Dr. Seyyed Hadi Motamadi said, “A considerable number of such children, are secretly rented from their parents, at hardly any cost, to work illegally in the black-market despite it being illegal, and they earn inadequate salaries. Most of them suffer from physical and psychological disorders after enduring treatment by their employers”.
Motamadi complained of a lack of funding to cover the costs of providing for both runaway and working children. He accused the government of not having provided even “a single Rial” as part of the promised budget for combating the crisis.
He said that poverty was the main factor leading to increasing levels of employed and runaway children.
A recent study last December 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 are forced into illegal employment such as smuggling, selling narcotics, and prostitution and have to forgo any opportunity of studying in school. Most are facing malnutrition and are prone to diseases due to lack of hygiene, according to the latest statistics.
The figures showed 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.
Iranian authorities had recently announced that the number of street children throughout the country was in the hundreds of thousands. The majority of the children rounded up are under the age of fifteen.
