Imagine being forced by your family to marry someone you don’t love, a practice that is extremely difficult for modern day collegiettes to envision. Yes, we have all seen Hollywood depictions of arranged marriages in films like Fiddler on the Roof, Pirates of the Caribbean, and Pride & Prejudice, but these are just glimpses of the past, right? Wrong. Arranged marriages still happen throughout the world today and unfortunately, the situations tend to be more extreme, not always ending with learned adoration.
This was the case for a 16-year-old Moroccan girl, Amina, who was forced by her parents to marry a man who raped her. There was no way that Amina was going to grow to love a man ten years her senior who began their relationship with brutal and violent rape, so why would Amina’s parents force her to essentially marry a criminal?
In Morocco, the law states that anyone who rapes a female minor, under the age of 18, will receive immunity from criminal charges as long as they marry the minor. After Amina’s situation was reported to authorities, the two families struck a deal in which Amina was married to her rapist in order to preserve her family’s “honor.” This deal allowed the rapist to avoid any run-ins with the law and it allowed Amina and her family to avoid the tarnished reputation that accompanies rape in Moroccan society.
After putting up with constant domestic abuse from her new husband for over a year, Amina no longer could deal with her oppressive condition. Sadly, Amina saw no other way out of her situation than to take her own life through the ingestion of rat poison this past weekend.
Amina’s death, while extremely upsetting, has helped to reveal the many problems with laws that exempt rapists from punishment if they marry their victims. People from around the world took to various social media outlets on Tuesday expressing their shock and horror that laws like this are still in existence. On Twitter, tweets tagged with #RIPAmina were trending all day long hoping to encourage people to sign a petition calling for the abolition of the law exempting rapists from punishment if they marry their victim.
If you would like to get involved in the #RIPAmina movement, click here to sign the petition with the hope of ensuring that nothing like this will happen again.
Sources:
http://www.buzzfeed.com/provincialelitist/moroccan-girl-who-was-forced-t…