An operation to round up hundreds of homeless female drug addicts from across Tehran and house them at the Shafaq Rehabilitation Center in Kahrizak, Rey County, was launched in November.
The operation was carried out in the Harandi neighborhood in Tehran Municipal district 12 where a large number of street children, urban homeless and junkies reside, following the orders of the governor and the approval of the prosecutor general and Law Enforcement Forces.
But Habibollah Masoudi Farid, deputy for social affairs at the State Welfare Organization, believes that plans to round up female addicts and send them to a rehab center is a temporary solution and does not address the core of the problem, ISNA reported.
“Keeping a large number of women addicts under one roof is not advisable. The maximum number of addicts at a rehabilitation center should not be more than 30 or 40,” he said.
Such measures will not help address the problem of addiction or check the social malaise. There should be at least 6 to 7 centers for homeless women in Tehran. Centers like Shafaq should be used “only to organize, screen and offer preliminary services.”
There are 15,000 homeless drug addicts in Tehran, of which 15% comprise women, according to the Iran Drug Control Headquarters.
Many of the women have migrated to Tehran from other cities, Farid said, and proposed measures to return them to their original provinces so that they can receive proper treatment and better rehabilitation services in their home towns.
The official also stressed the need for the presence of skilled social workers, psychologists and psychiatrists at rehabilitation centers. “Inmates suffer from social, psychological and economic trauma. For their reintegration into the society, they are in dire need of overall assistance so as to have an acceptable level of stability and normalcy in life.”
The SWO has established “Mehr” centers for the purpose of providing shelter to female drug addicts who have children, in collaboration with a well-known NGO, the Toloo-bi-Neshanha Society (literally, dawn of the unknown) in Harandi neighborhood in south Tehran.
