October 16, October 20, Women do not grace the street without carrying the gaze of many men. Of many coffee shops throughout the country, this particular Starbucks is a known pick-up spot for prostitutes.
It is large and centrally located in the Gueliz neighborhood, where nightlife reigns not far from gaudy tourist resorts, and where interactions such as these illustrate how sex work operates quite freely. A local who works at a small cafe in Jemaa el Fna , the main market square of Marrakech, confirms that prostitutes do work in the city. Ongoing reports conducted by both the U. Department of State and the Moroccan government reveal that sex work, as well as sex trafficking, is still a deeply-ingrained issue in Morocco.
Now, in , Moroccan women are being sold for lump sums of cash to work as maids in Saudi households over Twitter. Morocco has earned a reputation for sex trafficking within the region, especially in countries like Saudi Arabia.
A Deutsche Welle article published this year detailed a post influx of Moroccans, mostly entering domestic work, caused outrage among Saudi women due to fears that Moroccan women would seduce their husbands. Within the region, the Moroccan woman bears much of the burden of the hypersexualization of the Arab woman as a relatively Westernized country.
Their fetishization and eroticization leads to the belief that they are sexually promiscuous. This conceptualization influences the way Moroccan and other regional societies view victims of sexual abuse, tending to shift the blame.
