Exodus of Tattered Garments

EXODUS OF TATTERED GARMENTS

A Social Study on the Phenomena of Street Children in Iran

EXODUS OF TATTERED GARMENTS

A Social Study on the Phenomena of Street Children in Iran Alaleh Navaii 2014

CONTENTS

• INTRODUCTION

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• PRINCIPLES OF MIGRATION 7

• CHILD LABOR IN IRAN 9 • INVISIBLE CHILDREN

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• TERMS & DEFINITIONS

• EMERGENCE OF PHENOMENA 17 • SOCIOPHYSICAL CONTEXT 21

• HABITS & BEHAVIOR 23

• ACTIVITIES & INVOLVEMENTS 27

• COMMUNITY & SPACE 29 •

CLOSURE

• BIBLIOGRAPHY

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INTRODUCTION There are an estimated 100 million street-children in the world today. Streetchildren are not a new phenomenon, but it is their dramatic proliferation in some regions of the world that has given them a visibility that is difficult for both the general population and governments to ignore. This visibility has not necessarily helped the cause of street-children. Regarded individually as deviant or delinquent by those responsible for social control, street-children in large numbers have come to be perceived as a social threat. The opening sentence of a 1988 document on street-children by the Ministry of Social Welfare in Sudan notes: 'Vagrancy of children has become one of the dangerous phenomena forming a real threat to the entity of the Sudanese community and threatening its stability.' While this statement precedes a call for rehabilitative measures, perceptions of street-children as a 'social threat' are also evident in the policies of governments seeking to lessen this threat in more insidious ways.

In Brazil for example, a 1989 Amnesty International report claimed that at least one street- child a day was killed by death squads and Brazilian groups working with street-children have claimed that more than 4,600 children have been killed there to date.

During the history, there has been child abuse in all societies. However, this issue has recently been considered as a serious problem in Iran. The first judicial step for supporting the child abuse was in 1924 after the First World War by Community of Nations in Geneva. It was done as the result of war consequences and damages on children. This program was about nutrition, health, housing for war-affected and homeless children and protecting them against psychological and physical damages of war.

Taken in Teheran

Street children phenomenon in Iran, especially in metropolitans, is considerable as the result of these children’s presence all over the streets in different forms such as selling gum, newspaper, flower, tissue paper and shoe shiner. This phenomenon is one of the most important social pathologies, which continues in an increasing level and affected by social, cultural, political and economic situations and factors.

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Childhood definition is one of the attractive and important subjects in studying the child issues. The reason is that institutions and different laws and regulations offer childhood definitions which make it difficult to plan programs for this class not only in Iran and less developed countries but also in developed countries.

From legal perspective, a child is who has not got the physical and mental growth at their age, since the real life of child and childhood starts with birth.

That child of human being is the weakest and strongest one on the earth.

Weakest because unlike the other creatures, he can not walk or fly. Then, he needs support and maintain: Strongest, because he is representative of the most evolved organisms which passed 4 billion years, as long as scinece goes, miraculous life process. On the other hand, children as the result of being qualitatively different from the adults, they have especial needs, characteristics and interests, in the way that these differences are present in physical, emotional, social and cognitive areas. In spite of cultural, social, economic differences, it seems necessary to have universal criterions, which can help improve the life quality of children all over the world.

Street Art by ICY and SOT in Tehran

The existence of street children is most often viewed as a significant problem, stripping youth off their humanity and burdening them with the everyday concern of survival. It is easy to analyze this complicated issue objectively, yet the actual experiences of the children are just as easily lost. It is therefore necessary to approach the subject with the inclusion of contextual information regarding the problem. Statistical evidence provides only a narrow view of the problem. Through a combination of both numbers and context, the many problems contributing to their existence can be addressed. Poverty, the work force, substance abuse, and general homelessness in Iran are just a few of the many influences that affect the lives of street children. In addressing these effects, this paper questions how the topic of street children is an outgrowth of its surroundings. Furthermore, this research will focus on providing grass-roots solutions to the problem, through an architectural approach; thus, the remainder of the analysis centers on the new directions being taken in addressing this large-scale issue.

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PRINCIPLES OF MIGRATION As estimated, there is now 214 million international migrants and 740 million internal migrants in the world. According to the World Bank, one-third of people who migrate from developing countries, young adults and adolescents are aged between 12 to 24 years. These statistics include a large number of children under 18 who migrate either independently or with families.

Increased migration figures indicate a desire to leave ‘home’ in recent years.

Facts & figures demonstrate the increase of population mobility and lack of employment opportunities, especially in rural areas. Environmental conditions also have a great impact on immigration. The predictions reach as far as estimating approximately 200 million "climate refugees" in 2050, including children.

Given the current situation, many children who grow up in rural areas become teenagers who migrate from their hometowns to seek employment opportunities and a ‘better life’. Beside these cases, children who are often traveling between borders without identification documents fall naturally into exclusion from public services such as children's right to education, health and medical insurance. This exclusion expose them radically to child labor and other forms of exploitation or often become a victim of traffickers on their path of migration, especially when they migrate alone. As far as refugee children are concerned, it is the responsibility of the host country to ensure that refugee children have access to education in the same way as all children in the country.

Important factors triggering child migration comes with many aspects, which varies from region to region. But overall migration can be done for the following reasons: - Economic factors such as unemployment/poverty in rural areas - Cultural factors such as gender discrimination, war and the threat of being forced to marry at young age - Personal factors such as peer pressure and harassment, domestic violence and AIDS (HIV) - External factors such as climate change, natural disasters and seasonal floods

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Many children with the hope of facing more opportunities voluntarily decide to leave their home in rural areas and migrate to urban areas where in many cases lead to a positive experience. This point must be kept in mind that the goal here is not to stop voluntary migration but to create a rather more secure and attractive environment to control and hopefully reduce child exploitation.

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CHILD LABOR IN IRAN

WORDS AND NUMBERS

There are many pressing humanitarian issues in the Middle East, but one that is often overlooked and under reported is the issue of child labor. Throughout the Middle East, and in fact much of the world, child labor is a critical issue involving exploitation, human trafficking and a fundamental breakdown in foundations of society. Human trafficking and child labor have become increasingly prevalent in Iran, which according to reports is now one of the worst offenders of children rights in the world. The Iranian government has done little to resolve this issue, and has in fact been implicated in human trafficking and the exploitation of children.

As it has been mentioned before, child labor is related to family poverty: children of low-income and poor families have to help their parents to increase the income. It is usually done through participating in group-works or finding a job out of home. Family power is one aspect of economic, social and cultural retardation which can be seen in most of countries and societies. The other main factor that leads children to marketplaces, is lack or insufficiency of training centers or distance of these centers from children’s living place.

It is not easy to achieve the precise and exact statistics of children working in different sections. However, some informal statistics show that number of these children in Iran is over two million. Half of them have stable and full- time jobs and the others have seasonal jobs such as carpet weaving and brick baking.

On the whole, 80% of street children are Labor Children who have to work as the result of family poverty. These children mainly live in some provinces such as Khorasan, Tehran, Lorestan and Kurdistan. Statistics show that 90% of these children have parents, 80% are immigrants, 42% are from different villages and cities, 38% from the other countries, 78% male and between 5-18 years old.

While Labor Law in Iran has forbidden the work of under 15 years old, it allows 15-18 years olds to work under some exceptions.

There are different factors and causes related to child abuse and maltreatment. An ecological model of child maltreatment offers several factors in the emergence of child abuse such as the parenting and social factors. In Iran, there is age limitation in criminal responsibility. That is, people, less than 18 year old who commit offenses, will be held in a juvenile institution.

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Law has looked at this phenomenon, child labor, from two aspects: works which are done obviously such as selling omen, flowers or working in workshops and

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houses in an organized form. Legal challenge in this point refers to lack of management and regulation in fewer than 10 - member workshops. It has made a great gap in child employment because it is possible to face many problems in these workshops. It seems necessary to recognize the labor children not only children working in streets but also children working in different areas and consider appropriate procedures for them.

Historically low income families with multiple children within Iran have viewed their offspring as a source of labor and income for the family. The existing child labor laws in Iran, and the lack of societal support and advocacy for the rights of children have created a climate where children are commonly subject to abuse and exploitation.

According to recent statistics, as many as 3 million or 22% of Iranian children under the age of 18 are not attending school. Estimated total of about 2 million and 700 thousand children are in the work force. This trend not only deprives children of a chance to develop through education, but also perpetuates a cycle of poverty and ignorance, leaving millions of children without opportunity to freedom- and damaging society for generations to come.

"Economic exploitation" of children and forcing them to earn a living is seen as a form of child abuse. The government runs 28 ‘health houses’ set up by the state-operated Welfare Association to provide assistance to children and unmarried girls who have run away from their homes and who are at risk of being trafficked. However, girls reportedly are abused in these shelters, even by shelter staff and other government officials. This association also allocates funds to rehabilitate street children. However, officials acknowledge that annually this organization takes in 10000 street children into its welfare centers where 85.4 % of them come from families tagged as "unfit guardian".

In the last series of Iranian labor force statistics, the Statistical Center of Iran changed two fundamental definitions to artificially lower the official unemployment rate: that of “work,” and that of “employment.” The new definitions used by the Statistical Center of Iran under Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s cabinet allow children under the age of 15 to be added to employment statistics, thereby lowering the official unemployment rates. These new definitions go against both Iranian and international labor laws.

According to Iranian Labor Law, the legal age to work is 15 full years, and anyone under this age is regarded a “child” and is therefore prohibited to work.

According to Article 79 of the Labor Law, “Employment of individuals under the age of 15 is prohibited.” Article 80 emphasizes, “Workers whose ages are between 15 and 18 are regarded as ‘youth labor’ and must undergo medical tests by the Social Welfare Organization at initial employment.”

Changing the definitions for “work” and “employment” is one thing, however the Statistical Center of Iran has first added the labor of children between 10 and 14 to the national employment statistics, on page 15 of this report, “work” is defined as follows: “The group of economic (intellectual or physical) activities that take place with the aim to earn an income (cash or non-cash) and whose objective is to manufacture goods or to provide services, is considered ‘work.’”

According to this definition, “work” is not necessarily an activity that leads to earning an income, but rather it is sufficient for the activity to “aim” to earn income. Therefore, the background is set for children who work but who do not have independent income. For example, a child who is training side by side with his father, or who is working in a workshop without earning an independent income, is considered “employed.”

The second important point in this report and similar reports is the fundamental change in the definition of “employment.” Prior to the definition change and before the Mahmoud Ahmadinejad government, in collecting statistics for employment and unemployment, the definition for an “employed” individual was someone who had worked for at least two days during a given week (Etemad Melli Newspaper, Number 938, June 8, 2009, Page 21). But under the new definition, “all individuals 10 years and older who worked for at least one hour during a given week, or who left their jobs temporarily for some reason, were considered ‘employed’.

The Iranian government claims that they received their definitions from the International Labor Organization (Jam-e Jam Newspaper, Number 2624, August 3, 2009, page 4), and in all definitions quoted by Iran and its state newspaper, an “employed” individual is referred to as someone who is above 15 years of age. In the Statistical Center of Iran, however, the employment age has been reduced to 10 years of age (Iran Newspaper, Number 4625, October 14, 2011).

This discrepancy bears attention as the government’s view to “work” does not necessarily require earnings, and the government has reduced the labor age to 10 years old. Therefore, in its final estimates, the government announces unreal employment rates and recognizes illegal child labor in order to increase its employment statistics.

Street and Labor Children, specially based on their social status, must be supported by societies. According to the International Labor Organization in 2004, more than 243 million children worldwide are working in which the highest proportion belongs to African and Asian countries, especially India and Pakistan. Iran is not an exception in this issue. Because of being young and lack of monitoring devices, these children are being exploited and in many cases do not get the true value of their labor.

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INVISIBLE CHILDREN

TERMS AND DEFINITIONS ´Latchkey child´, ´ Vagrant´, ´abandoned´, ´waif´, and ´urchin´- these are just some of the terms synonymous with 'street-child'. The standard United Nations definition says a street-child is ´any minor for whom the street (in the widest sense, including unoccupied dwellings, wastelands, etc.) has become his or her habitual abode and/or source of livelihood and who is inadequately protected, supervised or directed by responsible adults'. However this definition is quite weak, grouping together as it does children of vastly different characteristics and circumstances. UNICEF has developed a typology which recognizes that there are different types of street-children and which differentiates between children according to their degree of involvement in street-life and family contact. Its categories include children at high risk of street-life involvement, children on the streets, children of the streets and abandoned children.

The crux and most-contributing context to this problem is the issue of poverty.

Other influences upon street children cannot be understood aside from it, and it is continually addressed throughout this analysis. For instance, the lack of both education and job opportunities is an outgrowth of poverty within the society.

Poverty is one of the reasons that lead children to the street. The process of children going to the streets to work in legal or illegal businesses to supplement family income contributes in part to the later phenomenon of street children:

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children on the street become children of the street.

The conceptual difference between children of the street and children on the street was determined in a 1989 (Barker and Knaul) meeting on the issue.

Children of the street were described as youth under the age of 18 living in urban areas and who call the street their principal home, assuming they no longer live in their familial residence. The street is the central environment from which they develop and obtain social skills. Children on the street, however, are children under the age of 18 who maintain stronger family ties, yet continue to spend the majority of their time in the streets. They work and engage in activities to ensure their survival, their families’, or even that of a third party.

Some of these children go to school in spite of having difficulties and issues such as using drugs. In general, they have less illegal behaviors. They constitute the majority of street children. Street children can be best understood as a product of their context and socialization, and this includes aspects of their familial and socioeconomic background.

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In looking at Iranian society, the structure and role of the family plays an integral part in the socialization and development of children. In each culture the family maintains a certain responsibility toward the minimal requirements for their offspring’s survival. Research on contemporary Iranian families reveals that a nuclear family structure, as the most common type, is more than only a result of population and industrialization boom that led to the formation of an urban proletariat. On a socioeconomic level, this urban class was faced with overpopulation, housing shortages, and a lack of many other basic amenities. Such factors allowed the development of households in the Zaaghe1, as slum called in Farsi, that are located on the outskirts of major cites.

informal economy.

Migrants to these areas were confident they would find more employment opportunities as well as an overall better future for themselves. However, more than 50 percent of zagheneshin (people living in zaghe) are unemployed and do not have medical assistance or unemployment benefits. Inflation and ongoing economic problems continue to present difficulties for families to live decently, with the head of the family working excess hours and other family members entering the labor force to ensure better income. Often this is seen in the joining of the informal economy, such as vending on the street, to make any earnings possible to support the family. These conditions threaten the overall organization and stability of Iranian families, as well as the socialization of their children. In the process of a child’s development, families are expected to instill in children their society’s basic values, attitudes, and modes of behavior. This harsh economic condition is the world many Iranian children are born into, an urban culture based on pressure and the basic need for survival. This environment has caused difficulty for families to properly socialize their children, and also has prevented the development of values outside those of subsistence.

Collection of found photos

Additional family members, as previously mentioned, are often forced to join the labor force in the interest of their family’s survival. This is noted by a rise in women workers, but also by the increasing numbers of children and adolescents in the Iranian work force. The issue of unemployment and lack of jobs contributes to widespread informal economic activities that include vending and shoe-shining, but also the illicit businesses of prostitution and drug sales. Children have become a workforce commodity, and the street serves as an attractive workplace to gain extra income for the family.

Urbanization has caused the development of child labor to evolve from a family agriculture business to industrial and illegal work within the street’s 1. A slum - a heavily populated urban informal settlement characterized by substandard housing and squalor .

-´What are slums and why do they exist?´ UN-Habitat, Kenya (April 2007)

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EMERGENCE OF PHENOMENA Children easily become the victims because they are dependent on their parents and supervisor and they also do not know how to protect themselves. They are mainly unaware from their parents’ wrong doings. In Thailand Streets, children are forced to beg, in Brazil have to pick up fruits, in Albania, children are subjected to sexual exploitation, in Iran, children beg, work as domestic servant and are subject to sexual harassment and exploitation.

The most important reasons of running away from home are as follows: Crowded families, emotional poverty in family, polygamy, fear from punishment as the result of their works, school problems, disability, being ridiculed by the other family members, failure in lessons, family pressure, bias, low tolerance of children against the pressures, addiction of one of the parents and tendency towards personal independency. Socioeconomic influences greatly contribute to the forced situation street children often find themselves in. The parents often socialize their children based upon their own experience.

Generally, children’s parents also suffered abuse and neglect from their own parents. Parents of street children repeat the same behavior with their own children, which contribute to the children choosing the street as their home.

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The relationship with the family has been considered as a key feature in the definition of street children. Felsman (1985) identified three groups of street children in Colombia: (a) orphaned or abandoned children, (b) runaways, and (c) children with family ties. Leisure and occupation on the streets were added to family ties in Martins’ work (1996) to identify three different groups of street children in Brazil. He found a group of children with stable family ties who worked on the streets and went home every night. These children played in their neighborhood or on the streets where they worked and many attended school.

A second group had unstable family ties. Although they lived on the streets, these children knew their families and, occasionally, went home to visit or even to stay for a while. Finally, there was a group of children who were on their own on the streets and who had lost all contact with their family. This categorization is quite similar to the current situation in Iran.

Nevertheless, it is difficult and it may even been misleading, to define a child as belonging to a specific category. It is rare to find children who had completely lost contact with their families in Iran. There are many children who live at home and work on the streets, but occasionally sleep on the street, and children who periodically leave home and live on the streets for weeks or months, and

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then go back home. The variability within these groups regarding the frequency of family contact, sleeping location, occupation on the streets, the destination for the money they earn, school attendance, and several other variables (including physical and sexual abuse, sexual activity, etc.) may be so large that the distinction between the of the street group and the in the street group may be meaningless or even misleading for research or intervention purposes.

It would be more appropriate to categorize street children as a function of the risks to which they are exposed (e.g., contact with gangs, use of drugs, dropping out of school, lack of proper parental guidance, prostitution, etc.) and the protective factors available to them (e.g., school attendance, supportive social networks, contact with caring adults, etc.). Researchers could then determine how vulnerable children are to developmental risk and what appropriate actions could be taken in each specific case.

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SOCIO-PHYSICAL CONTEXT About 55% of street children in Iran are offspring of the estimated 1.5 million refugees who have flooded into Iran from Afghanistan in waves over the last 20 years and many of the rest are children of single parents, mixed-nationality families or Gypsies. Many come from the growing number of families beset by drug addiction as heroin shipments across the Afghan border have multiplied since the fall of the Taliban in 2001. Others come from Iranian families who have slipped, through unemployment, drug addiction or illness, into the populous ranks of the urban poor.

Official government figures estimate that there are about 20,000 street children in the country, but NGOs say there are at least 55,000 in the capital Tehran alone. According to an article published in an Iranian daily four years ago, 100 to 150 street kids die each month from malnutrition and dangerous working conditions. Many of the children are illegal immigrants, whose parents were economic migrants and work here illegally, mostly as badly paid construction workers. Their children, as illegal citizens, do not have the right to an education and many are sent out to work at an early age to help supplement the family's paltry income.

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Street children must develop adaptive strategies to survive and stay safe in spite of those risks. They form groups (emotional and business groups) that protect them from street violence and help them to survive. Also, often they find shelter and food in institutions that have rules that must be obeyed. They learn to cope with such rules, even when they do not agree with them, but their behavior becomes opportunistic and often ingenious.

Most of the street children live in the slums of south Tehran and are sent out to work every morning by their parents. They travel to the affluent suburbs of north Tehran where they shine shoes, clean car windscreens (if they can reach) and sell an assortment of junk and oddities: chewing gum, flowers, fortune poems, nylon socks and cheap shoes.

South Tehran is where most Iranians in the city live, squeezed into decaying houses in narrow, twisting alleys. The hub of the 1979 Islamic Revolution, south Tehran is a densely populated urban sprawl, spilling further and further south in a sea of bazaars and black chadors. This is the district of the poor, working class and religious, where people still flock to Friday prayers. By the time it reaches the south of the city, the sparkling spring water that gushes from the mountains in north Tehran has become murky and viscous, clotted with rubbish.

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HABITS & BEHAVIORS Abuse also can take many forms, whether psychological, emotional, or sexual.

Recent research exploring this type of violence toward street children has found that 23 percent of street children reported abuse as their reason for leaving home. This past of abuse is subsequently engrained within the child and is therefore translated to their behavior on the streets. This behavior often manifests in some form of aggression, which has led to the association of street children with violence and dissonant activities.

A large part of these dissonant activities is the misuse of substances by the children. It is difficult to imagine a child the age of 10 as a frequent drug user. Truthfully, however, substance abuse is very widespread among the street children population, the most popular being inhalants, marijuana, and morphine. This type of abuse of drugs and common goods is often thought of as method of coping with life’s daily struggles.

The strategic geographic situation of Iran and its long borders with the countries of the Golden Crescent (Afghanistan and Pakistan), where a substantial proportion of the world's heroin is produced, have confronted Iran with problems of drug trafficking and concomitant drug addiction within the country. The youth are not an exception and in fact make up a considerable population of substance users. One estimation shows the rate of substance use is approximately 80% among the street children in Tehran. Nonetheless it should be emphasized that, alcohol and substance use is illegal in Iran and, therefore the reported rate is lower than the actual rate of their consumption in this population. Substance use in Iran is similar to other countries around the globe.

How do children effectively gain access to these drugs as well as to food?

Another significant contributor to the life and context of street children is the culture of stealing. Stealing operates effectively within their street system and is the basic method of survival. From this lifestyle of stealing comes an important aspect to consider: the relationship of the children with the police.

Principally, the police appear as a fearful figure in the lives of the children. They consider the worst part of their experience on the street to be their interactions with the authorities. Children have reported that even if they maintained a positive relationship with a policeman they were chastised and excluded from their group. In an effort to escape the problematic authorities at home, they encounter a second type in the streets. Instead of acting as a form of a protection, the police often bring more violence into the lives of the children.

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Children choose the streets as a place to make money and get attention, but they have no direction, goals or hopes. They rely on natural instinct and desire, lack discipline and have no consideration for risk or danger. This makes them particularly vulnerable to daily abuse, whether it is physical, psychological or even sexual. Over time street children become traumatized and develop behavioral problems, such as hyperactivity and lack of concentration.

Most street children, even those who go to school, are illiterate and have negative school experiences. Their attention span, memory, and cognitive development in general may be affected by malnutrition, drug use and intoxication, untreated illnesses, and accidental injuries. Often, they have difficulty adapting to the formal school system because it requires discipline, attention to specific tasks and schedules, planning ahead, and other routines with which they cannot deal effectively. Language, critical thinking, and intelligence also develop more slowly and may present significant deficits because street children interact mostly with their peers and have very little contact with adults. In fact, some researchers have noted that street children find it rewarding to talk to adults who will listen and speak with them in a friendly manner (Hutz and Koller 1999). Middle-class children, as a rule, are exposed daily to caring adults who talk to them, tell them stories, listen to their tales, and spend time interacting with them. Street children do not have this experience.

Spatial skills and very well developed visual and auditory discrimination,

for example, are required to detect, avoid, and escape street risks. Carraher et al.

(1985) noted that street children who worked at the market were very capable of dealing with money and doing sophisticated calculations to figure out the price or value of products (although they failed when presented with standard school math problems). Aptekar (1989) also referred to what he calls street knowledge as an important skill for social interaction.

Taken in Mombay

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ACTIVITIES & INVOLVEMENTS Children living on the streets are still children undergoing development, despite their life conditions. They experience risks and challenges that, at the same time, may jeopardize their development and promote the acquisition of strategies for dealing with life on the streets. There is some evidence that economical pressures and emotional disturbances in the family expose children to larger risks than do the conditions of the street. Street children often face larger risks than children in general because they are exposed to negative physical, social, and emotional factors at home and still have to deal with the challenges of life on the streets. On the other hand, there is evidence that the conditions of life on the streets lead to the development of coping strategies that are adaptive and that may help to strengthen their cognitive and social skills.

Street children are usually targets of social rejection and discrimination.

They have to develop their social identity and sense of belonging to a society that views them either as victims, who deserve pitying, or as criminals who must be taken off the streets and locked in jail. On the one hand, they are seen as victims, because they do not have shelter, clothes, food, or adult protection, have to work on the streets instead of going to school, are sexually exploited, and so on. On the other hand, they are perceived also as transgressors because they often use drugs, commit robbery, make noise, and are grouped in threatening gangs. The adult environment is usually very hostile to street children. The police aggress them often, causing physical harm and humiliation. They are also harassed by street adults and gangs, which fight for space and better survival conditions.

An effective strategy to survive and develop in such a hostile environment is to belong to a group on the streets. Therefore, street children will often join gangs and develop different kinds of peer relationships that leads to the development of emotional groups (appropriate to spend the night and to have fun together) and business groups (organized to dodge street life risks and fulfill their survival needs). Another strategy consists of going to social institutions for food and shelter. However, such institutions often fail to help them effectively, because they aim at taking the children off the streets, whereas the children seek them, because they perceive the institutions as part of street life, and not as a way out of it.

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IMPORTANCE OF COMMUNITY AND SPACE In Iran, Governmental and Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs) working with Street children have been very active in addressing the problems of these children. Many of them provide shelter, medical treatment, and basic education. In addition, they teach the children "survival skills". Part of these survival skills might be communication skills. Other lessons include helping children fend off sexual abuse, staying warm during Tehran's snowy winters, and include simple technical skills to encourage safer means of earning money.

In addition to the influence of family, school is the other means by which children become socialized and aware of their particular culture and values.

Although illiteracy in Iran has been decreasing, the rising number of child laborers has the potential to hurt the educational system. Increased fatigue, the large quantity of work, and the overall detrimental effect on mental health are probable in the circumstance of balancing school and work.

It is also difficult for schools to keep pace with the rapid overpopulation and urban growth that has occurred in recent years. The educational system struggles to effectively socialize children due to its outdated schools, lack of seats for enrollment, and the abundance of strikes by teachers. The need for income as well as the toll of labor upon the body place great stress on one’s educational ability. Subsistence simply dominates the possibility of education.

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Another aspect that schools lack in regards of socialization of children is their inability to build upon the body of knowledge gained outside of school. Research by Terezinha Carraher in 1991 found that schools fail to take advantage of “the knowledge and rationale of the students so as to expand it; schools are aware of the skills that children of the lower classes must have if they are to survive in big cities” (Mickelson, 2000, p.48). This type of knowledge may be referred to as “street smart” and is rarely emphasized in school. It is the difficulty of switching from the oral expression of the street to the written expression of the classroom that is the root of the problem. Teachers do not structure their curriculum around these “street” learning experiences and thus many students are not given opportunities to excel.

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CLOSURE

Children living on the streets are a social problem in many countries, a problem that has to be fought by all means available. I presume to fight this social ill requires that individuals and groups in society take the social and political responsibility to develop effective prevention and intervention projects. Children on the streets are vulnerable to risks but they manage to develop ‘coping strategies’ that often make them resilient (Hutz et al. 1996).

They behave as children when they play or interact with peers on the streets.

But, they must also act as adults when they have to provide for their subsistence and safety. In spite of their circumstances, street children are still developing persons that require appropriate health care, education, a nurturing home, safety, and human rights in order to grow with dignity and to become adjusted and productive citizens.

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On 22 September 2013, one day before the start of the school year in Iran, the Islamic Republic of Iran´s Majlis or parliament passed a law permitting a stepfather to marry his adopted child. In defense of the law, one member of the parliament said, ´According to Islam, every child who is accepted as an adopted child is not considered a real child. Islamic jurisprudence and Sharia law allow the guardian of the child to marry and have sex with his step-child´.

This shocking law will encourage child marriages and is nothing more than legalized pedophilia and child rape. It will further endanger the welfare of the child and violate their basic rights. It will deny the child any sense of security and safety at home.

In such times, when it seems impossible to grab a piece of logic behind such laws and conditions, each member of the society, as a part of a bigger whole based on their expertise, has the alternative if not responsibility to contribute to the victims of such laws, the small particles we tend to oversee; in order to cure the whole system in due time.

While removing the cause of existing street children is out of architects hands, it could be an option for them to create spatial alternatives to these childrens everyday life. Maybe a place to throw a ball, or listen to a story, or even learn how to read would take their mind off their tattered garments.

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BIBLIOGRAPHY

ICY and SOT

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