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Sexually transmitted HIV infections are on the rise in Iran and the Islamic Republic is setting up telephone hotlines to help fight the problem, a senior official said in comments published on Tuesday.

Iran has a low prevalence of HIV infections with a rate of about 0.16 percent of the adult population compared with 0.8 percent in North America, a senior U.N. official in the country told Reuters last year. But the official warned that infection rates in Iran were increasing because of both a growing inflow of cheap heroin from Afghanistan, the world's number one opium poppy producer, and a rise in the number of sexually transmitted cases.

While this portrait of Iranian sexual experimentation may be shocking on its surface, it has grown familiar to most people who have visited Iran or followed cultural developments there in the past decade. Less well known is that, for all their promiscuity and seeming sophistication, many of these young Iranians suffer from a lack of sexual education and resources that fits the official culture of pious abstinence rather than the actual one of looseness and risk. The birth control method of choice among Mahdavi's informants is withdrawal. Women who take the pill frequently lack the most basic information and take it only erratically, depriving themselves of almost all of its effect. Condoms are considered so filthy and embarrassing that even people who share florid details about their sex lives with Mahdavi blush at their mention, and no one wants to be seen requesting them at a pharmacy. AIDS, educated young Iranians tell Mahdavi, is transmitted through visits to the dentist or hairdresser, and other STDs come only from a certain unsavory sort of woman. While wealthy women can obtain abortions--illegal in most cases but common, thanks to poor contraception--from sympathetic doctors at vast expense, poorer women acquire on the black market pills or injections meant for animals. Mahdavi went to a back street where dealers sell these medications, just to see how easily they could be acquired. A dealer sold her a vial of pills without the least instruction on what to do with them. Physicians she interviewed told her that they see a great many women seriously injured or rendered infertile by self-administered abortions meant for animals.

Yet there is good news in Mahdavi's study. Close to the ground, where it counts, Iranian doctors, parents, educators and even institutions are bending to the forces of change. For example, since 2000 the Islamic Republic has required Iranians who seek marriage licenses to attend state-administered classes on family planning. One that Mahdavi attended in Tehran's central business district sounds perfectly appalling. A chador-clad woman shrilly lectures a room of gum-snapping, nail-filing, indifferent young women, offering the following counsel: "You must always be ready for your husband's sexual needs. If perchance he is watching a football game on television, you should be resting to prepare yourself, or else preparing your bed for the evening. If you should feel overcome by fatigue yourself, make sure always to ask your husband, 'Is there anything else you need from me?' or 'Would you like to have me later?' before retiring."

But then Mahdavi attends another such class, this time in the city's north, in the upscale shopping district near the Tajrish bazaar. This class covers disease transmission, contraception, fertility, mental health, marital relations and even female sexual pleasure. The teachers wear the less forbidding hijab--head scarf and fitted thigh-length coat--common among their students, and the women attending these classes, Mahdavi reports, confide freely to the teachers about their relationships and their sex lives. Here, and in her chapter about the older generation's response to the sexual revolution, Mahdavi shows us a society beginning to shake off its denial and rigidity out of the sheer necessity of serving the burgeoning needs of its young--a generation of adults who have either grown sympathetic to young people's yearnings or, like Mrs. Erami, recognize that they risk greater losses than they can bear.

Iran carries out more sex change operations than any other nation in the world except for Thailand

government even provides up to half the cost for those needing financial assistance and a sex change is recognised on your birth certificate.

She has had to work as a prostitute to make ends meet.

En vertu du principe de "qisas" – ou juste châtiment – prévu par le droit islamique iranien, le tribunal a jugé que l'homme devait à son tour être rendu aveugle par un jet d'acide.

Un Iranien, qui avait rendu aveugle une femme ayant refusé sa demande en mariage en lui jetant de l'acide au visage, a été condamné par la justice au même châtiment, rapporte, jeudi 27 novembre, le quotidien Etemad-e Melli.