British road safety Ad about Hijab wearing Muslim nursery schoolgirl, sexualizing
London,August14:British transport chiefs have been forced to drop a children’s road safety campaign depicting a Muslim nursery schoolgirl wearing a religious headscarf.
The £2 million ($A3.3m) campaign was accused of sexualising a child because the hijab is traditionally worn by women only from puberty as a sign of female modesty in front of men. The images are included in children’s books distributed through nurseries and in stories on a website.
The Children’s Traffic Club London, promoted by Transport for London (TfL), has recruited more than 66,000 children across the capital.
TfL, which is chaired by Sadiq Khan, the capital’s Labour mayor, apologised last night and said that it would stop using the images.
Mr Khan was alerted to the pictures by The Times. The books were introduced under his Conservative predecessor Boris Johnson, now the foreign secretary, in 2015.
The stories are illustrated with characters from ethnically diverse backgrounds. The Muslim girl, aged three or four, is called Razmi and is always shown wearing a religious headscarf. Razmi is seen indoors in the home of a Chinese girl and that child’s grandmother and on outings.
Gina Khan, an advocate of Islamic women’s equality, said: “You are sexualising a four-year-old girl. It is as simple as that. The reason a female is covered is so men don’t look at her. How can you integrate in society if you have a four-year-old girl wearing a hijab?”
Shaista Gohir, chairwoman of the Muslim Women’s Network UK charity, said: “It’s like trying to get that child to try to grow up far too quickly. A child needs to be treated like a child.”
She criticised the tendency of the media to stereotype by always portraying Muslim women as wearing headscarves when many choose not to. Such a depiction in an educational book sent a message to boys that girls are supposed to cover their hair, she suggested.
Aisha Ali-Khan, a Muslim feminist campaigner, said the publishers of the book need diversity training. “The hijab is a Saudi-isation of British Muslim identity,” she said. “If you are a Muslim girl and look at these images and see this girl is Muslim and she is wearing a hijab and you aren’t, you will think there’s something wrong with you. It is far too young. You are a child. What are you being modest for?”
Dame Louise Casey, the government’s integration tsar, intervened in a row in Birmingham this year when a Catholic school came under pressure to let a four-year-old girl wear a Muslim headscarf. She has expressed concern that “time and again I found it was women and children who were the targets of these [kind of] regressive practices” against the vulnerable.
The London road safety books take pains to emphasise diversity. An Irish-origin child is taken, wearing a shamrock-emblazoned hat, to celebrate St Patrick’s Day in Trafalgar Square with “hundreds of happy people all dressed in green”. A middle-class white boy is taken by his father to watch the tennis at Wimbledon while a black man takes his niece to play football in the park.
A TfL spokeswoman said: “We apologise for any offence caused by this content and we will not use these designs in future.”
