Marianne Pearl - wife of murdered journalist Daniel Pearl and soon to be portrayed by Angelina Jolie in the film A Mighty Heart - has been traveling the world reporting for Glamour Magazine. This month, she stops off in Morocco to profile some remarkable activists helping an outcast group of mothers:
Because extramarital sex is the ultimate cultural taboo—a crime
punishable by imprisonment, although it’s rarely prosecuted—unmarried
mothers are ostracized, harassed and even threatened with death by
their own families. (So-called honor killings are illegal and rare in
Morocco, but do occur, usually in rural areas.) “Single mothers are
considered prostitutes,” Aicha [Ech Chenna] says. “They are invisible.” Even if a
woman becomes pregnant from rape or incest, she and her baby are
shunned by society, like an ocean rejecting waste. Many mothers abandon
newborns anywhere they can, sometimes in garbage bins, to avoid the
stigma...
Most of Morocco’s unwed mothers are poor, illiterate women from the
countryside who started working as domestic servants, or “little
maids,” as young as age seven, explains Aicha. Handed over into virtual
enslavement by their families, the girls spend long hours cooking and
cleaning for better-off Moroccans. Their fathers take what little money
they make. After years of this, many girls will have sex with any man
who promises marriage; countless others are raped. Those who get
pregnant often end up on the streets—and worse. “These girls are at
risk of being beaten and even killed,” Aicha says.
Aicha, 65,
found her calling after meeting a frightened young woman who haunts her
to this day. It was 1980, and the woman came to abandon her infant at
the public health office where Aicha was employed as a social worker.
As a nurse took the child away, “she pulled the baby off his mother’s
breast and milk splashed all over his little face,” Aicha recalls.
Disturbed by that image, she couldn’t sleep that night. “I kept
thinking that the mother needed to nourish her child, but she was too
afraid to keep him,” says Aicha, who has been married for 40 years and
has four children of her own. She rented a basement office and set up a
social work practice just for desperate unmarried young mothers,
something no one had ever done...
Aicha’s group also provides about 500 unwed mothers a year with
much-needed legal aid. A major hurdle for many women is obtaining last
names for their babies. In the Arab world, women lack authority to give
their newborns a surname; they must ask permission from their fathers
or husbands. Without a last name, children cannot get government IDs or
attend school—it’s as if they’d never been born. Aicha’s staff
convinces reluctant, often angry, men to pass on their names to
grandchildren they didn’t know existed. “We politely negotiate with
them,” she says. Many of Aicha’s clients also lack IDs because they,
too, were born to single women; Aicha helps them get their official
paperwork so they can work legally and receive government benefits...
Aicha has faced great dangers in her work. In 2000, an extremist imam
issued a fatwa, or religious ruling, calling for her to be stoned to
death. “I’m not afraid,” she says, “because I’ve done nothing wrong.”
Soon after, she gave an unprecedented interview to Al Jazeera
denouncing the stigma on unwed motherhood. She hit a nerve. “People
called me from all over the country agreeing, saying I couldn’t let the
Islamists win,” she says. More astonishing, the king summoned her to
his palace and awarded her the Medal of Honor. “Please don’t give up,”
he told her.
