To get to the house, a set of four simple adobe buildings, you have to travel 30 kilometers of a narrow road from the nearest city, and then two more along a path of reddish sand. Live there S., the 13-year-old girl who has Morocco in suspense. And a few meters away, her rapists.
S. she was only 11 years old when she was repeatedly raped by three men, became pregnant and had a baby. Overcoming the fear of reprisals, his father denounced, but the sentence handed down a few days ago fell like a brick: between a year and a half and two years in prison for the aggressors.
The resolution condemning Karim A. (36 years old), Abdeluahed B. (29 years old) and Yusef Z. (22 years old and Karim’s nephew) has raised outrage in the Maghreb country and put on the table what seems to be an endemic problem of justice: lax penalties applied to rapists.
According to a study prepared in 2020 by the feminist collective Masaktach (I won’t keep quiet) analyzing 1,169 cases from the 21 first instance courts in Morocco, 80% of those convicted of rape receive a sentence of less than 5 years. In practice, they are in prison for an average of 3 years and 1 month.
Moroccan law stipulates between 5 and 10 years in prison for this crime, which rises to between 10 and 20 if the victim is a minor and up to 30 if she loses her virginity. The latter is the case of S.but a court in Rabat applied three mitigations and reduced the sentence to the minimum expression.
30 meters from the attackers
S. gave birth to a boy a year ago, who is cared for by his parents and grandmother in a region east of Rabat that lives, with great difficulty, from agriculture and livestock. Her family cultivates a couple of hectares with potatoes, pumpkins and cereals near an almost dry river.
Mohamed, his father, receives many calls these days from journalists who want to see him. he and the little girl S. accompany EFE I’m in the car on the way home and my cell phone won’t stop ringing. The girl, in a pink tracksuit, flees from gaze with a shrunken body. When she speaks, her voice sounds gravelly like an adult, and she nervously touches her hands.
Upon arrival, two dogs bark, some chickens dodge the car and the grandmother comes out to say hello. Her name is Chaiat and she is, as she puts it, “over 50 years old”, but her wrinkles suggest many more. She and Mohamed, her son, explain that it all started in 2021, when his grandfather fell ill.
”(The rapists) came to see my father. They attacked the girl. Forty days after my father died, I went to the market and a man told me the story. I got dizzy, I didn’t know what to say. She is a little girl who does not know, ”he says.
account that two of the attackers live 30 meters from his house. They are Karim and Yusef, uncle and nephew, who have seen S. grow. Karim’s mother, Mohamed says, was his father’s cousin. The third rapist lives 400 meters away.
A culture of rape
S.says Mohammed, it is not the same. “She doesn’t know if she’s a girl or an adult, she lives in a vacuum. She doesn’t want to play with her brothers.”. And it has gotten worse since the sentence, which is now being reviewed by an appeals court in Rabat.
Mohamed will reach the end asking for justice for his daughter. It was he who denounced, going over the fear. “Their family pressured me not to go to the police, but I do not accept the sentence, I do not want it to be repeated. I do it for my children and the children of others.”
In case of S. shakes the country and the Minister of Justice, Abdelatif Uahbi, promised harsher penalties. But for platforms like Masakatch, the problem starts with the police, prosecutors and judges.
According to Loubna Rais, one of its members, in Morocco there is a widespread “culture of rape” that “does not stop at the doors of the courts”, where the violence suffered by women and girls is trivialized, their suffering is minimized ”. “If the penalties were applied as provided for in the law, it would already be an achievement,” she says.
fear, hope and light
the grandmother of S.dressed in a pink gown and apron, dreads the moment when the rapists are released from jail. “S. he is very afraid of them. She’ll die of a heart attack or throw herself down a well if she sees them.”assures.
The girl, she says, is fine because she has been studying to be a hairdresser in Tiflet for four months, thanks to the help of the Insaf association. “I want to work in a salon,” she confirms hopefully, outlining a smile.
Away from her ears, asked about what happened, the grandmother’s head goes straight to when her great-grandson was born, a lively little boy with big eyes, “embarrassing” and who loves to play.
That day, he explains smiling, between tears and looking at the sky, electricity returned to the village after a year without power. “It is as if the light has brought us.”
(With information from EFE)
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Source-www.infobae.com