Outrage over video promoting marriage to Moroccan minors

A viral social media video showing a foreign national from an unnamed Gulf country calling on older men to travel to Morocco to marry underage girls has sparked widespread public outrage across the kingdom, government-friendly but UAE investor-owned Hespress English reports on May 18th. In the circulating footage, the individual uses highly offensive language that rights groups say strips Moroccan women and children of their basic dignity. The speaker explicitly encourages older men to seek out relationships with girls as young as 14 years old, falsely marketing child marriage as a medical remedy to prevent strokes, high blood pressure, and diabetes in ageing men. The video also appears to depict a local marriage bureau operator cooperating with the foreign national, prompting fears of organised exploitation.

The content has drawn fierce condemnation from a broad coalition of Moroccan civil society organisations and child protection advocates. In a formal statement, the Free Hands Association strongly denounced the footage, emphasising that the discourse explicitly promotes the sexual exploitation of young girls and amounts to incitement to human trafficking. The group stressed that child marriage is a severe form of gender-based violence that permanently deprives young girls of their fundamental rights to education, health, and physical safety. Concurrently, the Dounia Coalition condemned the normalisation of these predatory narratives, using the backlash to demand the immediate and total removal of child marriage loopholes from Morocco’s family code. Furthermore, the prominent child protection organisation Matqich Weldi (Don’t Touch My Child) took formal legal action by filing an official letter with the Attorney General at the Public Prosecutor’s Office in Rabat, demanding an urgent judicial investigation to penalise all those involved.

This public outcry surfaces amid worrying institutional data regarding child protection in the country. According to the Public Prosecutor’s Office, child marriage authorisation requests in Morocco climbed to 16,960 cases in 2024, marking an 11% increase compared to the previous year. While public prosecutors actively fought the trend by submitting nearly 12,000 requests to reject these underage marriage applications, local activists maintain that the current legal exceptions leave dangerous gaps that allow child exploitation to persist under the guise of marriage.

Maghrebi.org, Hespress English.