WUNRN
DOES HIJAB PROTECT WOMEN FROM SEXUAL
VIOLENCE & HARASSMENT?- ANALYSIS
By — September 6, 2012
I was only 6 years old
when my family was forced to flee the civil war in
I remember Neelo picking
up her tiny bag, wrapping her scarf around her hair, and going to her first day
of school. I also sadly remember her coming back from school that day and
telling our parents: “The guards told me, ‘Either you are going to wear the
full hijab or wear a chador
[an Afghan burqa], or you can't come to school.’” Her tiny headscarf was no
longer enough.
The school she was going
to was run by archconservatives.
The myth that there's a correlation between
the hijab and a low incidence of sexual harassment and violence against women
actually systematically victimizes them.
Neelo was forced to wear
the most restrictive form of the hijab—almost exactly like the woman in this image.
Things were fine until the next year, when I started school myself. My mother sat
me down and told me that from then on I would have to walk my sister to school
every day.
I grew to hate it. Every
school day, for years, as the two of us walked toward Neelo’s school, men would
stare at her, sizing up her body behind the dark clothes, whispering to each
other, making signs with their hands, making catcalls, taunting her, and saying
things like how pretty she was—even though the only thing you could see on my
sister's body were her eyes.
The men who passed us on
sidewalks would say demeaning things—things sexual in nature that I was too
young to understand. My mom and dad wanted me to walk her to school because if
I wasn’t with her, who knew what these men would do? I grew up hearing stories
about women being groped, punched, even abducted—all while wearing hijabs. The
perpetrators were from all ethnic groups and were both Pakistanis and, like us,
refugees.
The experience left me
angry, helpless, and traumatized. We never talked about it. What she didn’t
know was that I knew she was emotionally and psychologically hurt. I didn't
need her to tell me she was not being protected by her hijab. The tears behind
her veil were enough.
Those memories came back
to haunt me on Tuesday, World Hijab Day. The day celebrates a Muslim woman's
right to choose what she wants to wear. The headscarf and more restrictive
forms of face and body coverings are widely known as the hijab; over the
centuries, it has become a symbol of conservative Islam and, to some, even a
defining characteristic of modest and pious Muslim women. While the practice
isn't uniform in all countries, wearing the “conservative” hijab means
completely covering all of a woman's hair and, in many places, even her face,
with a veil, a pardah
(a long, thin shawl covering the head and upper body, mostly worn in South
Asia), a burqa (a sort of shawl, with a hood and built-in veil, worn in
Afghanistan, Pakistan, and India), or several other national variations
thereof. No parts of a woman’s body except her face, hands, feet below the
ankles, and, sometimes, neck are allowed to be seen, in conservative
interpretations.
Great strides in women's
rights over the past two centuries have allowed religious women to take some
liberties in how they want to dress. Yet the dominant response to this by the
mainstream conservative religious movement has been to separate the practice
from its religious nature and to find reasons to justify not just its
observance for piety's sake, but for supposed practical benefits.
I'll let an excerpt of
an article by a writer named Sehmina Jaffer Chopra on the popular Muslim issues
website Islam101.com explain what’s going on:
Another benefit of adorning the veil is that it is a
protection for women. Muslims believe that when women display their beauty to
everybody, they degrade themselves by becoming objects of sexual desire and
become vulnerable to men, who look at them as “gratification for the sexual
urge” (Nadvi, 8).
The Hijab makes them out as women belonging to the class
of modest chaste women, so that transgressors and sensual men may recognize
them as such and dare not tease them out of mischief (Nadvi, 20).
Hijab solves the problem of sexual harassment and
unwanted sexual advances, which is
so demeaning for women, when men get mixed signals and believe that women want
their advances by the way they reveal their bodies. [Emphasis mine.]
That the hijab somehow
protects women against sexual harassment and/or violence is by no means a
minority view. Eminent Islamic clerics like Egypt’s Sheikh
Yusuf al-Qaradawi—widely considered a spiritual leader of the Muslim
Brotherhood and much of Sunni Islamic thought—and Ayatollah
Sayyed Ali Khamenei—the supreme religious and political authority in Iran
and one of Shia Islam’s main sources of jurisprudence—have endorsed this view.
This is not just a false
assertion that has no basis in fact; it is also a dangerous one. I know that
for a fact because I saw Neelo's hijab fail to protect her for years.
I know this because I've
seen, heard, or read multiple first-person accounts by victims of sexual
harassment and sexualized violence who were wearing the hijab when they were
attacked. The hijab cannot and will not stop men from assaulting women. Even if
the only part of a woman's body that shows is her shadow, deviants will
sexualize and fetishize it. Take the example of
This billboard in
The myth that there's a
correlation between the hijab and a low incidence of sexual harassment and
violence against women actually systematically victimizes them. Men are doing
women a disservice in that they are placing blame on women who don’t cover themselves,
as well as insinuating that a woman who is attacked while wearing a headscarf
somehow did something to deserve it. As with all victim-blaming, this prevents
women from speaking up about sexual assault. Many mainstream conservative
Muslim clerics and pseudo-social scientists—like Zakir Naik, in this
video, which is a must-see for anyone wanting to learn about this
issue—openly imply or proclaim that women who don't wear the hijab are calling for sexual harassment and
sexual violence. They go so far as correlating a woman's right to wear what she
wants in the West with a high incidence of sexualized violence against women
there.
They conveniently ignore
all of the reports on how sexualized violence is underreported in many conservative Islamic societies
because of its taboo nature and the stigma associated with it; they ignore the
fact that sexualized violence
leads to the honor killings of many of the women victims each
year.
Perverts are perverts.
They will sexually harass and commit sexual violence against women who wear the
hijab or a miniskirt because
they are perverts—not because women have exercised their right to wear what
they want.
Continuing to perpetuate
the myth of the magical hijab only makes the problem grow. It doesn't actually
solve anything. For that, we need to be able to openly talk about this problem,
raise awareness, educate people, draft laws against it, and have law
enforcement agencies that actually act upon criminal complaints against men who
carry out these crimes. If that had been in place in the 1980s, maybe Neelo—or
the millions of other victims like her—wouldn't have had to endure the pain she
lived with for years.
To wear or not to wear
the hijab is a personal choice that must be protected. Many women who wear it
choose to do so and take joy in their gesture of modesty and piety. This,
however, is not about the hijab or women's choice. It's about pseudo-science
and misogyny.
It's about the fact that
women who wear the hijab are not any safer than women who don’t. It’s about the
fact that there needs to be real
protection for women in Islamic societies, at home, on the streets, and in the
workplace—not just miracle garments.