The victim’s lawyers said “satisfied” of the verdict and Moroccan society felt heard. On Friday April 14, the Rabat Court of Appeal greatly increased the sentences of the three men accused of having repeatedly raped the young Sanaa, 11, in a village near Tiflet, and today the mother of a child born of this violence. One of the defendants was sentenced to twenty years in prison, the other two to ten years. At first instance, on March 20, they were sentenced to two years in prison.
In Morocco, this verdict had raised an outcry, bringing in its wake an intense wave of indignation. Citizens, activists, intellectuals had in turn mobilized against a sentence deemed outrageously lenient, against the laxity from which aggressors tend to benefit in cases of sexual violence against minors and women. And to demand a change in the laws of this country.
Because the tragic story of Sanaa, far from being isolated, echoes many other cases. Some shook Moroccan society, like that of Khadija Souidi, a 17-year-old girl who committed suicide in 2016 after her rapists were released. Or that of Amina Filali, 15, who ended her life in 2012 after being forced to marry her rapist. But many similar cases go under the radar.
Gold, “If we look at the decisions handed down by the courts, we realize that every day there are dozens of Sanaa to whom justice is not rendered and as many aggressors who escape the law”, underlines the lawyer Laila Slassi, co-founder of “Masaktach” (“I am not silent”), a collective which denounces violence against women and “legitimation of rape culture” in Morocco.
In 2020, the collective carried out a study on the judicial treatment of cases of sexual violence. It emerged, on the basis of 1,169 trials, that 80% of defendants convicted of rape had received sentences less than those provided for by law, i.e. imprisonment of five to ten years, ten to twenty years when the victim is minor (up to thirty years in the event of “defloration”). “The average length of sentences for rape, including in pedocrime cases, does not exceed three years and one month, continues Laila Slassi. The lightness of the penalties is systematic. »
Use of mitigating circumstances
The Sanaa affair crystallizes “all the aberrations of the judicial system in matters of sexual violence”, analyzes Amina Bouayach, president of the National Council for Human Rights (CNDH). Starting with the charges: the ” statutory rape “ And “indecent assault”rather than the “rape”.
In addition, the judges, at first instance, granted extenuating circumstances to the defendants, justifying them by their “social conditions” I’“no criminal record” and the fact that “the legally prescribed penalty is severe in view of the facts incriminated”. A ” miscarriage of justice “, denounces Mme Bouayach, while “The facts describe organized and repeated gang rapes with the use of violence on an 11-year-old child. This is an aggravated rape”.
This recourse to mitigating circumstances, left to the full discretion of the judges, ” East used quite systematically in cases of sexual violence to promote impunity for rapists”, reports Stephanie Willman Bordat, lawyer and co-founder of Mobilizing for Rights Associates (MRA), an NGO based in Rabat. “It gives judges the latitude to give free rein to their sexist stereotypes and find excuses for the culprits”, she specifies.
“We need safeguards. It should not be possible to grant mitigating circumstances in cases of sexual violence against minors as well as adults. It would be a way of setting in stone that sexual crimes are the most serious,” defends Youssef Chehbi, lawyer in Casablanca, who also pleads for specialized criminal chambers, “with magistrates who know what a sexual assault is, aware of the seriousness of the after-effects that this engenders”.
The penal code has “gaps”
To these difficulties in obtaining justice is added the risk of switching from the status of victim to that of culprit. Because in cases of rape, article 490 of the Moroccan penal code which criminalizes sexual relations outside marriage is a sword of Damocles which weighs on the victims. “Very often, this article is used by men as a blackmail tool to continue to perpetrate their crime with complete impunity, explains Stephanie Willman Bordat. And if the victim nevertheless decides to file a complaint for rape, but she cannot prove it – because this requires proof of physical injuries – she takes all the risks of being prosecuted in return for sexual relations. illegal. »
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One of the reasons that may explain why the number of victims who file complaints is so low in Morocco: only 3%, according to a 2019 report by the High Commission for Planning.
The penal code also has “shortcomings” as to the framework defined for carrying out the investigations, according to Mme Willman Bordat: “Very often, the investigators seek above all to know if the people knew each other before. If this is the case, they will consider that it is proof of consent, without pushing the investigations further, without looking at the act of violence in itself, the behavior of the aggressor or the circumstances. »
In 2018, the kingdom adopted a law against violence against women. While the text was hailed as a step forward – it criminalizes sexual harassment in particular and provides for mechanisms to support victims – it was however deemed largely incomplete by feminist organizations.
It is urgent to legislate
“Marital rape is still not criminalized; it is considered a marital duty of wives. The marriage of minors, which promotes sexual exploitation, is still possible by obtaining authorization from a judge. The culture of rape, which is universal, continues to permeate the entire judicial system in Morocco,” deplores the activist Ibtissame Betty Lachgar, Coordinator of the Alternative Movement for Individual Liberties (MALI).
Finally, this law did not change the definition of rape, written into the Moroccan penal code in the chapter on “crimes and offenses against family order and public morality”. “It is as if what is really denounced is not so much the fact that there was violence and attack on the other, but that there was a sexual relationship outside the traditional framework, namely marriage. Which may partly explain the very light sentences we are seeing,” emphasizes Amina Bouayach.
While a reform of the penal code – long announced but successively blocked, withdrawn, postponed – is “in the process of being finalized”, according to the Ministry of Justice, the president of the CNDH calls for the requalification, according to international standards, of rape as a “sexual abuse”, ” that’s to say a serious crime affecting the physical integrity of the victim”.
In his eyes, it is urgent to legislate. Because the taboos surrounding sexual violence – often suppressed for fear of scandal, hchouma (“shame”) – tend, according to her, to fade away. And because the indignation aroused in Morocco by the story of Sanaa is indicative of“a rejection of the normalization of sexual violence and archaic stereotypes that are now outdated”.