Moroccan society was shattered by the shocking suicide of 16-year-old Amina Filali, who was raped by a criminal and then forced to marry her rapist.
Rights activists, feminists and bloggers have launched a campaign to sign an online petition addressed to the government demanding that the Criminal Code be amended to prevent rapists' escape from punishment if they marry their victim.
A Facebook account was set up called We Are All Amina Filali. The internet is filled with outrage on the subject. The following message by Abadila Maelainin, a civil rights activist, became very popular, “Amina was raped three times – by the rapist himself, by the tradition and by Article 475 of Morocco’s Criminal Code”. Protests to abolish the controversial article took place not only in the capital and the victim’s hometown, but also in many cities throughout the country.
Meanwhile, relatives of rape victims not only in Morocco, but also in other Islamic states often agree to such marriages in order to avoid disgracing their entire family, as they believe. According to the girl's father, that was specifically the reason why he agreed to have his beloved daughter marry the rapist.
The Arab mass media infuriatingly tell of how the rapist-husband regularly beat and starved his young wife that married him against her will, which apparently became another reason for her suicide. Obviously, that man had a criminal nature and was prone to violence. That was the original reason for his crime. And by forcing his former victim to marry him, she was punished additionally.
At the end of January, the Moroccan Minister of Justice announced that the possibility of scraping that article of the Criminal Code, that allows a man accused of kidnapping or raping an underage girl to escape from punishment if he married the victim, could be reviewed. What changes are proposed to amend article 475 of the Moroccan Criminal Code? A journalist from Morocco Radvan al-Balyadi tells the Voice of Russia about that:
- The Ministry of Justice of the kingdom is reviewing three amendments to the Criminal Code, all of which concern the protection of underage girls from rape. According to the amendments, a man can be sentenced to a prison term of ten years for the kidnapping of an underage girl and sexual relations with her even with her consent. For rape the punishment would be 20 years in prison, for kidnapping and rape – up to 30 years of imprisonment.
The Moroccan civil rights activists support the proposal of Mustafa Ramid, the kingdom's Minister of Justice, to amend the law. It took the Moroccan authorities ten months and a tragic story that ended fatally to risk taking such steps and to hear the rights activists.
Moroccan society along with the rest of the Arab world has many unresolved issues. One of the main issues is that in the Arab world the man undoubtedly receives the dominating role, while women's rights remain in the background or are totally absent, states Radvan al-Balyadi, a journalist from Morocco, in his interview to the Voice of Russia.
- This problem is primarily a social one. Such a decision needs to coincide with the changes within the views of the society itself, in all of its spheres, so that the rights of women are no longer suppressed. Women are half of the society. It is not only the state that needs to look for the solution, but the society itself needs to move forward so that women have a the place in society they deserve.
|ruvr.ru
