Cardboard-Sleeping Women; An All-Out Battle for Survival
She introduces herself this way: “I am Laden, an addict. For about 21 years I slept on cardboard in Darband Gate Park and Haghani. During these 21 years, maybe every day, maybe every other day, officers would come and set our belongings on fire. We suffered greatly. That is, cardboard-sleeping women did not live…” Laden, now 64 years old and having quit addiction two years ago, has been addicted since the age of six. However, she did not experience cardboard-sleeping until she was 40 years old. Yet from her cardboard-sleeping period, she has many extraordinarily bitter experiences. According to her own account, she has tried to quit addiction 102 times. Perhaps based on these experiences that when recalling her memories, she prefers prisons to camps and shelters. The municipality takes cardboard-sleeping women to shelters and after a 21-day withdrawal period, releases them, and when these homeless women return to the park, they are beaten again and returned to the shelters.
Harassment from Both Sides; People and Government
Laden’s account is a familiar story for cardboard-sleeping women in Iran. The story of women who often failed in their personal lives and when homeless and shelterless they turned to street sleeping, they viewed the government not as a helper but as a harasser and aggressor. Dahi Amiri, a criminology student, attributes this harmful treatment of cardboard-sleeping women to existing prejudices about these women and the negative labels that society and government jointly impose on them. So it is not without reason that we sometimes hear reports of group attacks by people on cardboard-sleeping individuals in Tehran, or even encounter support from officials. As after a group attack by people on a group of cardboard-sleepers in the “Herandi” neighborhood of Tehran, Morteza Talaei, Vice Chairman of Tehran City Council, likened cardboard-sleeping people to a “virus” that should not be spread. He explicitly stated: “People have the right to defend themselves against cardboard-sleepers… Cardboard-sleepers can go to warming centers to sleep, but these people want to be together and sit in local spaces, therefore I give people the right to defend themselves against harm that attacks them.”
Regarding the connection between government and people in harming cardboard-sleeping individuals, and since cardboard-sleeping women has a deep connection with drug addiction, Amiri says: “An addicted woman is considered a criminal, and when we try to label and distance her from social contracts with this view, she certainly becomes more prepared to accept many other harms. When we work on the mental stereotypes of people, when media coverage of a criminal intervention on a social harm is so negative and contrary to custom, we completely prepare the public mind to take any inappropriate behavior toward these women. We want to help a harmed person and give them social dignity and return them to society, but we do this by beating them. We lose women either in the cold or in forced camps. Every year, cardboard-sleeping women at Darband Gate wait for near New Year to collect them as part of urban space cleansing.”
There is not even agreement on the statistics of cardboard-sleeping women!
But before anything else, the problem is: if we factor in provinces and cities, how many cardboard-sleeping women live in Tehran itself? The point is that there is not even minimal agreement among the highest responsible officials about the statistics of cardboard-sleeping women. While in September 2015, Shahindokht Molaverdi spoke of five thousand cardboard-sleeping women in Tehran, two months later the head of the Social Welfare Organization reported the discovery and identification of 600 cardboard-sleeping women in Tehran. This stark difference in the numbers of cardboard-sleeping women between responsible officials, whatever consequences it may have, will certainly result in infertile and ineffective planning for organizing these women. All this is while the Social Welfare Organization’s Social Deputy admits that in Iran there is no method for counting the number of cardboard-sleeping people, and on this basis, Forugh Azizi, a member of the Iranian Sociological Association, does not consider government statistics about cardboard-sleepers accurate at all and says: “For example, Social Welfare says there are 15 thousand cardboard-sleepers in all of Iran, and the Municipality in another statistic says the number of cardboard-sleepers in Tehran is 15 thousand people.”
The age of female cardboard-sleeping has reached 17 years
But apart from the debate over contradictory statistics about the number of cardboard-sleeping women, another catastrophic point about the phenomenon of female cardboard-sleeping is the decrease in the age of cardboard-sleeping. Some time ago, Mohammad Baqer Qalibaf, Mayor of Tehran, spoke of the existence of young girls among cardboard-sleeping individuals. Previously, in November 2013, Reza Jahangiri-Fard, Deputy of Social Services at the Social Welfare and Public Participation Organization of Tehran Municipality, spoke of the decrease in the age of cardboard-sleeping women. He acknowledged the existence of young women aged 17-18 among cardboard-sleepers and, stating that the main cause of the increase in the number of female cardboard-sleepers is addiction, in further explanation of this issue said: “A time in the past eight years, the majority of statistics of homeless and cardboard-sleeping women in Tehran belonged to elderly women, but these days we are witnessing the presence of young women… Women are affected by addiction earlier than men and are rejected by their families, therefore they become homeless at any age. Perhaps in individual cases, someone younger than 15 years old may sleep on cardboard in Tehran, but due to their young age they are quickly handed over to welfare centers. What matters in this regard is that cardboard-sleeping women in Tehran have become younger.”
Akbar Rajabi, CEO of the “Talou-ye Bi-Neshan” Institute, explains the causes of women becoming cardboard-sleepers as three factors: cultural poverty and socio-economic poverty. He, who is also an addiction specialist, considers social poverty very important in women’s cardboard-sleeping and considers people’s fear of addicts in the unconscious of society as one of the factors that causes more harm to cardboard-sleeping women and confronts the path of organization with challenges. He also mentions early marriages as one of the indirect factors of women’s cardboard-sleeping: “We have seen cases where a woman is 33 years old herself and has a 24-year-old child. Many of these early marriages lead to divorce. Since after divorce the person is not accepted by the family, their life will end in street-sleeping and cardboard-sleeping.”
Ineffective Measures in Organizing the Cardboard-Sleeping Phenomenon
Although social workers consider the projects of the municipality and other responsible institutions for organizing cardboard-sleepers to face serious challenges. For example, they point to “warming centers” which, although appropriate as a shelter measure, lack social assistance facilities, which has caused these places to become a meeting place for “addicts gatherings.” However, despite this, responsible officials constantly talk about building new camps to organize cardboard-sleepers, and in one of the recent examples, Alireza Jazini, Deputy Secretary General of the Headquarters for Combating Drugs in December 2015, spoke of preparing “physical space” for six thousand cardboard-sleepers. He, who referred to addicted cardboard-sleepers as “vagrant addicts,” said about accelerating this project: “The process of preparing camps is slow, so we asked the municipality to speed up this process. The problem of social harms, especially ‘vagrant addicts’ requires us to work faster and take action to organize them.”
But people like Laden have no good memories of such camps. Laden herself and people like her consider themselves exactly like “trash” that the municipality had the task of collecting. She speaks of one of her friends who became so desperate in one of these camps-shelters that she threw herself from the roof to die and not live there. She has a bitter story: “They would take us every day and take us to Luyzan shelter and sit us on cold tiles. Mentally ill people and the elderly, those who could not even control their urination and defecation were with us. Our daily ration was four cigarettes a day, while we had 10-15 years of addiction. For the sake of this cigarette ration, I had to diaper the old women or take them to the bathroom and empty their bedpans. Throughout all these years, we were only at war…”
Source: Tuana
