Tetouan, Settat, Oujda or even Tangier, the last few years have been marred by several cases of harassment in academia, sparking heated controversy. In this sense, the Minister of Higher Education, Abdellatif Miraoui, affirmed that his department continues to advocate “zero tolerance”, noting that training and education are part of the solution.
Indeed, cases of sexual or moral harassment have been latent for too long in Moroccan universities and seem to have taken a serious turn in recent years. For the supervisory ministry, these cases are absolutely not tolerated, and tries in this regard to promote the training and education of young people in order to create a healthy cycle within institutions and even homes.
Speaking on this subject during an interview with MoroccoLatestNews, the Minister of ESRI, Abdellatif Miraoui, clarified that these ” cases of sexual or moral harassment exist in all universities in the world“, noting that ” the university is only one image among others of society“.
According to the Minister, we must manage to better train, better educate, on all levels, young boys so that they respect young girls, and also train young girls so that they can be as capable of gauging, judging and to say no“. In particular, he specifies that this is work that “we have started to do at the level of higher education with leadership”, stressing that this is also work that should be done in homes. .
” Look at what is happening today in social networks, if we cannot train our young people to deal well with their content, to compare and also to be able not to take at face value everything that is said in such network or such digital site“, he says.
Miraoui explains that most teachers, researchers, administrators, university staff are normal people who do their job as honestly as possible, and adds that ” you always have, as in all societies, people who can drift, who can go astray“, while insisting on the firmness of measures in such situations.
At the ministry, we said it was zero tolerance and we are continuing on this aspect and I think the message got across well, but I would also like to put what is happening in perspective, because it is an international scourge“, continues the minister.
” You have to educate educate educate and I think that the role of the university is to be at the heart of this training, you have to give self-confidence to young people regardless of gender so that they are able to gauge and be able react to situations that are sometimes unforeseen and it is a daily job“, emphasizes Miraoui.
For the supervising minister, “ you have to have hope, because what we want is to empower individuals, because when you do that, they themselves will be able to empower their children, empower their homes. I think it is this circle that must be initiated so that these situations do not repeat themselves.“, he concludes.