In aid of Moroccan women

By: Katherine Marshall

November 1, 2010

Aicha Ech-Channa sat six feet away from the Moroccan Ambassador to the United States last Friday in a Georgetown University lecture room. She jabbed her verbal sword at a host of social prejudices. Hunching her shoulders, she depicted the posture of shame of an unmarried mother who loves her child but has no way to care for him. She grabbed a scarf to cover her head and face to convey the fear a young girl feels, left alone in the world and beleaguered by problems. Aicha was talking last week about her beloved country, Morocco, but the biases she attacked are not specific to Morocco. They are a present reality in much of the world.
Aicha's main target? The stubborn social taboos that oppress young girls. They are mostly about social attitudes but religion is a potent part of the toxic mix. Young girls face a cruel combination of protection and judgment. They are confined to traditional roles, are pressured to care for their families and face constraints on their choices about schooling, marriage and child-bearing, all in the guise of "protecting" them. In reality young girls wind up at the bottom of the heap in most situations.

Inexorably, young girls become pregnant (either through rape, carelessness, or with romantic stars in their eyes). Then, unmarried, they are cast aside by their families and society, with nowhere to go. They are terrified that their own fathers and brothers will kill them because the family's honor has been besmirched. Their babies suffer lifelong shame because the shadow over a child born out of wedlock is indelible. The young mother is pressed to abandon the baby to uncertain fate or keep it, with no support from either family or society.

Aicha Ech-Channa has spent over 50 years fighting against society's attitudes and prejudices. Her terrain is Morocco, a conservative Muslim society buffeted by change, ruled by an enlightened monarch in an evolving democracy. But she is swift to point out that the kinds of attitudes she decries there were commonplace in many other societies, the United States and Europe among them, only a few generations ago. She deals with the underside of society, the daily grind and indignity that poor people face. No group, though, is so little appreciated and has less to fall back on than young girls. It is a supreme irony that societies committed to protecting and treasuring young women in practice do little to help them in their hour of greatest need.

Aicha took on the fight long ago as a young nurse, then a social worker. A turning point was witnessing a young girl forced to give up her baby; still more, a visit to the city orphanage made her blood boil. There she saw hungry babies whose skin was eaten away by long unchanged diapers. She started to fight on two fronts: as a social worker and then founder of a center, and as a determined advocate for policy change. She and a group of women confronted the governor of the city and discovered, to their surprise, that civil servants do care and are human. So the progress in laws and institutions that she has propelled is the product of an alliance of private people and the government, including Morocco's royal family.

Mrs. Ech-Channa today runs a center in Casablanca that supports young mothers so they can care for and keep their babies. They learn job skills that allow them to be independent - nothing makes so big a difference as financial independence in the real world. And she lobbies incessantly and creatively for changes in laws that do practical, important things: making it possible for an unmarried girl to get a birth certificate, and to give her child a name, even if the presumed father is not present and supportive.

Last year, Aicha Ech-Channa won the Opus Prize (I'm on the Foundation board). With an international honor and a million dollars for the cause, her work and courage have catapulted to a new level. She is constantly sought after as a speaker and advocate, which brings new attention to her cause. She argues, quoting her theologian grandfather, that no child asks to be born - that is God's wish, so no child should suffer because of his or her birth.

Aicha described a long interview with the Doha-based news channel Al-Jazeera. Midway through, she took a bottle of water and poured it on the table in front of her. It ran all over. Her message? Trying to impose massive changes in social attitudes is like rain after a drought. The society cannot absorb the change and it runs off. But with patience and persistence, change will be absorbed.

Our grandmothers knew girls who were rejected because they got pregnant and out-of-wedlock children who lived in shame all their lives. Happily today we have progressed. Morocco, like other countries, is in the midst of a social revolution about treatment of girls. Change is happening, too slowly, but with an Aicha Ech-Channa or two, it will surely move faster as time goes on.
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