Official and unofficial statistics indicate that the number of working children in Iran is increasing daily and is going to capture a large part of the country’s children’s population.
Accurate statistics of child labor in Iran are not available because the regime never publishes the accurate statistics about working children.
Due to the extension and dispersion of the phenomena, exact statistics of working children are difficult to obtain. But if individuals or news networks publish the real numbers, not only will they be prosecuted, but their work will not be allowed to be published.
According to Fars news agency, even though 13 organizations in the regime are in charge of the child labor issue, none of them publish the accurate number of working children.
Previously, Mehdi Eisazadeh, the head of the Social Commission of the Iranian Majles (Parliament), had announced the number of agencies responsible for working children. Despite all these agencies, there are not any accurate statistics in this field yet.
In recent years, in rare case, the regime’s media provided statistics on child labor from organizations and children’s rights activists and, which is shocking.
The tragedy of working children in Iran
On February 26, 2017, Dr. Seyed Mohsen Tabatabaei Mazdabadi, then–secretary of the Scientific Association for Children’s Rights, announced the number of child laborers at that time, varying between 3 and 7 million people. (Source: ISNA news agency)
On September 27, 2017, the Tasnim news agency, affiliated with the IRGC, quoted Nahid Tajuddin, a member of the Majlis, as confirming that the number of working children in Iran is between 3 and 7 million people.
But why is the number of working children underestimated?
Since August 2017, the Iranian regime implemented a plan to collect working children in Tehran and other cities of the country, but the result was disastrous.
Since that year, the statistics of this field have been engineered and manipulated, and the regime is trying to get minimal figures published in its media.
However, in addition to whitewashing social problems, there are other reasons involved as to why the number of working children has decreased on paper.
Earlier in 2021, Vahid Ghobadi Dana, the former head of the welfare organization, announced that the municipality uses contractors to employ children for garbage collection and sorting.
According to the announcement of Mahmoud Aligu, the director general of the office of the social victims of the Welfare Organization, the financial turnover earned by the labor of working children in the city of Tehran alone was 10 trillion rials in 2021.
Also, according to Fatemeh Ashrafi, CEO of Women and Children Support Association, 35 percent of working children in Iran are victims of human trafficking.
Recently, the Research Center of the Majlis claimed that the number of working children has increased by up to 15 percent of all children in the country, without announcing specific statistics.
Mirfalah Nasri, the head of the Statistical and Strategic Center of the Ministry of Cooperation, Labor and Social Welfare, has announced that in 2017, the number of children between 6 and 18 years old was about 17 million. But in declaring the number of working children, he considered the age range of 10 to 17. According to his calculation, the number of working children has increased by 96 and 600 percent increase compared to 2015 and 2016, respectively. (Source: Taadol newspaper, June 15, 2019)
This is while many working children in Iran are under 10 years old and are not included in these statistics at all.
After all these years no exact statistics are given in this field and due to the increase of working children, it seems that the real figures are much higher.
