[Chikour]

Originally posted by Version7_1
Excerpts from Article regarding rape in Morocco posted by Azzedine_Azzedine:

Moroccan society, as a “democratic monarchy,” has certainly not reached the same level of
“democratic oligarchy” so cherished in the United States. Nor has the extended family been reduced
to near extinction as it has in the U.S., though the first indications of the emergence of the
professional/middle-class nuclear family are increasingly evident in cities. Women are yet not free to
walk just anywhere in public, and, even in the acceptable places, they suffer regular harassment by
day and are hardly seen by night. A woman alone at night is assumed to be a prostitute. A woman
walking with a man at night can be stopped by police and ordered to produce a marriage certificate;
failing that, they are arrested and, if unmarried, can be forced to marry under the assumption that
carnal acts have taken place. Or so goes the street lore, anyway. Several men told me they had
friends who had been forced to marry after being caught by the police with a woman at night. (I can
only assume the stories had some level of truth to them, since I heard them on several occasions,
though I did not interview anyone to whom this had happened.) The fact that this “shotgun
wedding,” if forced on both parties by the Islamic patriarchal state, is likely to produce misery is less
important than its perceived production of social order. It is a curious tale in which the instruments
of state power become the arbiter of public morality in a nation in which political authority intersects
with religious authority.

Glad you put "Democratic Monarchy" between quotes.