Sexual violence and sub-Saharan migrants in Morocco: a community-based participatory assessment using respondent driven sampling

Background: The European Union contracted Morocco to regulate migration from so-called “transit migrants” from Morocco to Europe via the European Neighbourhood Policy. Yet, international organisations signal that human, asylum and refugee rights are not upheld in Morocco and that many sub-Saharan migrants suffer from ill-health and violence. Hence, our study aimed at 1) investigating the nature of violence that sub-Saharan migrants experience around and in Morocco, 2) assessing which determinants they perceive as decisive and 3) formulating prevention recommendations. Methods: Applying Community-Based Participatory Research, we trained twelve sub-Saharan migrants as Community Researchers to conduct in-depth interviews with peers, using Respondent Driven Sampling. We used Nvivo 8 to analyse the data. We interpreted results with Community Researchers and the Community Advisory Board and commonly formulated prevention recommendations. Results: Among the 154 (60 F-94 M) sub-Saharan migrants interviewed, 90% reported cases of multiple victimizations, 45% of which was sexual, predominantly gang rape. Seventy-nine respondents were personally victimized, 41 were forced to witness how relatives or co-migrants were victimized and 18 others knew of peer victimisation. Severe long lasting ill-health consequences were reported while sub-Saharan victims are not granted access to the official health care system. Perpetrators were mostly Moroccan or Algerian officials and sub-Saharan gang leaders who function as unofficial yet rigorous migration professionals at migration ‘hubs’. They seem to proceed in impunity. Respondents link risk factors mainly to their undocumented and unprotected status and suggest that migrant communities set-up awareness raising campaigns on risks while legal and policy changes enforcing human rights, legal protection and human treatment of migrants along with severe punishment of perpetrators are politically lobbied for. Conclusion: Sub-Saharan migrants are at high risk of sexual victimization and subsequent ill-health in and around Morocco. Comprehensive cross-border and multi-level prevention actions are urgently called for. Given the European Neighbourhood Policy, we deem it paramount that the European Union politically cares for these migrants’ lives and health, takes up its responsibility, drastically changes migration regulation into one that upholds human rights beyond survival and enforces all authorities involved to restore migrants’ lives worthy to be lived again

Les rites obstétriques au Maroc. Un enjeu politique mérinide ?

Obstetrical rites in Marocco: a Merinide political wager. A. Dialmy. A rite, called the "spreading of the sheet", was practiced in Fès from the 13th century til the 1950s. The rite finds its source in the social, religions and political history of the city during the Middle Ages. In the first part of this study, after having established the existence of the Sheet rite in the 13th century, we will examine the content of the rite, in other words, the anthropological form of the rite that the oulema had occasion to judge. The latter, pretending to ignore the magico-pagan dimensions of the rite, were content to condemn the ritual for socio-economic reasons. The second part of the paper analyses the main functions of the Sheet rite within the city and makes a distinction between a manifest, obstetrical function, aimed at warding off a demographic threat, and a latent function of islamic urban integration. Finally, in the third part, the Sheet rite acquires a competitor in the Trousers rite, whose latent function is to provide the Merinides with the religions legitimacy that they were lacking since they took hold of power. One can also offer the hypothesis of a battle between the two rites, which would pose the question of the relationship of symbolic domination between the political cite and the civil society, between the Prince and the city.Dialmy Abdessamad. Les rites obstétriques au Maroc. Un enjeu politique mérinide ?. In: Annales. Histoire, Sciences Sociales. 53ᵉ année, N. 3, 1998. pp. 481-504

Sexually transmitted diseases in Morocco: gender influences on prevention and health care seeking behavior

Increased awareness of the medical and social costs of sexually transmitted diseases (STD) has resulted in greater attention to the control of these illnesses. STDs are responsible for a significant amount of morbidity in Morocco and have become a key target of the HIV control program. In 1996, the Ministry of Health conducted a qualitative study in order to enhance information, education and communication strategies in the national STD/HIV program. Data on the conceptualization and knowledge of STD, information sources and health-care-seeking behavior were gathered through 70 semidirected, in-depth interviews conducted with men and women in the general population and health care providers (HCPs). Two commonly applied health behavior theories in STD/HIV prevention, the Health Belief Model (HBM) and the Theory of Reasoned Action (TRA) served as a framework for data analysis. The most common name for STD is berd, which means "the cold" in Moroccan Arabic. Berd is caused either by cold striking the genital area or sexual intercourse and most often designates a syndrome of genital discharge. However, the term was also often used to indicate STD in general. The dual causality of berd maintains social stability by providing an honorable excuse for individuals who become infected, while warning against unsanctioned sexual behavior. Clear gender differences in understanding STDs and health-care-seeking behavior emerged through these interviews. STDs in Morocco are viewed as women's illnesses and men with STD often reported feeling victimized by women. Men appear to have more extensive informal information sources for STD than women. Consequences of STD, both physical and psychosocial, were viewed as more severe for women than men, and men had greater access to treatment, for both social and economic reasons.STD/HIV Morocco Gender Care-seeking behaviour Lay beliefs

Sexual violence and sub-Saharan migrants in Morocco: a community-based participatory assessment using respondent driven sampling

Abstract Background: The European Union contracted Morocco to regulate migration from so-called "transit migrants" from Morocco to Europe via the European Neighbourhood Policy. Yet, international organisations signal that human, asylum and refugee rights are not upheld in Morocco and that many sub-Saharan migrants suffer from ill-health and violence. Hence, our study aimed at 1) investigating the nature of violence that sub-Saharan migrants experience around and in Morocco, 2) assessing which determinants they perceive as decisive and 3) formulating prevention recommendations. Methods: Applying Community-Based Participatory Research, we trained twelve sub-Saharan migrants as Community Researchers to conduct in-depth interviews with peers, using Respondent Driven Sampling. We used Nvivo 8 to analyse the data. We interpreted results with Community Researchers and the Community Advisory Board and commonly formulated prevention recommendations

Queer Virginity: Leïla Maraoune's La Vie sexuelle d'un islamiste à Paris

There is something deceptively binary about Leïla Marouane's novel, The Sexual Life of an Islamist in Paris: her male protagonist is a forty-year old virgin who wishes to "conquer" Western female bodies for whom procreation, marriage and commitment are (he hopes) irrelevant. At the same time, he does not seem able to break free from supposedly traditional Muslim values. And he is obsessed by an overpowering mother does not stop pressuring him into marrying a young Muslim virgin and having children as soon as possible. One of the possible interpretations of The Sexual Life of as Islamist in Paris is the protagonist slowly becomes mad because he is torn between two worlds and two cultures. The narrator has supposedly inherited a very precise cartography of bodies and gender that separates the world into penetrable and penetrating bodies. The trouble with that interpretation however is that it presupposes that Marouane accepts that Maghrebi sexual discourse is monolithic, opposable to a just as monolithic Western norm. Upon close reading, it becomes apparent that The Sexual Life of an Islamist in Paris is just as provocative as its title seems to promise but for reasons that have nothing to do with the reiteration or inversion of clichés. Rather than presenting a simple reversal of stereotypes (Mohamed is the male virgin and the Arab women he meets are sexually liberated), the novel complicates the construction of virginity and penetration and presents the narrative voice as an inextricable web of male and female threads. Presented as a double of the author herself, it turns the novel into a space where the construction of masculinity and femininity escapes the opposition between "the Maghreb" and "France," a space where critique has find its own parameters through practices of constant disaligning and disidentification from gender and ethnic or religious norms