The Legal Endurance and Impunitive Nature of Intimate Partner Violence: A Comparative Analysis of the United States and Morocco

Thesis advisor: Elizabeth ShlalaThe fact that the most dangerous place to be as a woman is her home is an unnerving reality experienced on a cross-national scale, no matter the socio-political structure of their nation-states. This thesis fundamentally sources and deconstructs a common denominator between the United States, relayed as a secularized, democratic nation-state, and Morocco, understood as a monarchal, Shari'a informed nation-state, to be a patriarchal framework. In identifying the patriarchal framework as that which writes, interprets, and acts on laws and cultural beliefs, there is a recognition of how legal literature and praxis gives widespread impunity to men in their violence against women, especially in the home. Where they seek to keep punishment in the private sphere, this paper, in coordination with both North American and Moroccan feminists, seeks to drive punishment into the public sphere. In doing so, men and women will be understood as wholly equal at every level of the nation-state.Thesis (BA) — Boston College, 2020.Submitted to: Boston College. College of Arts and Sciences.Discipline: Departmental Honors.Discipline: International Studies