Society Stressed

School teachers, on their ‘last legs’

‘We’re on our last legs’ – that was the message coming loud and clear from teachers in Iran. Inflation has been rampant, but wages for state workers like teachers have not risen accordingly....

Matchmaking mullahs: Iran launches marriage website

Marriage is in a mess in Iran. The young population is delaying getting hitched. ‘Temporary marriage’ (sigheh), and therefore sexual immorality, is rife. Divorce ends one in three marriages in...

Saved from the abortion clinic: The baby who nearly died

Dr Mojdeh Shirvanian, director of Elam’s Women’s Ministry, explains - ‘When Rebecca’s mother became pregnant her life fell apart. The father left her, she was thrown out of her work, and her...

Youth Frustration, It’s about jobs, marriage, and freedom.

The roots of youth angst are cemented in grim facts. Young people between the ages of fifteen and twenty nine make up thirty five percent of Iran’s population, the largest youth sector in the...

Temporary Marriage: legal, flourishing – and poisonous.

Legal Actively promoted by senior government figures such as the former interior minister Mostafa Pour-Mohammadi, temporary marriage is legal in Shia Iran. And remarkably easy to arrange: the...

The curse of drug addiction in Iran

Epidemic: Most families impacted Epidemic. That’s the word commentators and officials use for heroin and opium abuse in Iran. And they are right. Official figures are that around two million...

‘I was a prostitute, but Jesus told me I belong to Him forever’

In the autumn, Jaleh, a quiet, rather sullen woman, arrived at an Elam conference. Nobody knew that when she was fourteen she had been raped as a punishment for joining a school protest; that...

Campaign for the unborn in Iran

Elam is committed to speaking up for the unborn child, for abortion is a problem in Iran. There is much ignorance and many women, including Christians, think abortion is a normal operation. To...