A group of prominent Moroccan authors led by the writer and film director Abdellah Taïa has called on the country’s government to stop “cling[ing] to obsolete values that are killing our children” following the “unspeakable” alleged gang rape and torture of a teenage girl.

Twelve men arrested over alleged abduction and rape of Moroccan girl Read more

Writing in the French newspaper Libération in an essay also published by a number of Moroccan news outlets, Taïa wrote about the alleged victim, identified only as Khadija. The 17-year-old says she was abducted and held by up to 15 men for two months, during which time she was starved, raped, tortured and tattooed with swastikas.

Taïa described the case as “a new level of unspeakable”, following the filmed sexual assault of a woman on a bus in Casablanca last year. Backed by names including authors Leïla Slimani and Tahar Ben Jelloun, Taïa wrote of how “it is women who are paying the highest price for all the malfunctions of a society that still doesn’t want to grow up”.

“Before it is too late, what can be done to solve the problem?” he asked. “It is more than urgent to … get out of this collective disease, which is spreading in us and making us insensitive. Hard with each other. Blind. Selfish. Extremely violent.”

He called on the government to put out new laws that would protect individuals. A recent report from UN Women found that more than half of men in Morocco admitted to having sexually harassed a woman or girl, with “more than 60% of women reporting such unwanted attentions”. Although the loophole that allowed rapists to escape prosecution by marrying their underage victim was closed in 2014, said the report, “around 60% of men and almost half of women continued to support the idea that a woman who is raped should marry her attacker”.

“Give them their rights,” Taïa wrote. “It is more than urgent to rethink the social contract that unites us … We must not cling to obsolete values that are killing our children. Enough is enough. If the government does not do its job of education, it’s up to us to do it. To be a human is to have a heart. It is to hold out a hand. To help each other … The fall of one man is the fall of a whole country. We are all Khadija.”

Taïa, who was one of the first Moroccans to come out publicly as gay, told the Guardian on Wednesday that his essay had received a lot of attention. “But I know that for a lot of people in Morocco these are just words. Worse: some of them consider the interventions of writers (especially me, the gay one) as just exploitation of the incident in order to be more famous,” he said. “So I got insults again.”

He was particularly appalled by the rape of Khadija because she comes from the same region as his parents, he said.

“My intimate link with her tragedy was bigger because of these family roots … Who knows? Maybe my mother lived something like that when she was young and told no one ... And I had to do something. But at the same time I know that I am only me and that my words will not change laws and discrimination immediately. Will change nothing. I feel the same when I write my books, novels. But yet, I keep doing it. I write these books until the end. The feeling of desperation never disappears.”

Twelve men aged 18 to 27 have been arrested over the Khadija case since Taïa’s essay was published, but the novelist said he believed the affair would “very soon be forgotten and nothing will change”.

“The police will say: ‘We punished the criminals, what else to do?’ The state will be happy … And in the meantime we will forget that the affair is not only about Khadija. It's about a whole system that still hates women and considers them as nothing. And this catastrophic situation is the real image of what is going on in general in Morocco.”