Sexism and Rape Culture in Moroccan

Social Discourse

Don Conway-Long

Webster University

In March, 1993, Hajj Mustapha Tabit was arrested in Morocco

for abusing his power as a police commissioner by abducting

and sexually assaulting hundreds of women over a period of

13 years. The reaction in the local Moroccan press is

examined here, demonstrating a structure of discourse that

blamed female victims, elevated the male offender to a kind

of cult status, and generally contributed to the

perpetuation of a sexist subjectivity in a nation that was

only beginning to deal with crimes against women in any

organized manner. The specifics of the case study are placed

in the general context of women’s struggle for emancipation

in Morocco.

Key words: masculinity, rape, subjectivity, violence,

sexism, Morocco

Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Don

1

Conway-Long, Behavioral & Social Sciences, Webster University,

470 E. Lockwood Avenue, St. Louis, Missouri 63119. Electronic

mail may be sent to dconlong@webster.edu.

The Journal of Men’s Studies, Vol. 10, No. 3, Spring 2002, pp. 00-00.

© 2002 by the Men’s Studies Press, LLC. All rights reserved.

The streets of Rabat were abuzz with the tales of rape, of abuse

of police powers, and of breach of public trust that emerged with

the tale of Hajj Mustapha Tabit. It was March 1993, and this

powerful police commissioner had just been arrested after abusing

his authority for dozens of years sexually violating numerous

women and minor girls (International Herald Tribune, 1993, March 16, p.

2). He was also charged with filming the events for the

international pornography trade, making in the process millions

of dirhams (approximately 8 to the U.S. dollar at the time).

The entire country faced, perhaps for the first time, the

realities of rape and police abuse, two issues that seem to

increase with the rise of modernity and social complexity. One of

the issues most on people’s minds seemed to be the fact that this

man, this official, this demonic rapist, was also a Hajj, someone

who had gone to Mecca in the guise of a pilgrim, thereby carrying

out one of the most cherished duties of a good Muslim. All

understandings of the actions with which he was charged had to be

2

framed in the context of his religious piety. This proved to be a

case that had a very familiar feeling for those who study rape

and public perceptions of the crime.

The Tabit scandal, to which I will return, is a classic

illustration of the violations of women by men of power. But,

first, let us turn to a general examination of the status of

sexual assault in the cultural world of Morocco. What is the

general level of consciousness of this assaultive act? How did

Moroccans talk about it, if they did at all, in Morocco in the

early nineties?

I did research in Morocco in 1992-93, spending a great deal of

my time in Rabat, the capital, with trips to Méknès, Casablanca,

and Tangiers. I was studying men and masculinities, seeking to

gain a grasp of the ways Moroccan men interpreted and experienced

their day-to-day gendered lives, with a particular focus on their

perception of power between the sexes and among men, on work and

family roles, and on their views of violence among men, between

men and women, and between fathers and children.

I asked many people about rape, including two female

academics, and received a consistent answer from them all: rape,

while it did exist, was not really a problem in Morocco. The

academic feminists also informed me that rape was not on the

feminist agenda. Far more important for Moroccan women, they

said, were issues of access to resources, particularly jobs and

education. This did not mean that they thought that rape was not

3

wrong; they just thought it was not a serious problem in Morocco,

though they did acknowledge the seriousness of the issue in the

United States. It appeared that somehow Morocco was different in

their minds from what they perceived as that alienated, socially

corrupt society of the first world. Many seemed to associate the

extent of rape in the United States with the extent of

promiscuous sexual behavior. Since sexual promiscuity was much

less in Morocco, they reasoned, rape in Morocco must be less as

well. One friend told me that most people in Morocco believed

rape happened only when a woman’s virginity was forcibly taken

without her family’s permission.1

My assessment of this unusual perspective is twofold. First, I

continue to believe that rape is underreported worldwide,

especially in societies in which women’s “issues” have not made

the same moves into the public awareness as has taken place in

Europe and North America. (However, I do not believe that rape is

necessarily worse in the third world; the issue here is

awareness, not frequency.) Second, I suspect that the women I

spoke with in Morocco do have an important point, which is that

rape does grow worse in circumstances of great social changes, of

disruptions of institutions (particularly familial ones), and

specifically when women begin to threaten men’s purported control

1 This is, of course, the biblical point of view, and hence that

of the Qur’an as well.

4

of public (and private?) life.2 This would suggest that the rape

rate may be lower in societies linked more closely by forms of

integrated social organization, especially extended family

systems. If this is true, it will also mean that social

alienation can exacerbate crimes of violence against women. On

the other hand, the issue of marital rape and battery may simply

be more occluded by the same close family integration. For

example, many men in Morocco reacted with surprise, disdain or

disbelief when asked about the concept of marital rape. The

belief that it was impossible to rape one’s wife was common. One

well-traveled professor of history, at an event I attended that

included several academics, laughed uproariously about a news

report out of Egypt that declared the beginnings of a national

discourse on the subject. He argued that such claims by wives

were impossible given Islamic law, and that he was quite happy

with that impossibility. This recalls Germaine Tillion’s (1983)

argument suggesting that the extended family combined with the

preference for cross-cousin marriage made incest a frequent

pattern on the Mediterranean rim. Women’s sexuality in both

circumstances is “owned,” and certainly controlled, by the

family, considered as part of the patrimony of the male line

itself; marrying off a sister to a close cousin simply keeps the

wealth within the family. But the potential that women could be

2On the relationship between rape and social upheaval, see

Sanday 1981.

5

raped by members outside of the family leads to closely guarded

cloistration, reducing the existence of “real” rape, as

culturally defined by circum-Mediterranean people.3 However, as

Tillion suggests, that same overprotective cloistration may

increase the rate of incestual forms of sexual violence, and may

limit any perception of inappropriateness by the parties

involved.

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

3 See Estrich's Real Rape (1987) for the origin of this term.

6

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.

But what happens when the politico-religious authority shows

itself flawed, corrupt, a moral canker?

The Tabit Case

This is the moral uncertainty that surrounded the emergence of

the Hajj Tabit case onto the national scene. Hajj Mustafa Tabit

was a high level police commissioner in Rabat who was arrested in

March 1993 for the repeated abuse of his police powers in the

crime of abduction and rape of women; newspapers reported not one

victim, not ten, not even 100; he allegedly confessed to

victimizing 1500 women in this manner, though 518 women became

the figure most frequently used, since the identity cards of

these 518 were found in Tabit’s garçonnière after his arrest

(Rocco, 1993, p. 4). The crime was exacerbated by the fact that

he videotaped his crimes, apparently making them available for an

exclusive market in video violence against women. One hundred

eighteen videos of the sexual exploits were recovered, showing

Tabit and various professional cronies victimizing countless

7

women and girls. The entire list of females victimized by Tabit

and friends were, curiously for a police official, kept on a

computer file, and therefore discovered easily. The “Affair

Tabit” was the most talked-about scandal, and the lead headline

for weeks.

It was greeted as a “windfall for the people of the press,”

enabling journalists to emerge from the usual doldrums of their

“yoke of silence” to actually report on something important4

(Smaili, 1993a). The list of crimes ascribed to Tabit led to

salacious discussions in an usually restrained press: “Rapes,

recordings of pornography for decades, seduction of minors,

breach of faith and now death [of a young girl]. Decidedly, Tabit

committed all the crimes that he was supposed to combat” (Chaoui,

1993, p.6). Questions were raised about how many other Tabits

were still in the police departments of the nation (Selhami,

1993a, p.2). The trial was held behind closed doors, with only

the official Channel One television station permitted to report

on the proceedings; speculations were rife that much was being

hushed up, especially when Tabit’s alleged remark that he would

not go down alone and that judges should review tape #118, was

made public. The government was accused of seeking to reduce the

scandal to a morals case, instead of looking further into overall

police corruption (Selhami, 1993b, p.4).

4 Translations from French were done by Joan Benson-Robinson and

myself.

8

Blaming the victims

And where was one to lay blame? asked one journalist. “Upon

prostitution as a phenomenon, on prostitutes as sellers of

pleasure, on their purchasers, on the occurrences of the

commission of evil or on the society as a whole?” (Chankou,

1993b, p.8). This article puzzled me. Exactly how could

prostitution be responsible for a thirteen-year-rape spree by a

police commissioner? The women raped were not prostitutes, but

wives and daughters of the urban elite, petit bourgeois merchants

and white-collar clerks. However, Chankou was not unique in his

use of prostitutes as a foil for men’s behaviors; the discourse

on prostitution that I encountered among friends and informants

was a fascinating exercise in the denial of men’s responsibility.

I was told that if prostitutes did not peddle their wares on the

street, then men would have no reason to stray from proper

monogamous and Islamic values. It seems clear to me that it is

men’s desires combined with the double standard that create the

need for prostitutes to provide sexual services, and not the

other way around. It is the same reversal of cause and effect

that is found in Chankou’s suggestions about the origins of the

Tabit affair. Prostitutes became a possible explanation for

Tabit’s crimes, a foil for male vice. Chankou (1993b) continued

the argument:

9

In this erroneous conception of things, all women—whether

they are married, engaged or not—are considered as girls of

joy [filles de joie], ready to give themselves to prostitution.

According to this phenomenon, anything can be in some way

legalized or acceptable, and will be tolerated up to yet

excluding deflowering virgins or pregnancy. (p.8-9)

There exists in this statement a perspective on women that makes

them dangerous to the [male] social order, yet at the same time

incorporates a view that makes men responsible for women (well,

for “good” women, anyway), to protect them from being

inappropriately deflowered or impregnated. Chankou is decrying an

improper way of thinking, yet playing simultaneously to salacious

visions of fitna, the chaos of the uncontrolled female. Social

order has been disrupted through a man’s behavior, yet somehow

women were held responsible, because they (as a group, in toto)

no longer remain within the protective realm provided by men. All

women are conflated with the prostitute, each constituting the

other in a masterful application of guilt by association, a sort

of neo-contagion theory.

Chankou continues in this vein by arguing that the victims of

Tabit went into the situation with open eyes, and were somehow

culpable because they accepted money or favors. In other words,

he denied any use of threats or power to bring about the women’s

acquiescence; they somehow profited from this “abuse of their

10

honor and dignity.” He asks with a rhetorical flourish, “but, did

he [Tabit] use iron chains to make them enter his cinematic

studio? Certainly not!” (1993b, p.9) The women are culpable,

perhaps even responsible for the events under consideration.

It seems evident that some of the response to Tabit’s series

of rapes was an attempt to blame the victims, and beyond them,

women as a whole. In a culture that interprets adult female

sexuality as a danger inherent and insatiable if existing outside

the marriage bond, this comes as little surprise. “Has anyone

ever seen Satan making someone deviate from the right path? No!”

says Chankou. (1993b, p.9) Satan is unnecessary, for women,

according to Moroccan proverbs and tales, can control the

adversary himself.5 And in the end, it is only the cuckolded

husbands and the wounded parents who have the right to pursue

justice to its conclusion, Chankou quotes a “man of the street,”

perhaps as a stand-in for his own beliefs. This article makes a

clearly articulated argument for placing blame on the shoulders

of women, both as prostitutes and as willing partners to Tabit,

and for perceiving righteous vindication due to the poor harmed

husbands (and parents, though seemingly as an afterthought) of

these blatant offenders of social order. Fiammetta Rocco (1993),

a reporter for The Independent of London, has this to say based

on her personal investigation:

5 See for example Kapchan 1996, Rosander 1991, and the classics by

Westermarck 1926 and 1930.

11

Ask any gathering of Moroccans what they feel about the case

they inevitably call Tabetgate (sic.), and a chorus of

explanations will come tumbling out. For this is a trial

that is about much, much more than a crime. But the

explanations they put forward seem extraordinarily

superficial. Some—quite a few, actually—say the women got

what they deserved; others insist the Tabet (sic.) case was

simply an aberration, and thus holds no lessons for the

future; still more will tell you, quite seriously, that this

is what happens when you allow your daughters to go to

university. Of Tabet’s abuse of power, there is no mention.

(p. 4)

This point of view is quite similar to Sanday’s (1990) concept

of sexist subjectivity, which she applied to a fraternity that

had been involved in a gang rape of a “little sister” under the

influence of drugs and alcohol. All of the participants denied

wrongdoing, and chose solidarity with the dominant discourse of

the fraternity brothers over any recognition of the subjectivity

of the woman, refusing any empathy with her status as a victim.

None of the brothers resisted the dominant discourse of the

fraternity. They all took the position of blaming the victim of

their depredations, excusing their behavior at the expense of the

females who hang out with frat brothers. This, as Sanday herself

12

points out, can be found in many societies based on male

dominance, as if the fact of dominance is insufficient; it must

be shored up by projecting onto the female the responsibility for

the desires, fantasies, and subsequent violent actions of males.

This process is central to what we call entitlement (Crowley,

1993), a central aspect of the subjective engenderment of men in

male-dominant cultures. Men are at the center, women are the

problem; men are privileged by their centrality, women are

disempowered by their peripheral status; men are freed from

responsibility for their own behavior, women are burdened by

their ultimate culpability for anything that men do to women. It

is an odd sort of subjectification in that men are constructed to

be the acting subjects of their world, yet are not responsible

for their actions, or for the impact of their actions upon

others. In fact, it seems as if men construct themselves as the

object of women’s sexual power, so that their response to that

perceived power cannot be considered the action of an agent, but

must instead be considered the result of perceived victimization

by a female form of subjectification that exists, from a

masculine point of view rather than in any objective reality, in

the very fact of her being sexed–and therefore “sexy.”6 Males and

females are engendered subjects, yet in very different ways with

dissimilar relations to power (see Moore, 1994). They are also

6 The best example of this can be found in Beneke 1982, in his

discussion of ‘Jay’, pp. 20ff.

13

embodied as sexed subjects/objects, again with very different

relations to power. In the end, men are able to gain greater

leeway for their own dominating and violent behavior by

controlling a discourse that engenders women as the walking

embodiment of sexuality and the cause of all male desire. This is

a sadly common, and fascinatingly cross-cultural, myth of

patriarchal societies.

Contradictory Responses to the Rapist

As if this blaming of the victims was not sufficient, there is

another wrinkle in the story that must be addressed. In a

parallel discourse to the preceding, Tabit himself was made out

by some commentators to be a virile sex machine. This man who

turned to so many other women while he already had two wives (and

children) at home was talked about by some with a kind of

breathless awe; he had “gluttonous appetites,” said one (Salim,

1993, p.9), while Chankou talked of Tabit’s “too-full [tropplein]

sexuality” (1993a, p.5). His lawyer Mohammed Afrit Bennani, in an

interview following the trial, said,

My client is not a criminal. He is perhaps unwell. He is

perhaps even a sick man. He has powerful urges. He needs sex

more than many men. Sometimes for four or five hours a day.

For a man of 54, I admit that is unusual. But that does not

make him a criminal (Rocco, 1993, p.7).

14

Bennani also denied that the violence on the tapes, where blood

and beatings were abundantly evident, was anything other than

“normal rough sex . . . but then, you know, some women like that”

(Rocco, 1993, p. 7). Man as penis. Man as taker, as giver of

pain, as violence embodied. And woman as taken, as prey, as the

raped victim who, of course, enjoys it. In the framework of

sexist subjectivity, man is clearly the actor, the producer of

power, the one in control. That a rapist can be respected, even

begrudgingly, for his excesses, is a powerful example of the

failure to empathize with the victim of the crime. Failure to

empathize with the recipient of one’s violence is a key feature

of sexist masculine subjectivity. Simultaneously with this

failure to empathize is the projection of agency onto the victim,

recreating her into culpable aggressor. Assuredly, in this

perspective, men have their cake and eat it too. But once again,

this is but one of the multiple readings of Tabit.

Others, in another interesting twist on the tale, saw him as a

vile reflection of the insane instability that comes from the

breakdown of social values caused by Western influence.7 We need

to recall that this man was a Hajj, ostensibly a pious Muslim who

7 This point of view is a common one. In reference to a notorious

child murder in Japan, Cameron and Fraser (1994) note that some

commentators wrote that Japan’s recent affluence had caused

imbalances in some people’s minds, and a social scientist argued that

it was caused by the “Americanization” of Japanese society.

15

had done all his duties, including more than one visit to Mecca.

Privileged in every way, how then could he stoop so low?, many

asked. In an article accompanying Chankou’s entitled “P for

Prostitution, S for SIDA [AIDS],” Omar Salim (1993) argued,

similarly to Chankou, that prostitution was somehow at fault for

the excesses of the Tabit Affair:

Sexual pleasure is a natural right for all men and all

women, and it would be extremely dangerous to put aside this

question, especially in these uncertain times where the

Islamic menace is at our doors. The politics of our country

has always been very realistic on this in that it founds

itself on, in the celebrated words of Nietzsche, “chase away

what is natural, and it will return at a gallop” (Salim,

1993, p.9).

In addition to implying that rape could be equated with sexual

pleasure, this article made Tabit out to be some kind of natural

phenomenon, related somehow to the “necessary evil” of

prostitution, which is plentifully available in Morocco, even if

it does not exist officially. The author appears to suggest that

if Tabit and prostitution are comparable expressions of the human

need for sexual pleasure, where after all was the crime? While I

agree there is a link between Tabit’s crimes and the existence of

prostitution, I connect the two through the hegemony of men’s

16

predatory sexuality in lieu of blaming women for both issues, or

of dismissing both as mere reflections of sexual pleasure.

But Salim demonstrated his awareness that the supposedly

enlightened view he espoused could in the end be used against

Moroccan civil society, worrying that the failure to control

prostitution (“to the level it can be” though not legalized) will

lay them open to the Islamic extremists, which appeared at the

time to be the skeleton in the Moroccan political closet.8

Others also worried that the incident would fuel the Islamist

movement, demonstrating the clear need to prevent the slide into

“Western” extravagance and excess by returning to root morals.

Abdelmajid Smaili (1993b), in his article “The Islamists, A Faith

Blessed by Excess,” opened by quoting a fortyish bank official

(who did not fit, he stated, the image of an intolerant, bearded

fanatic):

Tabit is no surprise to me. We know that, inevitably, a

society marked by decaying morals, the lure of profit and

dirty fortunes rapidly amassed, will end by giving birth not

8 Morocco has not had the high level of Islamist activity that its

North African neighbors Algeria and Egypt have had, largely because

of the iron fisted control of the late King Hassan, and the linkage

of the monarchy to both politics and religion. The King is “Commander

of the Faithful” as well as political leader. However, Hassan kept

close tabs on any Islamic rebellion against his rule, keeping some

leaders of potential movements under house arrest for years.

17

only to one Tabit, but to dozens of monsters in his image.

Only the strict application of Sharia [Islamic law] will

eradicate to the root the evil which gnaws at us (p.12).

Such sentiments were frequently stated to me. Just as Smaili

notes of his informant, none of the men who said such things to

me had “the look of a fanatic” either. And in the article

following this opening set-up, Smaili seems to agree with this

thoughtful banker, saying that the society has reaped “poisoned

fruit,” which has come about because of the “forced search for

equality between the sexes and a greater opening to the world”

(1993b, p.12). Once again, the comments were not so very

different from those I heard repeatedly from men over a year of

interviews. But this time, the comments were not to a lone

researcher in a café, but to the reading public at large in a

well-respected newsmagazine. Toward whom, one wonders, was the

implied criticism in the last quotation from Smaili above? Who

was doing the forcing, providing the pressure for both an

unwanted equality and a greater openness to the West? In such

discourse, the relations between the sexes were correlated with

increased penetration by the West, with all the implications of a

global sexual politics that such terms yield.9 Morocco’s body9 An essential part of this perspective I call “gender

revanchist.” By this I mean a reactive response to social change that

is common to many fundamentalisms worldwide, as well as many

conservative political positions. Gender revanchism is based on the

18

politic was portrayed as raped by the forceful penetration of

foreign, Western elements that had no good result; in fact, the

fruit of the union was poisoned. Also in the short statement, the

positive developments in the lives of women over the previous

twenty years were perceived as something imposed, unnatural, even

non-Moroccan. And this view was held by someone ostensibly

deriding the Islamist movement in the same article as too

extreme, too excessive. It frequently seemed to me to be the case

that Islamists were gaining points without gaining power. Tabit

the serial rapist was but another way for at least part of the

Moroccan polity to portray the social changes of modern Morocco

as an inappropriate imposition of Western values onto an Islamic

state. But the entire discourse was also a contribution to the

sexist subjectivity of hegemonic masculinity of Morocco–Islamist,

African, and post-colonial.

In the end of the trial, Tabit was sentenced to death for his

crimes. His father disowned him. Tabit’s co-defendants received

from two years to life in prison; some, particularly a medical

attempt to reclaim conceptual territory perceived to have been stolen

from men by changes that have benefited women. Placing them back into

their traditional role as guardian of virtue, as the ones responsible

for the socialization of children, as the caretakers of home and

hearth is an important political position that most conservatisms

share. I found this point of view repeatedly in Morocco, and have

written more extensively about it elsewhere. See Conway-Long 2000.

19

doctor who admitted to repairing the hymens of some victims, were

also fined. By the time I left in July, things had calmed down to

a murmur, almost a memory. But I continue to wonder at the long-

term effect of the Tabit affair. As a single incident, it is

over, disappearing into the dustbin of history. But as a

reflection of the cultural dialogue on extramarital, non-

heteronormative behaviors, it remains as an exemplar of a

specific set of responses to the social changes of the present

era. As a discourse on how Morocco will face the complexities of

the modern disruptive events of global economy,

telecommunications and media, it was decidedly conservative,

showing a deep-seated tendency toward gender revanchist

perspectives. Women became the enemy of social order, even of

free will in men. Women were linked to the depredations of

Western penetration into Morocco. Women, as a sex-class, were

portrayed as prostitutes who draw men astray from the straight

path. Finally, a serial rapist who further deteriorated public

trust in government by abusing the power of his appointed office

was transmuted by some into an anti-hero, a martyr, though in

excess, to the cause of controlling that unruly and dangerous

female sex. Media reporting on the Tabit affair was a reaction

against women’s rights to enter the public space once dominated

by men. In much of the common discourse, one finds denial of

subjectivity for the female; the subject position was taken by

Tabit himself at times, other times by husbands, occasionally by

20

parents. Those who were victimized remained abstractions at best

and became the responsible party at worst. Sexist subjectivity

(Sanday, 1990) seemed in the ascendant.

Notes

1. This is, of course, the biblical point of view, and hence

that of the Qur’an as well.

2. On the relationship between rape and social upheaval, see

Sanday 1981.

3. See Estrich's Real Rape (1987) for the origin of this term.

4. Translations from French were done by Joan Benson-Robinson

and myself.

5. See for example Kapchan 1996, Rosander 1991, and the

classics by Westermarck 1926 and 1930.

6. The best example of this can be found in Beneke 1982, in his

discussion of “Jay,” pp. 20-ff.

7. This point of view is a common one. In reference to a

notorious child murder in Japan, Cameron and Fraser (1994) note

that some commentators wrote that Japan’s recent affluence had

caused imbalances in some people’s minds, and a social scientist

argued that it was caused by the “Americanization” of Japanese

society.

8. Morocco has not had the high level of Islamist activity

that its North African neighbors Algeria and Egypt have had,

largely because of the iron fisted control of late King Hassan,

21

and the linkage of the monarchy to both politics and religion.

The King is “Commander of the Faithful” as well as political

leader. However, Hassan kept close tabs on any Islamic rebellion

against his rule, keeping some leaders of potential movements

under house arrest for years.

9. An essential part of this perspective I call “gender

revanchist.” By this I mean a reactive response to social change

that is common to many fundamentalisms worldwide, as well as many

conservative political positions. Gender revanchism is based on

the attempt to reclaim conceptual territory perceived to have

been stolen from men by changes that have benefited women.

Placing them back into their traditional role as guardian of

virtue, as the ones responsible for the socialization of

children, as the caretakers of home and hearth is an important

political position that most conservatisms share. I found this

point of view repeatedly in Morocco, and have written more

extensively about it elsewhere (see Conway-Long, 2000).

References

Beneke, T. (1982). Men on rape. New York: St. Martin’s Press.

Cameron, D., & Frazer, E. (1994). Cultural difference and the

lust to kill. In P. Harvey & P. Gow (Eds.), Sex and violence:

Issues in representation and experience (pp. 156-171). London:

Routledge.

22

Chankou, A. (1993a, 5-11 March). Silence, on tourne. . .! Maroc

Hebdo, p.5.

Chankou, A. (1993b, 12-18 March). Dans les griffes de la

prostitution. Maroc Hebdo, pp. 8-9.

Chaoui, A. (1993, 5-11 March). Tabit connection. Maroc Hebdo,

p.6.

Conway-Long, D. (2000). Dreadfully changing: The pressures of

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