In early February 2018 Moroccan Upper House of Councilors approved Draft Law 103-13, a much awaited violence against women (VAW) law. Unfortunately and as women’s rights activists have been arguing all along, the bill falls well short of dealing with the needs of victims of such violence. That a much more comprehensive law is needed is demonstrated by a 2011 government report showing that six out of nine million women between the ages of 15 and 60 suffered from a form of gender-based violence. My own fieldwork (2015-2017) in a Listening Centre for victims of violence in a socio-economically depressed area just outside Meknes corroborates government statistics and further demonstrates how the existing Penal and Family Codes allow men to act with impunity, while failing to protect women victims, but also how inaccessibility of services and crumbling infrastructure, lack of proper training of medical, police, and legal staff, unemployment, and poverty all severely impact women’s experiences with violence. Much of the literature on VAW in the region still focuses on cultural determinants of violence, attempting to either blame Islam or challenge this myth, and debating whether regional patriarchal culture or the rise of extremist Islamism are to blame for the worrying statistics on VAW. Though these debates are much needed, they conceive of the cause(s) as outside the parameters of a masculine, neoliberal, and bureaucratic state and its actors. Small-scale but intensive ethnographic fieldwork of VAW exposes how masculinization, neoliberalism, and bureaucratization all help consolidate state power, while increase the vulnerability of the already disenfranchised population and the impact of violence. While this research certainly cannot predict the future developments, let alone future popular revolutions in the region, it can contribute to our understanding of their underlying root causes.