Last Fall, a 10-year-old Moroccan girl named Zaineb Chtit (Zaineb is spelled Zineb in many of these stories) who had been contracted as a domestic servant to an affluent Moroccan family by her impoverished parents was hospitalized. Her injuries, inflicted by her employer, were described:
Zainab looked emaciated. Her body was bruised and bleeding from beatings. She was branded on her lips with a red-hot iron. She was burned with boiling oil on her chest and private areas.
She was also illiterate, having never attended school, and had been locked in a cellar while not working. Moroccan bloggers highlighted her story and the fact that Morocco has 177,000 child workers, 66,000 of whom work as domestic servants, many of them girls.
Last week, Zaineb’s attacker Nawal Houmin, the wife of the couple who had hired her, was sentenced to three years in prison without possibility of parole and a $13,000 fine.
Human rights groups have complained that the sentence is too lenient, but a local blogger reports that most people in the community were shocked, expecting that there would not be a penalty of more than a few months, given it was a prominent local family, and the husband is a judge.
Moroccan bloggers are now advocating for a campaign to address the problem of child labor at its roots with more resource put toward social aid and subsidized tuition and school supplies for poor children, as well as more substantial enforcement of child labor laws in that country.
