An Assessment of Street Children and Their Working Characteristics in Tehran

In Iran, Child Labor on the streets has been reviewed repeatedly but only a few studies have taken a qualitative approach towards the experience of child labor on the streets. This study has taken the characteristics of child labor in Tehran into consideration, using a set of qualitative and quantitative methods. The study has been carried out in the years 1391-92. We conducted focused group discussions, in-depth interviews and surveyed 289 children in order to collect the data from the key informants and the street children themselves. According to our findings, most of the children were engaged in customary works like colportage and semi customary works like waste picking. The children’s work places were mostly in municipality districts of 12, 2 and 1 respectively. Half of the children were working two shifts a day (49%) and one fifth of them were working all day. The average of the street children’s income was 200000 Rials a day and 79% of them handed all or part of their income to their families. The income of the street children has an important role in fulfilling the needs of the child and his/her family and is a serious barrier for cessation of the child labor on the streets. These findings emphasize the necessity of regarding the contextual causes of child labor in the strategies related to reducing the child labor and its priority over coercive actions like removal of children from the streets.