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Rabat – Moroccan Influencer Rawaa Beauty is in the crosshairs of outraged netizens for appearing to trivialize domestic violence in a TikTok video.
The beauty and lifestyle influencer, who has 3 million followers on her Instagram account, recently posted a video that appears to have been meant to make her audience laugh at the idea of her husband slapping her for pretending to be single.
Her followers, Instagram news pages and Moroccan netizens were all outraged at her blatant normalization of domestic violence.
The video was seen as of severe bad taste, raising serious concerns about the reaction of a society that already trivializes violence against women in various formats.
Moroccans across many social media platforms are calling for a mass reporting of the video, saying the influencer is clearly promoting domestic violence to her whopping 3 million followers.
Following the public backlash against her video, Rawaa deactivated the comments section on the video. The clip is still online and has amassed close to 700,000 views and over 62,000 likes.
She has also not commented on the backlash. Instead, she appears to have moved on, posting her usual, unrelated content of recipes and sharing quote posts.
Yasmine, a social media influencer and artist, called the video “alarming, pathetic and dangerous.”
Meanwhile, many social media pages campaigning for women’s rights in Morocco have also expressed their outrage at the video, calling for an apology and explanation from Rawaa Beauty.
Local human rights associations and media outlets regularly sound the alarm bell on violence perpetrated against women, whether in public spaces or in the family setting.
In recent years, cases of domestic violence against women have hit a new heights in Morocco, according to the High Commission for Planning (HCP).
According to recent statistics, over 52% of Moroccan women are victims of domestic violence.
While that number is alarmingly high, women’s rights NGO maintain that the real number of victims exceeds official figures as many women don’t report their aggressors.
Making “a joke” out of a real struggle most Moroccan women face, which is unfortunately sometimes fatal, has not gone unnoticed by Moroccans online.
National legislation protecting women from such violence has also been lagging behind. It was only in 2018, that a law criminalizing the many forms of violence against finally came into force.
However, the text has been routinely denounced as “insufficient” by women’s rights movements, which are calling for firmer regulations and a stricter implementation of the existing laws to discourage or deter the banalization of all types of gendered violence.
