Such types of renting and sales are carried out in areas such as Behesht-e Zahra, Tehran’s main cemetery, said Farahnaz Rafe, president of Iran’s Red Crescent Volunteers Organization.

Rafe raised this issue on February 29th in an interview with the state-run Tasnim news agency (associated to the Quds Force, the extra-territorial wing of the Revolutionary Guards).

This social dilemma has specifically grown amongst homeless women sleeping on the streets, Rafe added.

Studies show 5,000 of the 15,000 homeless people across the country are women, said Shaheendokh Molvardi, Hassan Rouhani’s deputy for women and family affairs, in an interview on July 11th, 2015 with the state-run ILNA news agency. In other words one third of the country’s homeless people are women.

The true number of homeless people in Iran is believed to be far higher than officially-announced estimates. At a time when Iran fails to provide detailed figures on the number of homeless women and attempts to minimize this very serious social crisis, there are numerous signs of evidence showing that the number of homeless women in Iran is rising.

There are 25,000 homeless people in Tehran alone, of which 3,000 are women, said Adel Mazari, head of the social commission in the Iran Major Cities Secretariat in an interview on February 9th with ILNA. He indirectly referred to the root of this crisis and said cultural measures for a starving individual who cannot make ends meet for his/her family is pointless.

The International Transparency Organization has published a list of corrupt countries in the world for 2015, based on which Iran was ranked 130th in administrative and financial corruption.