Tehran, July 03: Joining a global trend, the fundamentalists have added another way to dehumanize women and girls: buying and selling them for prostitution.
Exact numbers of victims are impossible to obtain, but according to an official source in Tehran, there has been a 635 percent increase in the number of teenage girls in prostitution.
The magnitude of this statistic conveys how rapidly this form of abuse has grown. In Tehran, there are an estimated 84,000 women and girls in prostitution, many of them are on the streets, others are in the 250 brothels that reportedly operate in the city. The trade is also international: thousands of Iranian women and girls have been sold into sexual slavery abroad. Many of the girls come from impoverished rural areas.
Drug addiction is epidemic throughout Iran, and some addicted parents sell their children to support their habits. High unemployment – 28 percent for youth 15 to 29 years of age, and 43 percent for women 15 to 20 years of age – is a serious factor in driving restless youth to accept risky offers for work. Slave traders take advantage of any opportunity in which women and children are vulnerable. One factor contributing to the increase in prostitution and the sex-slave trade is the number of teen girls who are running away from home.
The girls are rebelling against fundamentalist-imposed restrictions on their freedom, domestic abuse and parental drug addictions. Unfortunately, in their flight to freedom, the girls find more abuse and exploitation. Ninety percent of girls who run away from home will end up in prostitution.
As a result of runaways, in Tehran alone there are an estimated 25,000 street children, most of them girls. Pimps prey upon street children, runaways and vulnerable high-school girls in city parks. In one case, a woman was discovered selling Iranian girls to men in Persian Gulf countries; for four years, she had hunted down runaway girls and sold them. She even sold her own daughter for US$ 11,000.
-Agencies