Children’s Rights

Iran’s Children and the Machinery of Repression

The youngest faces of Iran’s protest movement were never meant to become case files.

Yet after the nationwide demonstrations that followed the death of Mahsa Jina Amini in September 2022, children and teenagers appeared repeatedly in reports of unlawful killings, detention, beatings, torture and sexual abuse. Human Rights Watch documented serious violations against children between September 2022 and February 2023, including cases in which minors were held without their families being informed, denied access to proper legal representation and tried outside juvenile courts. Human Rights Watch

The evidence collected by rights organizations points to something larger than isolated misconduct. Amnesty International said Iranian security forces killed at least 44 children in the first months of the uprising. Human Rights Watch later cited Iranian rights groups that were investigating the deaths of at least 68 children in the wider protest crackdown. Amnesty International

For many of these children, political dissent began in places that should have been ordinary: school corridors, neighborhoods, public streets and social media. Their age did not keep them outside the reach of the security apparatus.

Human Rights Watch described the case of a 17-year-old boy who was allegedly beaten and sexually assaulted in detention. A high-school student said security forces pushed her onto a lit gas stove during arrest before beating and whipping her during interrogation. Another boy was tortured with needles under his fingernails. A 13-year-old boy whose rib was broken during a beating was reportedly denied adequate medical treatment. Human Rights Watch

These accounts matter because children are entitled to protections beyond those available to adults. Under Iranian law, minors are supposed to be questioned through specialized juvenile procedures and tried in youth courts. In practice, Human Rights Watch found cases in which those safeguards were ignored. Children were charged under vague national-security provisions, prevented from choosing their own lawyers and subjected to proceedings that rights monitors described as grossly unfair. Human Rights Watch

The responsibility for such violations cannot be reduced to the behavior of individual officers. Police, intelligence bodies, the Revolutionary Guard, prosecutors, judges and detention authorities operate within a chain of command. When allegations involve repeated patterns of detention, torture and coercion across multiple institutions, accountability necessarily becomes institutional.

The government’s own obligations are clear. Iran is a party to the Convention on the Rights of the Child. It is required to protect children from violence, arbitrary detention and degrading treatment. National-security arguments do not suspend those obligations.

A child does not become an adult because she writes a political slogan. A teenager does not lose juvenile protections because he joins a protest.

The deeper consequence is generational. For a teenager, a first encounter with the state may become an arrest, an interrogation room or the death of a classmate. That experience does not disappear when the protest ends.

What happened to children during Iran’s protest crackdown is therefore not a side chapter in the country’s political crisis. It is part of the record by which state institutions will be judged.

Iran’s Recruitment of Children: When the State Blurs the Line Between Childhood and War

In March 2026, an Iranian military recruitment campaign produced a number that should have stopped the conversation immediately: 12.

Human Rights Watch reported that the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps had launched a campaign allowing children as young as 12 to volunteer as “homeland defending combatants.” The program, according to an IRGC official cited by Human Rights Watch, included not only cooking, medical assistance and distribution work, but also security checkpoints, operational patrols, intelligence patrols and vehicle convoys. Human Rights Watch

That distinction is important. A child standing at a checkpoint or participating in a patrol is not simply helping a community. He or she has entered a military-security environment.

The campaign emerged during a period of intense military confrontation involving attacks on Iranian military and security facilities. Human Rights Watch warned that placing children around such locations exposed them to a serious risk of death or injury. Human Rights Watch

The issue is not limited to combat in the narrow sense.

International child-protection standards treat the recruitment and use of children by armed forces as a grave violation because military association itself creates danger. A child can be killed while transporting supplies, staffing a checkpoint, assisting an intelligence patrol or simply being present at a military site.

Human Rights Watch noted that Iran’s own legal framework already permits certain forms of military association for minors. Under regulations cited by the organization, children aged 15 and above can qualify as “active” Basij members after training and may cooperate with the IRGC in assigned missions. Human Rights Watch

The 2026 campaign went further by publicly lowering the entry point to 12.

Bill Van Esveld of Human Rights Watch said there was no justification for a military recruitment drive targeting children, particularly 12-year-olds. His criticism went to the heart of the issue: a government facing war or external attack still has a duty to shield children from military structures, not absorb them into those structures. Human Rights Watch

Iran has signed, though not ratified, the Optional Protocol to the Convention on the Rights of the Child concerning children in armed conflict. Under customary international law, recruiting or using children under 15 in hostilities can constitute a war crime. Human Rights Watch

The legal threshold, however, should not become the moral threshold.

A 15-, 16- or 17-year-old remains a child under international child-rights standards. Adolescents are especially vulnerable to pressure built around nationalism, martyrdom, religious duty and social expectation.

This matters in Iran because military symbolism has long been embedded in public life. The Basij has a presence in schools and youth programs, while state media frequently celebrates sacrifice and military service as patriotic ideals.

There is nothing unusual about a country teaching civic responsibility. The problem begins when civic identity becomes a route into military mobilization.

A government may ask adults to defend the country. It may not reasonably claim that children should bear the same burden.

The state’s obligation is the opposite: keep them out of combat zones, armed organizations and security functions until they are adults.

Afghanistan’s Closed Classrooms

There is a particular cruelty in closing a school while leaving the building standing.

In Afghanistan, millions of girls know exactly what that means.

Five years after the Taliban returned to power, UNICEF reported in August 2026 that more than 2.6 million girls had been denied secondary education. Afghanistan remains the only country in the world where secondary and higher education are effectively closed to girls and women. UNICEF

Girls have been barred from formal education beyond grade six since September 2021. Women were later excluded from universities in December 2022. UNICEF

The figures are enormous, but the policy is easier to understand at the level of one family.

A girl finishes sixth grade. She may be academically capable, ambitious and supported by her parents. Her teachers may be available. A school may exist a few streets away.

None of that matters.

The governing authorities have decided she cannot continue.

Unlike education crises caused primarily by natural disaster or physical destruction, this one is rooted in policy. Taliban authorities have defended their restrictions through their interpretation of Islamic law and Afghan social norms. International organizations, including UNICEF, have repeatedly described the effect as discriminatory and profoundly damaging to children’s rights.

Catherine Russell, UNICEF’s executive director, has stressed that a classroom offers more than academic instruction. It provides children with independence, confidence and protection against child labor, early marriage, violence and abuse. UNICEF

The damage also spreads beyond individual students.

Afghanistan already struggles with shortages of qualified teachers, nurses, doctors and other professionals. UNICEF’s research on the long-term cost of excluding girls from education and restricting women’s employment warns that these policies are weakening the country’s human capital and future economic capacity. UNICEF

That means the restriction imposed on a 13-year-old girl today can reappear years later as a shortage of female health workers, teachers or administrators.

The Taliban’s policy also intersects with another regional crisis: the return of Afghan families from neighboring countries.

Many girls returning from Iran had attended school there. Crossing the border back into Afghanistan can end that education immediately.

For such a child, repatriation is not only a change of country. It can mean the loss of her future profession.

Afghanistan’s economic crisis, decades of war and weak infrastructure are genuine obstacles to education. They cannot explain away the exclusion of girls, because boys do not face the same prohibition.

That distinction matters.

Where deprivation results from a deliberate rule applied according to sex, responsibility lies with the authorities enforcing that rule.

A generation is growing older while the doors remain closed.

Time matters differently to a child than to a government.

A government can postpone policy reform for years. A girl cannot repeat adolescence.

Returning from Iran, Losing School in Afghanistan

At Afghanistan’s Islam Qala crossing, the journey home does not always feel like a return.

For many Afghan families leaving Iran in 2026, it means arriving with depleted savings, uncertain employment and daughters who can no longer continue school.

Reuters reporters spent a week in Herat province and neighboring Farah documenting the movement of Afghans returning from Iran as economic conditions there deteriorated sharply. More than two million Afghans had left Iran over the previous two years, and Reuters reported that most had been deported or pressured to leave before the latest wave of families returning amid war and economic collapse. Reuters

Inflation had eroded wages and savings. Some workers described months without reliable employment. International Organization for Migration surveys cited by Reuters found that only 29 percent of recent Afghan returnees from Iran still had savings. Reuters

For children, the financial figures tell only part of the story.

Fifteen-year-old Setayesh told Reuters that she missed Iran because of her education and friends. She wanted to become a fashion designer. Back in Afghanistan, the Taliban’s restrictions meant that the future she imagined had suddenly narrowed. Reuters

Another family described a 17-year-old girl who had completed eight years of education before returning. She now remained at home. Her mother recalled her saying that she had studied for eight years only to end up with nowhere to go. Reuters

These cases reveal the way policies in two countries can converge on the same child.

Iran is entitled to regulate migration, but mass removals and pressure on undocumented migrants carry consequences that extend beyond immigration enforcement. Children may lose schools, social networks and the only communities they remember.

Once they arrive in Afghanistan, Taliban restrictions create a second barrier.

A boy may return to school.

His sister may not.

Reuters reported that some Afghan families had lived in Iran for decades. Children born or raised there may speak with Iranian accents, know Iranian classrooms better than Afghan ones and have only limited experience of the country identified on their family documents. Reuters

The political argument surrounding migration often focuses on borders, legality, employment and public services. Those questions are legitimate.

But children occupy a different legal and humanitarian position.

They did not choose their parents’ migration status. They did not design Iran’s economic policies. They did not write Afghanistan’s education restrictions.

Yet they absorb the consequences of all three.

The result can be seen at the border: families carrying bags, documents and whatever money remains, while adolescent girls return to a country where formal schooling may already be over.

There is no single institution responsible for every part of this crisis.

Iranian authorities are responsible for how deportation and migration enforcement are conducted.

Taliban authorities are responsible for excluding girls from secondary education.

And the children caught between those systems are responsible for neither.

Syria After the War: The Bombs That Never Exploded

A child does not have to hear an air raid to be killed by a war.

In Syria, years after the most intense phases of the conflict, unexploded bombs, shells, landmines and other ordnance remain buried in farmland, beside roads, inside damaged neighborhoods and around places where children play.

UNICEF estimated in April 2026 that roughly five million children were living in areas contaminated by landmines and explosive remnants of war. Around 324,000 pieces of unexploded ordnance were believed to remain scattered across the country. UNICEF

The scale of the problem is difficult to see because much of the danger is invisible.

A metal object in a field may look like scrap.

A child walking to football practice may pick up something that has been lying undisturbed for years.

UNICEF documented the case of a 13-year-old boy who found an unexploded object while going to play football. It detonated, costing him three fingers and seriously injuring one eye. UNICEF

Since December 2024, UNICEF said at least 1,891 civilian casualties from explosive remnants had been recorded, including 698 deaths and 1,193 injuries. Children represented 30 percent of those killed and 40 percent of those injured between December 2024 and February 2026. UNICEF

The danger is increasing as displaced families return.

More than three million displaced people had gone back to areas affected by the conflict, often without reliable information about contamination. The normal activities of childhood — walking to school, playing outdoors, exploring abandoned buildings — can therefore become lethal. UNICEF

This is part of the legacy left by years of decisions made by the Syrian government, armed opposition groups, extremist organizations and foreign military actors.

Explosive remnants do not distinguish between the party that fired them and the child who finds them years later.

The state that emerges from war inherits the responsibility to clear them.

That requires mapping contaminated areas, removing unexploded ordnance, warning communities and providing long-term medical and psychological support to survivors.

Syria’s education crisis compounds the problem. UNICEF reported that millions of children remain outside school and thousands of school buildings are still non-functional. Children who are out of class are also more exposed to labor, recruitment, exploitation and unsafe environments. UNICEF

War ends differently for children.

Diplomatic agreements can change governments quickly. Military front lines can collapse in weeks.

A mine does not know that the war is over.

For a Syrian child stepping into a field in 2026, the conflict may still be waiting underground.

Yemen’s Children Are Still Being Recruited Into a War They Did Not Start

Yemen’s war has lasted long enough for children born after its beginning to become old enough to be recruited into it.

That fact alone describes the depth of the country’s crisis.

The United Nations verified 742 grave violations against 652 children in Yemen during 2025. Among them, 262 children were recruited or used by armed forces or armed groups. The violations were attributed to multiple actors, including government-affiliated forces and the Houthis. Children and Armed Conflict

The UN found that 188 children served in combat roles and another 60 in support roles. Fifty-two boys were killed or injured while associated with armed actors. Children and Armed Conflict

The numbers cut through political narratives.

Whatever justification a government, militia or movement offers for its military position, the recruitment of children remains a grave violation.

The UN also reported concerns about Houthi-organized “summer camps” exposing thousands of children to military content and activities. Children and Armed Conflict

Government-aligned forces were also implicated. The UN attributed recruitment to the Yemen Armed Forces and affiliated forces and groups as well as to the Houthis. Responsibility therefore cannot be honestly confined to one side.

The same report verified the killing or maiming of 431 children. It recorded attacks on schools and hospitals and documented the military use of dozens of educational and medical facilities. Children and Armed Conflict

For a child, this produces a closed circle.

The school may be occupied or damaged.

The family may be poor.

The local economy may offer almost no work.

An armed group may provide money, food, status or ideological belonging.

What appears from the outside as “recruitment” may therefore happen under conditions in which a child has very little meaningful freedom.

That does not diminish the responsibility of those doing the recruiting.

It increases it.

Adults commanding armed organizations have greater power than the children they enlist. Governments and de facto authorities control institutions, money, weapons and propaganda. Children do not.

Yemen’s political actors regularly present themselves as protectors of the country, the revolution, religion, sovereignty or local communities.

The treatment of children offers a harder test of those claims.

An armed movement that places a rifle in the hands of a child cannot plausibly say that the child’s welfare came first.

A government force that recruits minors cannot excuse the practice by pointing to an opposing militia doing the same.

The UN’s findings show that the abuse is distributed across the conflict.

The responsibility is distributed with it.

The Child as Political Capital

Authoritarian governments rarely begin by asking children to become soldiers. They begin much earlier.

They shape vocabulary.

They decide who is called a hero.

They decide which dead are remembered.

They decide which history is taught, which questions are discouraged and which institutions are introduced to children as sacred.

By the time a teenager is old enough to understand the political system around him, much of the emotional architecture may already have been built.

Iran provides a particularly revealing example.

The Islamic Republic has spent decades building a political culture around sacrifice, martyrdom, military symbolism and ideological loyalty. These themes appear in education, state television, official ceremonies and youth organizations.

That does not mean every Iranian student accepts them.

Quite the opposite. The protests of recent years showed how far many young Iranians have moved from the language of the state.

But the government continues to compete for that generation.

The 2026 IRGC recruitment campaign for children as young as 12 was therefore not an isolated public-relations mistake. Human Rights Watch reported that the program contemplated roles including checkpoints and patrol activities. Human Rights Watch

The question is not whether some 12-year-olds volunteered enthusiastically.

Children are capable of enthusiasm about many dangerous things.

The responsibility of an adult institution is to know where enthusiasm must be refused.

A military force should be the first institution to understand that distinction.

Iran is not unique in the region.

In Yemen, the United Nations has documented child recruitment by both Houthi forces and government-affiliated actors. Children and Armed Conflict

In Afghanistan, the method is different. The Taliban does not need to place every child in uniform to shape childhood politically. By deciding that girls may not continue formal education beyond sixth grade, the authorities determine the limits of millions of young lives through a single ideological rule. UNICEF

Different governments use different mechanisms.

One recruits.

Another prohibits.

Another arrests.

Another floods the classroom with propaganda.

The common element is the assumption that childhood belongs partly to the state.

It does not.

Children are not reserve manpower.

They are not ideological raw material.

They are not decorations for patriotic posters.

They are not evidence of political loyalty.

And they are not an audience that governments are entitled to monopolize.

A government has the right to teach civic responsibilities. It has the right to explain national history. It can even teach children about national defense.

But there is a boundary between education and possession.

That boundary is crossed when children are pressured toward military structures, when political obedience is rewarded as virtue, when dissent is punished as disloyalty, or when access to education depends on conformity with the ideology of those in power.

The most revealing question for any government in the region may be a simple one:

What kind of adult does it want the child to become?

An independent citizen capable of questioning authority?

Or a subject trained to repeat it?

The answer tells us more about the political system than any constitution.

A Region Where Childhood Depends on Who Holds Power

There is no single “Middle Eastern childhood.”

A child in Tehran, Kabul, Sana’a or Damascus lives under a different government, a different legal system and a different immediate danger.

But one pattern appears again and again: decisions made at the top of political systems descend directly into the smallest spaces of a child’s life.

A cabinet decision becomes an empty classroom.

A military order becomes a missing limb.

A security directive becomes a prison visit.

An immigration campaign becomes a teenager standing at a border with everything she owns in a bag.

Consider Afghanistan.

The Taliban’s exclusion of girls from secondary school is one of the clearest examples of state power entering childhood. More than 2.6 million girls have been denied secondary education since 2021, according to UNICEF. UNICEF

There is nothing abstract about that number.

Each girl loses years that cannot be returned to her.

In Iran, the pattern takes another form.

Security forces were documented abusing children during the 2022 protest crackdown. Years later, Human Rights Watch reported an IRGC recruitment initiative with a minimum age of 12. Human Rights Watch

The same state can therefore reach a child in two opposite ways: as an institution of punishment and as an institution of recruitment.

Syria offers another lesson.

The government that once fought to control territory now inherits territory polluted by the remains of war. Millions of children live around landmines and unexploded ordnance. UNICEF

Political transition does not remove that obligation. Whoever governs Syria must now make the country physically safe for the children who survived it.

Yemen demonstrates the danger of divided authority. The UN has documented child recruitment and other grave violations by multiple parties, including government-affiliated forces and the Houthis. Children and Armed Conflict

When several actors claim legitimacy, children can end up with several institutions capable of harming them and no institution strong enough to protect them.

This is why children’s rights should never be treated as a charitable subject.

They are an index of government.

Look at the child and you can often see the political system around him.

Can she attend school?

Can he speak without fear?

Can she walk to class without stepping on unexploded ordnance?

Can he grow up without being recruited?

Can an undocumented child see a doctor?

Can a detained teenager call his family?

These are not soft questions.

They are questions about power.

Governments often prefer to be judged by military capability, economic growth or diplomatic influence.

Children provide a different measurement.

They reveal whether state power is disciplined.

Whether ideology has limits.

Whether security institutions recognize law.

Whether political leaders understand that the most vulnerable people in society are not resources to be managed, but individuals to be protected.

That test is difficult precisely because children have so little political power of their own.

They cannot negotiate with ministries.

They cannot command armies.

Many cannot vote.

Their protection therefore depends on adults who hold authority choosing restraint.

When they do not, childhood becomes another casualty of politics.

Childhood Is Not a Secondary Issue

Human-rights reporting often separates crises into categories: war, migration, political repression, education, poverty, detention.

Children experience them all at once.

A child removed from school may later enter the labor market early. A displaced child may lose medical care. A teenager detained after a protest may also lose a year of education. A girl returned across a border may discover that the government now governing her country prohibits her from returning to class.

This overlap is visible across the Middle East.

In Afghanistan, Taliban restrictions have excluded more than 2.6 million girls from secondary education. UNICEF

In Iran, Human Rights Watch documented killings, torture, sexual abuse and unlawful detention of children during the protest crackdown. Human Rights Watch

In Syria, millions of children still live in areas contaminated by unexploded ordnance left by years of war. UNICEF

In Yemen, the United Nations verified recruitment and use of hundreds of children by several armed actors in 2025 alone. Children and Armed Conflict

These crises are politically different.

Their governments are different.

Their wars are different.

Their legal circumstances are different.

They should not be collapsed into one simplistic narrative.

But they expose the same institutional weakness: children are repeatedly treated as secondary when governments and armed actors pursue larger political goals.

That hierarchy must be challenged.

National security is important, but it does not erase juvenile protections.

Immigration enforcement is legitimate, but it does not eliminate the rights of migrant children.

Religious authority does not cancel a girl’s interest in education.

War does not transform schools into disposable infrastructure.

Political survival does not justify torture.

A government’s responsibility toward children is not measured by speeches or ministries carrying the word “youth” in their title.

It is measured by outcomes.

Are children alive?

Are they safe?

Are they in school?

Are they free from military recruitment?

Can they reach healthcare?

If detained, are they treated under juvenile law?

Can girls and boys develop without the state deciding their political identity for them?

The answers matter because childhood is temporary.

A government can promise reform next year.

A child does not remain 13 until the government is ready.

Every year outside school is gone.

Every year of displacement changes development.

Every period of detention leaves a record in memory.

Every armed recruitment decision can become irreversible.

The region does not lack laws protecting children.

What it lacks, too often, is enforcement against those with power.

That is where responsibility belongs.