Videos: Outrage, Protest Follow 16-Year-Old Moroccan’s Suicide

Many activists in Morocco are outraged and protesting the laws that led to the suicide of a 16-year-old near Tangiers, who was forced to marry her rapist. Juhie Bhatia, Women’s eNews managing editor, was in Morocco for reaction.

By Juhie Bhatia ● Crime & Law, Politics ● March 19, 2012

FEZ, Morocco (WOMENSENEWS)–Moroccan activists have stepped up pressure to a scrap a law that allows rapists to marry their victims after a 16 year old killed herself. Amina Filali drank rat poison on March 10 in Larache, near Tangiers in the north, after being forced to marry the man who raped her.

Her death has mobilized women’s rights groups. An online petition has been started, a Facebook page called “We are all Amina Filali” created and several hundred women’s rights activists demonstrated outside Morocco’s parliament in Rabat to demand the repeal of a law on sexual violence on Saturday.

One of the groups protesting and speaking out against Filali’s death is Global Rights, a human rights capacity-building organization. Juhie Bhatia caught up with the group’s Maghreb Regional Director Stephanie Willman Bordat in Fez, Morocco.

Women’s eNews’ Managing Editor Juhie Bhatia ?is reporting from Morocco on a fellowship from the International Reporting Project (IRP), an independent journalism program based in Washington, D.C.?

Author

Juhie Bhatia

Juhie Bhatia is the managing editor of Women’s eNews. She has covered health, science and women’s issues for over 10 years as a reporter and editor. Previously the public health editor of Global Voices Online, she’s also helped launch EverydayHealth.com, one of the leading health websites in the U.S., and worked for the Center for Science in the Public Interest’s Nutrition Action Healthletter. She’s written for Reuters Health, Nature Medicine, Planned Parenthood’s teenwire.com, Bust magazine, HealthDay, Bulletin for the World Health Organization and MSNBC, among others. She’s a graduate of Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism and also has a bachelor’s degree from the University of Guelph, Canada, in nutritional sciences.

Author

Juhie Bhatia

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