Rabat – A young woman was subjected to sexual harassment in Tangier, northern Morocco, while attending a beach concert on Sunday night.
A shocking video of the incident was uploaded to Youtube on Monday morning. In the footage, she is holding a little girl in her arms, while screaming, “they took my bag and all my money.”
While the video shows the moments after the police came to the scene, eyewitnesses said a group of teenagers tried to sexually harass the woman along with three other girls accompanying her and strip them.
However, the harassment turned into a violent mob-style attack, as the three other girls managed to make their escape, leaving her and the little girl face-to-face with harassers, according to eyewitnesses.
A report by local news website Tanja7 said some harassers attempted to rip the victim’s clothes. The victim, on the other hand, was struggling with the group, holding the little girl tight in her arms and running toward the main street.
Still, the harassers insisted on following her to the main street. Some passersby volunteered to help the woman to a safe location, but eyewitnesses said it was hard to differentiate between who was helping and who was robbing her, as she lost her bag in this moment.
The harassment of the woman triggered public anger in Morocco; the incident comes soon after Morocco saw two similar outrageous incidents.
The most recent incident occurred on July 15, in Safi, where a young girl was harassed by a group of passersby in a popular market for wearing shorts.
The girl was walking through the market with her mother, when dozens of passersby gathered around her and started harassing her.
Another similar incident took place to last month, when two young women, hairdressers aged 19 and 23, were harassed by a group of traders as they walked through a souq, or market, in the town of Inezgane near the holiday resort of Agadir.
Mahmoud Ababou, a Moroccan journalist and social media activist says the number of such incidents is expected to grow in the future, as long as there are uneducated citizens in the Moroccan society.
“While I can’t find a convicting reason to the growth of such events, I think the extremist ideologies promoted by the Wahabi channels influenced the uneducated persons, ” he explains.
“Before the launch of such channels, Morocco was a country of coexistence where both skirts and Hijab were regarded as a normal outfit,” he concluded.
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