December 3 - A recent study showed that the number of runaway girls in Iran has risen twenty-fold under the mullahs' rule, the state- owned daily Khorassan reported on December 1.

The study noted that "during the last four months of the past Iranian year (November 21, 2001, through March 20, 2002), more than 60,000 teenage runaway girls were arrested by the State Security Forces." It added that "the true figure is even higher."

According to the same study, the average age of runaway girls during last year was 14.7.

The state-run dailies had reported in the past on "the collection of 50 to 60 runaway girls in Tehran," "20,000 runaway girls wandering in Tehran" and "an annual rise of 12 percent in the number of runaway girls in Tehran." (Entekhab and Azad dailies, June 1). The Women's Committee of the National Council of Resistance of Iran last June released a detailed report on a criminal human-and-drug-trafficking network run by senior officials of the mullahs' regime, smuggling women and runaway girls to neighboring countries....

Ms. Sarvnaz Chitsaz, Chair of the Women's Committee of the National Council of Resistance of Iran, attributed the chilling rise in the number of young girls fleeing their homes and the spread of prostitution to the catastrophic impact of institutionalized gender discrimination, and called for the formation of an international delegation to investigate the crimes committed by the mullahs' regime against Iranian women.