Smara, Morocco - Watching the video of the maid who tried to commit suicide on Tuesday in Casablanca and seeing the way her body crashed on the ground, hearing her screams and the witnesses’ screams too, made me feel as if I were the person who fell down from the fourth floor.
Smara, Morocco – Watching the video of the maid who tried to commit suicide on Tuesday in Casablanca and seeing the way her body crashed on the ground, hearing her screams and the witnesses’ screams too, made me feel as if I were the person who fell down from the fourth floor.
Personally, I consider that her attempted suicide is a societal suicide of a whole community over its norms, values and ethics. A society that does not worry about citizens and does not take enough measures in advance should be blamed for such a failure because our children should be protected by everyone.
Our media, our civil society organizations and government usually work, speak and write only when the cows die. Then, as we say in Morocco, everyone brings out their knife to be sharpened so as to cut what to eat from the dead cow‘s meat.
The situation of child labor and maids should be opened for discussion without any feeling of shame or national pride. Silence has never been golden as we believe. It is high time we started to talk and unveil all the veiled issues and put them on the table so as to solve them before they are worsened and become filthy.
The Moroccan public has been shocked by the story of that girl who came from the suburbs of Taounat to work in Casablanca after being tricked by someone who had raped her and had stolen her money to find herself psychologically scratched and injured forever and socially disdained by her family.
In fact, her story is the story of great numbers of innocent girls who end up putting an end to their lives either in public or in private. They are hiding books of stories of suffering, pain and mental and psychological torture. These are unread stories and tales of several young girls who live with their hurts and injuries and who carry with them the curse of their family and community as those tragic heroes of Greek mythology.
All over Morocco, many girls of school age, find themselves obliged to bury their education, burn their books, break their slates and the pens and kill the child and the infant within them and grow up to quickly in their teens.
Most of them are forced to take their clothes in plastic bags, bide goodbye to their parents, relatives and friends and head towards big cities where they feel alone, lost and isolated forever. They are thrown helpless and penniless inside the wild world of big cities.
They usually work as nannies or maids to take care of the well-to-do sons and daughters of the rich, who are born with golden spoons in their mouths. They care for those children when they are still babies and they become their primary sex school where the children of the rich learn how to make love. Sometimes, they are raped either by the fathers or by their teenagers.
Their tragedies doe not stop there, once they are raped, abused and exploited, they are thrown in the streets with no directions, no addresses and nowhere to go. The host families treat them as an orange in which ‘they drink the juice, they throw the peel away’ leaving them for the margins of society to be exploited and abused again by others.
When these maids get pregnant, which is what frequently happens, their families get rid of them completely as the whole society forgets about them. Consequently, they become cheap rings in the fingers of sex gangs and widespread nets of prostitutes. Thus, the suicide begins and continues to be repeated daily with every rape and every sexual intercourse they had with their clients in the market of human.
Of course, the fundamental causes are ignorance and poverty. Rich and educated people will never let their girls quit school and go to work early. They send their daughters to private schools, universities and institutes so as to get high degrees and get good jobs with high salaries.
But, the question is that why do they exploit the poor’s daughters while they do not accept their daughters to be exploited? Why do we do to others` daughters what we do not want to be done to our sisters and daughters?
I think, we should not wait for the government to put an end to these bleeding injuries. Civil society must assume its responsibilities and rise up to sensitize both the poor and the rich and organize campaigns to make people aware that all girls have the right to be educated, treated well and granted security, love, appreciation and other universal human rights.
A society that abuses, and ill-treats its children, especial its girls, are, surely, abusing its future, and its dignity. Parents should fathom the truth that a father that lets his little girl leave his home to work to support him has nothing to do with neither fatherhood.
In conclusion, I believe that it is better to be childless than to give birth to many mouths that we can not feed nor take care of. It is easy to sleep on a bed, marry a poor lady, and have dozens of poor children. But what is needed is to care for them and protect them. In other words, when individual parents can not do so, society must react urgently. Giving time to time does not always work.
The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Morocco World News’ editorial policy
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