Moroccan NGO Creates Lifeline for Domestic Abuse Victims in Lockdown

Rabat – International non-profit Mobilising for Rights Associations (MRA) announced today, April 1, its initiative to assemble online emergency resources for the victims of domestic abuse in light of the coronavirus-induced lockdown.

The gravity of the COVID-19 pandemic is sidelining several essential issues, including gender-based violence.

MRA, which reads as “woman” in Arabic, is aggregating the work of Moroccan associations to “support women victims of violence, despite the difficult circumstances.”

The Rabat-based association launched a page on its website catering to women in Morocco in already hazardous situations aggravated by the COVID-19 lockdown, available at https://mrawomen.ma/coronavirus-resources-for-women-victims-of-violence-2/.

The website page contains emergency contact numbers made available by associations in various regions throughout Morocco. The initiative seeks to provide counseling and other relevant services to victims of domestic abuse during the lockdown.

Moroccan courts handle approximately 17,000 cases of gender-based violence annually, posing an imminent danger to the lives of the victims.

The Moroccan House of Councillors adopted in 2018 the draft law 103-13 against gender-based violence, but some critiques of the law deem it vague and out of touch with reality.

The law is “extremely short and it did not address any of the issues related to gender-based violence that Moroccan women and NGOs have been advocating for ten years,” Stephanie Willman Bordat, an international human rights lawyer, told Morocco World News.