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Iran: Arrest of Working Children, Adopting a Failed Scheme, Once Again

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NCRI Staff

NCRI – While according to its job description, the Welfare Organization should put all its efforts to expand rehabilitation and supportive services and help provide low-income population with their basic needs, Iranian regime’s Welfare Organization, however, has turned into an entity for cracking down on working children.

Along with Tehran Municipality and 11 other entities, including security forces, Iranian regime’s Welfare Organization has launched a program from September 6, 2017, to arrest working children while using police, oppressive tactics in the process.

In an interview with state-run ISNA news agency on September 22, 2017, regime’s head of Welfare Organization’s Social Affairs Department in Tehran province points to the oppressive scheme, saying “255 working children have been handed over to welfare centers from September 4 to date.” The regime official also points out that the scheme was also practiced during the first three months of this year. (State-run ISNA news agency, September 22, 2017)

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Arresting working children is such an awful practice that even regime officials and media are forced to protest against it. What’s obvious, however, is that such protests are not aimed at supporting working children, but they are raised for fear of the scheme’s social repercussions.

Among those opposing the scheme is Tahereh Pajouhesh, vice chairman of regime’s Children Protection Association, who points in her September-19-2017 Interview with state-run Rooydad website to arrest of working children, saying “with closure of factories and small workshops, working children will emerge. And when working children’s families and their living conditions are disregarded, these children are reproduced. To solve this problem, all entities need to cooperate and what needs to be done above all is to reform economic structure.”

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She then points to how the scheme affects children, saying “the children are scared when they get arrested. This is an instance of child abuse. We need to keep in mind that we are dealing with humans. Children are not bricks so we can lay them the way we like. We are pursuing schemes that are doomed to fail and will bring about nothing.”

Acknowledging previous failed experiences, former member of Tehran City Council ‘Fatemeh Daneshvar’ points to collaboration among regime’s Tehran governorate, municipality, law enforcement forces, and other relevant entities involved in the scheme, saying “the reason for such failures is that the necessary infrastructures for organizing working children are missing.”

She then points to the current round of the scheme, calling it “the vicious circle of collecting working children.” (Revolutionary Guard’s Fars news agency, September 18, 2017)

Meanwhile, state-run Salamatnews released an article titled ‘stop using police practices when dealing with working children!’ on September 23, 2017, quoting Chair of the Association for Protecting Children’s Rights ‘Motahareh Nazeri’ as saying “collecting working children is a failed scheme and we are actually faced with a vicious circle. With raising such slogans as ‘organizing street and working children’, the operators have launched the operational phase of a scheme which is more like an arrest program.”

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The state-run website then quotes Farshid Yazdani, referred to as social welfare researcher, as saying “those responsible for today’s scheme turn to worst possible ways (arrest, elimination, etc.) to deal with an evident, defined phenomenon like child labor. Such measures only serve to wipe out the question but the phenomenon itself will by no means be erased; it’ll just hide beneath a social layer.”

In the meantime, member of Tehran City Council ‘Bahareh Arwin’ points to absolute poverty of working children’s families to oppose the attempts made by regime entities responsible for arresting such children, saying “what percentage of the families forcing their children to work do this out of fun or child abuse, and what percentage do this under compulsion and poverty? Does the law require us to double people’s pain because of their poverty?”(State-run ISNA news agency, September 24, 2017)

Previously, regime’s so-called Welfare Organization had repeatedly attempted to collect working children by using the oppressive security forces, but all such schemes failed as they were totally aimed at arresting and oppressing such children.

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Since turning to such measures as arresting working children by regime’s Welfare Organization and its accomplices is not aimed at supporting children, but only to keep up appearances and covering up a catastrophic situation which is the outcome of poverty and mullahs’ filthy regime, so each time regime’s bodies arrest working children, it only takes a little while before the streets of Tehran and other big cities are once again filled with such children.

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