A 16-year-old Moroccan girl has committed suicide after a judge ordered her to marry her rapist, according to Moroccan media reports.
Last year Amina al-Filali’s parents filed charges against their daughter’s rapist, a man 10 years older than her but it was only recently that a judge in the northern city of Tangier decided that instead of punishing him, the two must be married.
The court’s decision to forcibly marry Amina to her rapist was supposed to “resolve” the damage of sexual violation against her, but it led to more suffering in the unwelcoming home of her rapist/husband’s family. “After I filed a complaint against him, he said he will marry her. And when he married her and took her to his family’s home he mistreated her, beating her and leaving her starve with no food,” Zahra Mallim, Amina’s mother told the Morocco’s 2M TV.
Traumatized by the painful experience of rape, Amina decided to end her life by consuming rat poison in the house of her husband’s family, according to the Moroccan daily al-Massae.
In many Muslim countries, rape is a taboo and not talked about when it occurs, and it is considered to somehow restore the woman’s honor if she is forced to marry her rapist. What an utterly vile and despicable tradition, a travesty, and a cruel violation of not only women’s rights, but also common decency, and as usual all in the name of man-made religious tradition.
