Analysis by PMOI/MEK
Iran, Oct. 18, 2018 – Iranian people are now facing much social and economic crisis due to the devastating policies of the ruling regime. As the most vulnerable group, Iran’s children are the first victims of this crisis. Child labor is now a familiar scene in every city.
On October 13, state-run news agency ILNA issued a report on child labor. The report alerted to the moving figures of poor suburbanites and the situation of poor children.
The report says that according to official figures, there are 2 million labor children in Iran. However, unofficial reports suggest the real figure is 7 million. Given the fact that the regime always manipulates statistics in its favor, the real number might be even more than 7 million.
Children under 10 without the safety gears are in danger of hazardous work
According to ILNA’s report, the number of labor children are constantly growing, and at the same time, their average age of child labor is decreasing.
“Economic crises and the degrading livelihoods of low-class families drive children into labor. Every day, we witness children under school age begging, peddling or even collecting garbage,” the report states.
While naming inflation as economic violence, the report says that the first victims of economic violence are children who must leave education to find any work in order to support their families.
Considering 19 million poor people live in 3,000 districts in suburbs of Iran’s cities, ILNA describes the situation as “poverty is taking its victims aggressively”.
The regime punishes the victims instead of solving the poverty
In a gesture meant to confront poverty, Tehran’s municipality arrested poor children in the capital last year and punished their parents, a measure that drew widespread criticism – more than 300 professors, researchers, social activists, lawyers, journalists and child activists accused regime officials of confronting the victims rather than fighting poverty. “Allocate the economic sources for providing livelihoods, education and healthcare, and for making job opportunity and supporting vulnerable strata of the society,” they demanded in their statement.
ILNA’s report also talks about garbage-collector children in Mahmood Abad, southern Tehran. The report describes the place as such: “Loads of garbage are on the ground with bad smell. Going down the hole between piles of garbage, you can see many children collecting trash among all kind of rubbish ranging from syringe needle, dead rats, to broken glasses and wasted foods.”
“Is it worth working here? Doesn’t it worsen your situation?” the reporter asked the kids. “Worsen? What is worse than this? Of course, it's death!” replied a kid. While their bodies are marked with wounds, the kids described that they should sell these garbage daily for three dollars to support their families.
Although the Iranian regime ratified the International Convention on Child Rights in Jul 1994, it does not even care about the rights of children mentioned in its own constitution.
Ali Rostamian, a member of regime’s parliament, told state-run Mehr news agency in June 2018, “the Welfare Organization has no agenda for organizing the children of labor at all”.
It is obvious that a regime that is fully capable of organizing an agenda to fund the Assad regime in Syria and other proxies in the region with $16 billion does not care about its own people. The wealth of Iranian people is now either going in the mullahs’ pockets or used to fund terrorism throughout the world, in a bid to stabilize the root of Iran’s dictatorship. Mrs. Maryam Rajavi, the president-elect of National Council of Resistance stated in June 2018, “The third sign of the inevitable overthrow of the ruling religious fascism is that social tensions and economic crises, especially high prices, unemployment, poverty, and inequality have reached a critical mass. Everyone senses the explosive state of society. And the mullahs can offer neither a solution nor are willing or able to resolve the problems.”
