Sixteen year-old Aminah Filali committed suicide by swallowing rat poison after she was forced to marry the man who raped her. The Moroccan state prosecutor had reportedly urged the attacker to marry Aminah in return for the charges to be dropped. Aminah’s death in 2012 was widely covered in the Moroccan media and helped create the momentum for changes in the law.
Basma Latifah, a Syrian rape victim living in south Lebanon, was pressured by her family and the community to marry her attacker. She endured the marriage for three years, (the period required by law to avoid prosecution) during which she was regularly beaten and assaulted. After she divorced him, the man visited her family home in June 2017 and shot Basma dead.
In recent days Jordan and Tunisia both took the important step of striking down a clause in their law on rape, excusing the offender from prosecution if he married his victim. Jordan and Tunisia are among the numerous Arab and Muslim states which until recently allowed for such an eventuality.
Such a clause was supposedly designed to prevent the shame of this crime becoming a matter of public knowledge. However, the result was that a loophole existed for rapists to escape punishment (especially given the low conviction rate globally for cases of rape). Meanwhile, the female victim is put in the extraordinary situation of being made to suffer twice; from the attack itself, and then being pressured to marry the man who attacked her. As we can see from the above examples; such involuntary and unnatural marriages are highly likely to end in tragedy.
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