The girl looks like she’s barely 10 years old. The man in his forties, who says to himself ” voluntary ” in the villages hit by the earthquake, posts the photo on Instagram and writes: “She doesn’t want to come with me to Casablanca. But she promised we’d get married when she was older. » In the space of a few days, the story spread like wildfire in this region of the High Atlas hit hard on the night of September 8 to 9 and a panicked fear resurfaced: that of kidnappings and forced marriages. .
In the days that followed, another man was arrested after boasting about wanting to travel to disaster areas to commit sex crimes. On social networks, other messages posted by members of wealthy urban communities offer survivors to come and serve as their servants, “since they lost everything”. The offer is not trivial: in Morocco, many domestic workers are underpaid, deprived of rights and sometimes mistreated or raped.
In these poor and remote villages, women and children sometimes find themselves on the side of the roads, exposed to the incessant passage of construction trucks, NGOs or volunteers who come spontaneously to the site. And it’s not easy to tell the difference between a good Samaritan and a malicious person. On the ground, humanitarians prefer not to address the issue of kidnappings too much.
A special telephone line
It must be said that the awareness-raising work was largely done on the Internet, through the accounts of numerous influencers. “We have received around ten reports of behavior of this type”, specifies Ghizlane Mamouni, lawyer and president of the Kif Mama Kif Baba association, which is at the forefront of defending the rights of children and women in the country. And to add: “We systematically filed complaints. » His association also brought together twenty-one other local actors to set up a special telephone line to report cases of violence.
The associations also published a manifesto summarizing the actions to follow. Following the earthquake, women face a “risk of gender-based violence, including sexual harassment and assault” And “may be afraid to access essential services for security reasons”. Lalla Hakima Drissi, from the NGO Global Diversity Foundation, confirms this: “One of the most urgent needs is toilets. At the moment, it is very difficult to access it, so many women wait until nightfall, to move away from the camp and be out of sight of the men. » A situation where they are all the more vulnerable as they find themselves alone.
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