize the fundamental rights of the Iranian people to end the brutal exploitation of children and establish freedom, democracy, and justice in Iran.
Originally published at http://freedomstarblog.wordpress.com on June 12, 2020.
