Women make up a third of Iran’s homeless population

NCRI - Women make up one third of homeless people living on the streets in Iran, according to a senior official of the Iranian regime.

"Our research indicates that there are 15,000 people sleeping in cardboard boxes in the country, of who 5,000 are women," Shahindokht Mollavardi said on Saturday.

Mollavardi, a vice president in the cabinet of Hassan Rouhani, made the remarks in an interview with the state-run news agency ILNA.

The true number of Iranians living on the streets is substantially higher than official records.

Last year, a deputy director of Tehran municipality’s Welfare Organization estimated the number of people living on the streets of Tehran to be over 15,000 of which 2,000 were women.

The organization also announced that the average age of these homeless women is 32.

Fatemeh Daneshvar, the head of the Social Committee in Tehran’s city council, said in June that the number of pregnant women and children living on the streets in the city is increasing.

Tehran’s mayor Mohammad Bagher Qalibaf has put the number of people sleeping in cardboards in Tehran alone at over 15,000.

Homeless women and street children live in dire conditions where they survive in abandoned buildings, containers, automobiles, parks, or even on the street itself.

Street children experience many social and psychological traumas on the streets on a daily basis.

Determining the numbers of street children in Iran is virtually impossible. In a 2005 report by the U.S. State Department, by the Iranian government’s own admission, 60,000 street children were accounted for in Iran.

Numerous child rights organizations suspect that the number is substantially higher, citing figures of 200,000 or more. Of this number, about 55 percent are the children of Afghan refugees.

Impoverished Iranian women and children live in such difficult circumstances while just one of the foundations that belong to the regime’s supreme leader has plundered $95 billion of the Iranian people’s wealth.