“The Court of First Instance in Tangiers convicted the accused of sexual harassment and sentenced him to one year in prison, with effect,” lawyer Aisha Kallaa said in a statement to Agence France-Presse.
And the lawyer added, “We are not satisfied with this ruling because the actions that are being reported are very serious and will have a lasting impact on the victim.”
The 46-year-old professor of Spanish at King Fahd High School in Tangiers (north) was arrested in early January in the midst of a wave of condemnation of extortion and sexual harassment in university circles.
Scandals continued in these circles, which led to widespread resentment on social networks, and necessitated the launch of judicial prosecutions.
On January 12, a professor at the University of Settat, near Casablanca, was sentenced to two years in prison with enforcement for sexually blackmailing female students.
The ruling issued in January is the first in the context of a scandal dubbed “sex for points” affecting 5 university professors, whose sessions have not yet concluded.
In recent years, the media has raised many cases of sexual harassment of female students by their professors in Moroccan universities, but the majority of these cases did not turn into complaints. And those that turned into judicial complaints were mostly left without follow-up.
Filing a complaint against a harasser is a very rare step in a conservative society, which often causes victims of sexual violence to remain silent for fear of reprisals, the eyes of others, or to protect the family’s reputation.
Human rights organizations and the media always warn of violence against Moroccan women.
In 2018, after a long debate that lasted for years, a law penalizing imprisonment entered into force practices that “consider a form of harassment, assault, sexual exploitation or ill-treatment.”
But associations for defending women’s rights, which call for more strictness in this regard, considered the text “insufficient.”