Rabat – The Tiflet child rape case continues to make local headlines and many across Morocco continue to denounce the “heinous” and “shocking” crime while expressing uncertainty over whether the nationwide uproar and backlash against the news of a child rape case will finally help change what critics have described as a culture of the banalization or normalization of sexual abuse.
Calls for the right punishment
On March 20, a Moroccan court sentenced three adult men to two years in prison after they were found guilty of repeatedly raping an 11-year-old girl.
The crime was committed near the victim’s house in Tiflet, a town in northwestern Morocco, with reports indicating that the three men told their victim they would kill her and her family if she ever dared to speak about that harrowing experience.
The victim, now 13, is mother to a one-year-old boy whose DNA test confirmed one of three rapers as the father.
In addition to the three adult men’s shocking abuse of their daughter, the victim’s parents said they felt more pain, outrage, and disappointment after the three men were only sentenced to two years in prison.
Among Moroccans following and commenting on the case, the prevailing sentiment appears to be that the court’s light sentencing of three child rapists ought to once and for all serve to wake up Moroccan society, especially the country’s lawmakers and judges, to the urgent need to severely punish child rapists and all sex offenders.
One effective way of deterring Pedophelia and other crimes of sexual abuse is to properly, and severely prosecute those found guilty of such crimes, many have said.
A devastated family
Speaking to Moroccan news outlet Le360, the father of the victim appeared to take issue with the culture of silence and victim-shaming surrounding cases of rape, emphasizing that his neighbors and people around the town knew about the rape of his daughter before the victim’s own family.
“People were taking their distance. I was not sure why. The case conceded with my father’s death… I was not aware of the rape case, I was wondering whether people were taking distance because my father died,” said the victim’s father, adding that he only learned about the case of neighbors’ avoidance after a friend finally broke the silence to inform him of his daughter’s rape.
“Everybody knew, except us,” he said, stressing that his friend urged him to take his daughter to a doctor.
“‘All of the people in the neighborhood are saying this. Take the girl to the hospital,’ my friend told me,” the father said.
Shocked, the father rushed to his daughter to ask her whether what he had heard was true. But she denied being pregnant, as her abusers had threatened to kill her and her family if she ever revealed what they had done to her.
Following a doctor’s check-up, the victim, who was then 11 years old, turned out to be pregnant.
“I rushed to the royal gendarmerie to file a complaint. When we were there, she only accused one, but when I left the statement room, she confessed to the security services that there were two others involved,” the father added.
Carrying the victim’s baby in a small room in the family’s modest house, the grandmother recalled feeling overwhelming sorrow and disappointment as news traveled in the community of her granddaughter’s tragedy.
“She denied being pregnant and told her father that she was ready to go to the doctor with him, when he was asking her whether what he had heard was true,” the grandmother said, recalling that her son “almost lost his mind” when he discovered that his 11-year-old daughter was pregnant and was carrying the baby of one of her rapists.
“We did not know what to do. My son fainted when he heard that. All I had to do was to show support and tell him that it’s destiny, God’s wish,” the grandmother said in tears, adding that the parents of one of the rapists attempted to “reconcile” and offered to have “their son marry our child.”
Read also: Tiflet Rape Case: Court to Open Appeal Trial Thursday Against 3 Child Rapists
But the victim’s “father refused, he told them that he will resort to justice and see what the law says about this.”
Across Morocco, the case of the Tiflet child rape has been greeted over the past week with chortles of shock, frustration, and outrage.
Moroccan social media and other online platforms have been buzzing with campaigns and petitions condemning the Rabat court’s initial light sentence in the case, demanding an appeal trial that would hand the three rapists the right punishment for their crime and serve to deter pedophilia and sexual abuse in Morocco.
To date, over 32,005 people have signed a petition calling for a retrial in the Tiflet rape case and the sentencing of the three perpetrators to at least 20 years in prison for their heinous rape of an 11-year-old.
The Appeal Court of Rabat announced yesterday its decision to open an appeal proceeding against the perpetrators on Thursday this week. While many have welcomed this decision, it remains to be seen whether the Appeal Court will deliver the verdict that Moroccans have been asking and hoping for.
