For an hour, in the sanctum of an apartment in El Jadida, the maid was beaten with the hose of a gas cylinder. Her screams and supplications brought her aggressor, the daughter of her employer who “borrowed” her to help around the house, to a frothing rage; she repeatedly struck her over the head and face with the heel of a shoe until she collapsed on the floor she had so thoroughly scrubbed lifeless. The maid’s name is Khadija. She was eleven years old. She hailed from Tagadirt, a small village southwest of Marrakesh. According to the police report, the killer, a thirty-one year old educated Moroccan woman, was upset Khadija ruined her dress shirt while washing it.
Khadija’s path into child labor is not unique. It is the same path taken by Zainab Shtit, Najwa Bent Bouazza, and many others. Being illiterate, their parents didn’t see the added value in sending them to school; famine and disease are daily realities and survival is a primary focus. They, like many other mostly rural parents who are economically depleted, circumvent the Malthusian constraint by putting their children to work as soon as they are physically capable. For boys, the work is often seasonal menial labor in fields and construction sites or as ambulant cigarette hawkers and shoe shiners; girls are sent off to the city to work as maids and professional panhandlers. When Khadija turned nine years old, she was sent to Marrakech to work as a maid. Her father would show up once a month to collect her measly salary – less than fifty dollars. She was eventually fired from that job. Thanks to a “samsara,” a headhunter who provides maids to customers, she was soon relocated to Casablanca where she was recruited by the mother of her murderer.
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