Death of Amina Filali Sparks Calls for Justice

by Janet Nixon, Guest Blogger


Death of Amina Filali Sparks Calls for Justice 
Amina Filali, from the small Moroccan town of Larache near Tangiers, would once, no doubt, have been a young, happy girl looking forward to her future. What were her dreams? Perhaps she had dreams of further education. Perhaps she would have left her small town and built a successful life in the city. Perhaps she would have had a beautiful house, with a nice rug and furniture. Sadly for Amina, her life was not to be as idyllic as she would have hoped. Barely into adulthood, aged 16, Amina was raped. The man who raped her was around ten years older than her. He may have raped her more than once. When Amina told her family about the rape, they were appalled. However, rather than attempt to have the man prosecuted, her mother Zohra asked the rapist’s family to agree to him marrying Amina.

The rapist’s family were at first unsure, and took the case to a judge. When he said that the marriage would be the best outcome, the agreed and Amina did as she was told. Her family felt that they would be dishonoured if Amina did not marry her rapist. They also believed that, as a rape victim and therefore not a virgin, it would be impossible for Amina to find another husband. The rest of the story has a certain feeling of tragic inevitability about it. The rapist did not change after marriage. He remained a cruel and violent man, and regularly beat his new wife, often severely. Amina could see no way out of her situation, and decided to commit suicide by drinking rat poison. Even this enraged her rapist husband, who dragged her screaming along the street by her hair as she was dying.

Moroccan law
Rape is illegal in Morocco, and generally carries a sentence of between five and ten years. However, Amina was a minor, and rape of a minor would be likely to attract a sentence of ten to twenty years. If Amina’s family had taken her to the police rather than to her rapist, perhaps he would now be in jail and Amina would be alive, husband or no husband (although in reality, it is unlikely he would have been prosecuted, as rapes in Morocco rarely are). Moroccan law also gives eighteen as the minimum age for marriage. Amina was two years younger when she married. How could a judge have recommended that she marry a man who had perpetrated a serious crime against her, when she was not yet old enough to marry?

The answer lies in article 475 of the Moroccan penal code, which allows rapists to avoid punishment if they marry their victims. The law relating to minimum age of marriage allows those under eighteen to marry ‘in special circumstances’. Sadly for Amina (and no doubt many others like her) the law put ‘special circumstances’ before justice.

What can be done?

Campaigners in Morocco are working hard to try and get the law changed to make sure that there are no more Aminas. A campaign involving protests on the ground, in Rabat, and over social media has drawn international press attention. Global Girl Media was at the protest in Rabat, and put together a video report of it. A huge crowd of women of all ages was there, noisily standing up for their rights and those of other ‘Aminas’. They were joined by many men: a reminder that it is possible to be both a man and a feminist, and that women’s rights is something that should be important to everyone, rather than being seen as a minority interest.

Even if the law in Morocco is changed, there is a much wider battle that needs to be won. In Morocco, as elsewhere, violence against women is routine and often brutal. When questioned, 62% of Moroccan women aged between eighteen and sixty-four said that they had suffered some form of violence from men during the past year. That group would not even have included Amina, as a minor.

A huge cultural change is required in Morocco to shift attitudes which see women as inferior, as unimportant and as responsible for violence towards them perpetrated by others. Domestic violence is seen as acceptable to some degree. Women who suffer it have nowhere to turn. There are very few places where they can go to seek refuge, and police are unwilling to investigate reports of rape and violence against women. Women in Morocco receive a poorer education than their brothers, and they find it very difficult to get jobs in the upper echelons of the labour market. As long as these things are true, it will be hard to reduce violence towards them. Women are seen by some as being less important, even less human than men. If that continues to be the case, violence against women will continue to be seen as acceptable.