Sex orgies, STD on the rise in Iran, hard-line daily warns



Sex
orgies, STD on the rise in Iran, hard-line daily
warns
Thursday, 25th August 2005 Iran Focus
Tehran, Iran, Aug.

25 - An influential hard-line daily in Iran
warned that young people were increasingly turning to sex orgies,
drugs, and alcohol, all of which carry severe penalties for the
offenders under Iran's strict religious laws.
"Teenagers are taking part in parties where they consume
alcohol, take all kinds of Ecstasy pills, and use other illegal
drugs", the daily Kayhan quoted Hamid Emadi, a specialist in
sexually-transmitted diseases, as saying. "Pornographic CDs are
shown at these parties and party-goers are increasingly turning to
sex orgies".
The specialist warned, without further elaboration, that
teenagers were increasingly resorting to "unconventional sexual
relationships in parties".


Pre-marital and extra-marital sex is illegal in Iran and, in
certain cases involving women, punishment can include execution.
Those who attend
mixed-sex
parties, even as innocuous as birthday parties, risk
being arrested and receiving punishment that includes imprisonment,
flogging, and heavy fines.
Independent experts believe that Iran's youths, chafing under
strict religious rule, pose a serious threat to the country's
clerical rulers.
"Iran has the highest per capita rate of sex-related murders and
offences in the world", Ali Lavassani, a criminologist, said.


"Newspapers are full of stories about young men killing other men
or women, sometimes in serial murders, for sex-related reasons. The
situation has simply become untenable".
Iran's hard-line rulers, however, blame the simmering social
crisis on "cultural onslaught" by the West.
The medical expert said the
government needed to act urgently "to control
the irreparable consequences of the current trend".

He said 14
percent of Iran's 70-million population fell in the age group 15 to
19 years old, the most likely to indulge in such sexual
behaviour.
"The daily-increasing rise in reckless sexual promiscuity and
the corresponding rise in venereal diseases are clearly being felt
in society", Emadi said. He blamed the phenomenon on "the lack of
commitment of young people to moral
principles" and said most parents were unaware
of what their
children were doing.
"The incidents of sexually-transmitted diseases such as AIDS,
Hepatitis B, Herpes and contagious ulcer have risen sharply in
recent years", the daily quoted Emadi as saying.


"Such parties predominantly take place in large cities and their
suburbs, and the party-goers are mostly those who are very well-off
or very poor".
The new government of ultra-Islamist President Mahmoud
Ahmadinejad has vowed to enforce "the strict rules of Islam". One
of Ahmadinejad's first decisions as mayor of Tehran was to separate
men-only and women-only elevators in the city hall.
On Thursday, a senior Iranian cleric criticised the level of
mixed-sex interaction in Iran.

In a statement posted on
Persian-language websites, Grand Ayatollah Safi Golpayegani
lamented the "uncontrolled interaction" between men and women in
"Iran's Islamic society".

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