She was a sixteen-year-old Moroccan girl who was raped at knife point and then made to marry her rapist:
Amina Al Filali, 16, drank rat poison last week in Larache, near the city of Tangiers after being severely beaten during a forced marriage to her rapist.It is good that the law might be changed. It is sad that Amina had to die for that to happen.
The girl's rapist had sought to escape prison by invoking an article of the penal code that he claimed would exonerate him if the rape victim was his wife.
Activist Abadila Maaelaynine wrote on the social network site Twitter: "Amina, 16, was triply violated, by her rapist, by tradition, and by Article 475 of the Moroccan law."
An online petition has been started and protests are planned for Saturday against a law branded by campaigners as an "embarrassment".
Laws of this type have existed in the past in many societies. Their point has been to fix the disorder a rape causes for all concerned except the woman/girl who was raped: The man doesn't have to be punished, the family of the victim hasn't lost its honor by having a deflowered unmarried daughter whom nobody else might now want to marry.
The extreme outcome of such laws is to sentence a victim to be permanently available to a sadistic torturer. Sadly, this was the case here.