Teenagers are taking part in parties where they consume alcohol, take all kinds of Ecstasy pills, and use other illegal drugs, the daily Kayhan quoted Hamid Emadi, a specialist in sexually-transmitted diseases, as saying. Pornographic CDs are shown at these parties and party-goers are increasingly turning to sex orgies.
The specialist warned, without further elaboration, that teenagers were increasingly resorting to unconventional sexual relationships in parties.
Pre-marital and extra-marital sex is illegal in Iran and, in certain cases involving women, punishment can include execution. Those who attend mixed-sex parties, even as innocuous as birthday parties, risk being arrested and receiving punishment that includes imprisonment, flogging, and heavy fines.
Independent experts believe that Irans youths, chafing under strict religious rule, pose a serious threat to the countrys clerical rulers.
Iran has the highest per capita rate of sex-related murders and offences in the world, Ali Lavassani, a criminologist, said. Newspapers are full of stories about young men killing other men or women, sometimes in serial murders, for sex-related reasons. The situation has simply become untenable.
Irans hard-line rulers, however, blame the simmering social crisis on cultural onslaught by the West.
The medical expert said the government needed to act urgently to control the irreparable consequences of the current trend. He said 14 percent of Irans 70-million population fell in the age group 15 to 19 years old, the most likely to indulge in such sexual behaviour.
The daily-increasing rise in reckless sexual promiscuity and the corresponding rise in venereal diseases are clearly being felt in society, Emadi said. He blamed the phenomenon on the lack of commitment of young people to moral principles and said most parents were unaware of what their children were doing.
The incidents of sexually-transmitted diseases such as AIDS, Hepatitis B, Herpes and contagious ulcer have risen sharply in recent years, the daily quoted Emadi as saying.
Such parties predominantly take place in large cities and their suburbs, and the party-goers are mostly those who are very well-off or very poor.
The new government of ultra-Islamist President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has vowed to enforce the strict rules of Islam. One of Ahmadinejads first decisions as mayor of Tehran was to separate men-only and women-only elevators in the city hall.
On Thursday, a senior Iranian cleric criticised the level of mixed-sex interaction in Iran. In a statement posted on Persian-language websites, Grand Ayatollah Safi Golpayegani lamented the uncontrolled interaction between men and women in Irans Islamic society.
