Fwd: Situation of Women In Iran

["Macdonald Stainsby" <mstainsby@xxxxxxxxxx>]

(forwarded).

November 5, 2000
NewYork Times
By ELAINE SCIOLINO

TEHRAN   One afternoon, Fahimeh Eskandari opened the front metal gate
of the shelter she runs for runaway girls in central Tehran and was
confronted by two men armed with knives and rifles. They had driven
from Sanandaj in the northwest corner of Iran, hundreds of miles
away, and demanded to see their 16- year-old niece, Ranach. She had
shamed the family by leaving home a few days before. They had come
to behead her.
Ms. Eskandari alerted the armed guard on duty. She barred the door
and called the police for reinforcements. The uncles fled when they
realized the police were on the way. Ranach stayed safe inside,
still nursing the bruises from the beatings she had suffered at her
uncles' hands.
There are no official statistics on just how many young people run
away from home in Iran, although a recent article in a daily paper
here estimated that the police round up 90 male and female runaways
every day and that young runaways who have fallen victim to
criminal groups in Tehran have been raped and killed. Proof that
runaways exist is found in Iran's railroad and bus stations and
public parks. There, runaway boys and girls stand as embarrassing
testimony to the failure of the 21-year-old Islamic revolution to
produce a new generation of obedient, chaste "warriors for Islam,"
untainted by the corrupting influences of the West.
For years, Iran chose to ignore the problem of its runaway youths.
After all, Iran's culture dictates that family problems be kept
within the confines of the home. But as more and more children have
taken to the streets   and fallen prey to prostitution, crime and
addiction to cheap and plentiful heroin   the government has had no
choice but to act.
"Divorce, addiction, poverty and the bizarre demands of parents
are the main causes of runaways," said Ms. Eskandari, the
30-year-old manager of Reyhaneh House, as the shelter is called,
over tea and cookies. "There are parents who force their children
to steal money for their heroin addiction. There are parents who
brutally beat their children. And there is no law in this country
to protect the children."
The shelter is the only one of its kind in Iran. Financed a year
ago by the city of Tehran, it is intended as a resting place until
the girls can return to their families. The shelter is still
struggling to figure out what to do when a family reconciliation is
out of the question. Parental rights are strong in Iran, adoption
is rare and foster care unheard of.
The shelter is a safe place, but it is not a
come-and-go-as-you-please sort of place. The small staff, all
women, take turns sleeping in the shelter at night, and some girls
have even run away from the shelter.
The city has established offices for psychologists and social
workers in public places   even at the vast shrine built in honor
of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini   to search for girls who seem to
have no place to go. If they are prostitutes, drug addicts or going
bareheaded, pretending to be boys, they are turned over to the
police and arrested; if they are runaways, they are delivered to
the shelter's doorstep.
"We don't want to leave them on the streets because they'll end up
as prostitutes and then will never again be able to enter society,"
Ms. Eskandari said. "We are making a long- term investment for
these girls, who will someday be mothers."
The 24 girls, ages 12 to 17, currently living in the shelter learn
basic language and math skills. They learn a range of crafts:
sewing, flower arranging, painting, candle-making. They write
poetry. They have a television, newspapers and a radio.
Compared with many public institutions in Iran, the shelter is
exceptionally clean and bright. The girls sleep in bunk beds, five
to a room. Their hearty lunch is better than that served at many
restaurants: chicken kebab, mountains of buttered rice, grilled
tomatoes and yogurt.
There are plans to relocate the shelter eventually, to a bigger
space with a large garden and a swimming pool. But then, fewer
girls might want to leave.
The place has already become a showpiece, and when an American
woman, one of its first foreign visitors, dropped in one day, a
dozen girls gathered in a circle on the carpeted floor of a large
meeting room to chat. Only one refused to join in.
Their stories came spilling out, some jumbled, others perhaps
exaggerated, and they documented some of the social ills that
plague today's Iran: divorce, parental abandonment, addiction,
child abuse, unemployment, poverty, premarital sex.
All 12 girls said they had been beaten at home. Most said they had
taken public buses from their hometowns to Tehran and been nabbed
by the police when they arrived at the city's main bus station.
One 16-year-old named Madieyeh told a story of a heroin-addicted
father who abandoned the family, though his wife was mentally ill
and unemployed. "I was getting beaten so badly at home that I was
always bruised, and my teachers could tell I was beaten," Madieyeh
said. "I will never go back, never. I want to stay here to study,
to learn how to play music. I want to join a rock band."
Fifteen-year-old Ameneh smiled broadly as she told an unhappy
story of a father who went to prison and then disappeared, and a
mother who secretly married another man. Ameneh's uncle took
custody of her. "He beat me so much that the police came and forced
him to sign a paper promising to never beat me again," Ameneh said.
"But he still beat me, until I bled, using whatever he could find
to do it   a belt, a shoe."
"I've been here three months, and no one's asked about me," she
said. "No one's come looking for me."
The most mature of the group was Habibeh, a 16-year-old from Qum
with the look of someone much older. She told her story flatly. "My
mother died nine years ago," she said. "My father couldn't cope. He
didn't let us go to school. He beat us. Then he married two other
women, and they beat us, too. I saw my friends' lives, and they had
parents who loved them. That's all I ever wanted. When I found out
about this place on television, I ran away."
Because Habibeh looked and acted so mature, Mozhgan Shiravi, the
deputy director, who holds a master's degree in psychology, found
her a husband, a 21-year-old Revolutionary Guard. But Habibeh
refused.
 "She said I should marry him, but I didn't love him," Habibeh
said. "He was very religious. He told me I'd have to wear the black
chador in public. I told him, `I don't want to get married   ever.'
Why should I get married? Look at my parents."
Another young woman interrupted: "Why don't you want to get
married? Maybe you can find a rich husband."
But Habibeh insisted, "No, I want to study, to go to university."
Then she changed the subject. "Do you know Michael Jackson?" she
asked the American visitor. "I love Michael Jackson. And I love
President Clinton. I heard he was beaten when he was a child."
Ranach, the girl whose uncles wanted to behead her, turned the
subject to another political leader, the man who was the stern
father of Iran's revolution, Ayatollah Khomeini. Do you like
Ayatollah Khomeini? she asked the visitor.
The visitor fudged. "I hate him," Ranach said.
One 16-year-old girl with long curls named Akram set herself apart
from the rest. She laughed at the younger ones and suggested that
she would not be staying long at the shelter. "I have many friends
who are boys," she said. "I am used to boys. I have never paid in
my life for a ride   to anywhere I want to go."
So the conversation shifted to the touchy topic of virginity.
"There are things we care about in our culture that are not so
important in other cultures," Ms. Eskandari explained. "In other
cultures, it's O.K. for girls to have sexual relations. Our culture
is derived from our Iranian identity. And that dictates that a
woman should be surrounded by a wall, and her space should not be
invaded. In our culture, after one relationship, the girl can be
disowned by her family or banished by society."
Is this right? she was asked.
She smiled and paused before she whispered, "No."
"We've had lots of cases where girls as young as 14 or 15 have
lost their virginity. If they tell me about their sexual
experiences, I try not to look surprised. I try to convince my
girls that one sexual experience isn't a sin, that one sexual
experience doesn't mean their life is over." Ms. Shiravi then told
the story of Fatimeh, an 18-year-old who had had a sexual
relationship. "We got involved and they got married," Ms. Shiravi
said of Fatimeh and her boyfriend. "She said she didn't have any
family, and we said we would be her family. We rented them an
apartment. Now, she's pregnant."
When the girls had finished their stories, Ms. Eskandari suggested
that some might have been exaggerated. "Yes, sometimes the girls
lie," she said. "They've protected themselves all their lives by
lying. But no matter what, they're all tortured children. I always
tell them, `If I had been raised in the same conditions, I wouldn't
be any better.'
"These are the smart ones, the strong ones. The weak ones, they
don't run away."