Aid Groups Warn of Child Exploitation Risks After Morocco Earthquake

Activists and women’s rights organizations are mobilizing against child marriages, assaults on minors and child trafficking. This mobilization comes in response to online messages posted by men encouraging the marriage of minors and other forms of exploitation following the powerful earthquake that shook Morocco. In his Instagram story, an adult man, allegedly a volunteer helping survivors, posted a photo of himself posing next to a young girl of about 10 years old. "She doesn’t want to come with me to [Casablanca] but she whispered that when she grows up, we’ll get married," he wrote in the caption. This week, a 20-year-old student from Errachidia was arrested for boasting online that he was going to the earthquake-affected areas with the intention of sexually assaulting young girls.

"We knew something like this would happen, that there would be risks of gender-based violence, that there would be risks of exploitation, and that’s exactly what’s happening with the alarming cases we’ve seen online," Yasmina Benslimane, a Moroccan activist and founder of Politics4Her, a non-profit organization that promotes gender equality in politics, told Al Jazeera, promising to save minors. According to Laila Baker, regional director of the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA), there is evidence of sexual assaults following the earthquake. For Yasmina Benslimane, "it is absolutely crucial to adopt a gender-specific approach to disaster relief." "According to the United Nations Development Programme, women and girls are 14 times more likely to die in disasters than men," she added.

Last week, King Mohammed VI granted the status of "pupil of the nation" to the orphaned children of the earthquake, in order to "protect them against all kinds of risks," including trafficking, said Karima Mkika, president of the Marrakech-based association Al Karam, an NGO working to protect vulnerable children. Her association has not recorded any cases of child trafficking following the earthquake, but has set up an emergency hotline to allow people to report any abuse of this kind.