Thread to discuss the reality of parts of the UK absorbing large numbers of men from other cultures

I think we already have that level of "invasion" in child care and safeguarding. We try to protect children from harm and that requires a certain amount of intervention in how people parent. I don't think it's okay for little girls growing up in Britain to be forced to wear hijab.

‘Modesty culture, of which the veil is central, sexualises girls from a young age, puts the onus on them to protect themselves. It removes male accountability for violence. It’s an extension of rape culture.’ – Maryam Namazie, 2018

www.ex-muslim.org.uk/2022/01/on-worldhijabday-we-are-free-from-hijab/

I was trying to find the interviews that someone posted on another thread from the three ex-Muslim women, who were talking about the way being forced to wear hijab affected them as kids.

EndlessTea good summary points a - d above.
I would not intervene in most cases unless laws are broken. I would leave people covering their heads as they choose whether fundamentalist Christians, jewish caps, Sikh turbans and full face veils (other than perhaps the latter in court and motor bike helmets etc to be removed in banks for CCTV purposes).

If that means girls are brought in sexist homes so be it. I think it is better that is so than we interfere in people's private family lives.
Then I would hope that most groups after 2 or 3 generations integrate to a greater extent and some of the more sexist and homophobic ideas disappear.

That does not mean I am pleased little girls near where I am have to cover up and only go out with men accompanying them etc

The issue of hard numbers of disruptive young men coming here alone and causing noise, costing a lot of money etc is another issue again and if they break the law and attack women etc or break other laws in how they treat women they should be prosecuted.

What are the wider implications though, in terms of normalizing that level of invasion?

Could we see it being used to ban other religious head coverings, for example?

Sorry to quote myself:

How do you get these men to see that a twelve year old girl on her way to school is not one of these stereotyped, hyper sexual, ‘dirty’ women, who are overjoyed having anything and everything a man could fantasise about done to her?

I am thinking more, that this really is a core question, because these stereotyped beliefs about western/westernised/non-Muslim women and girls, are being handed down to second/third generation men, who form these racist, pedophile, religious extremist rape gangs aka ‘grooming gangs’.

I agree it's invasive. I don't think that means it's the wrong thing to do.

It might not be the most effective way to stop the practice. But I do think the practice should be stopped.

One thing which is a massive deal, influencing the men to harass women who have the temerity to leave the house, un-chaperoned, uncovered, maybe even wearing clothes that are a bit sexually provocative, maybe even engaging in premarital sexual activity - oh my goodness! The brazen hussies! Is all the pornography these men consume. Also the strip joints and the brothels, etc, that they visit at first opportunity, which completely prejudices their view of western/westernised women.

Women and girls are starkly either Madonnas or whores. No middle ground.

Men who are brought up in these places where women barely leave the house and are covered from head to toe when they do, still consume huge amounts of pornography made in the west. I am sure any woman who has travelled in the ME will have stories of men saying words to the effect of how they love the women in the country where they are from, they make the best porn, or whatever.

How do you get these men to see that a twelve year old girl on her way to school is not one of these stereotyped, hyper sexual, ‘dirty’ women, who are overjoyed having anything and everything a man could fantasise about done to her?

Maybe there is some way, other than banning, to stop parents covering their daughters hair?

In my street, I am friendly with three Muslim families, two of Pakistani heritage and one where the mother is of Eastern European Heritage and a convert and the father is Middle Eastern.

Of those families, the families of Pakistani heritage are of second generation (apart from the grandparent) and the women don’t really bother with a headscarf, just wearing a long, lightweight, rectangular scarf, and it seems if they want to look glam, they sometimes loosely wrap that over the back of their heads.

The family from the mix of Eastern European/Middle Eastern heritage are first generation, and they had their daughters covered with a pretty big headscarf, covering the shoulders and chest, pinned under the chin, from a very early age. I did a bit of a double-take at first, and I do think it is a socially negative thing to set children apart like that. But I wonder if it might be the zeal of the convert thing?

i suppose I am refuting this idea that existing resident Muslims are reacting to a pushback and are wanting to be more visible. Perhaps what is happening instead is that existing Muslim families are fairly stable and it is newer first generation influxes who are bringing in these cultural practices with them?

I feel it is coming from a completely different place than the young adult, second or third generation women, who are choosing to cover their faces to signify their extremism.

IMO, the family who put headscarves on their young daughters, would probably respond really well to a friendly word from some longer established Muslims, who could say ‘your lives will be easier, better here if you do XYZ’. I think this family are probably completely unaware of the fact that a lot of people find it off-putting, and how they are limited in their friendship pool by it.

It's not really about your opinion being neutral, it's about what the law should or should not try and control in the behaviour of individuals and families.

Banning wearing a headscarf or hair covering is pretty invasive.

Because when you take people out of one environment, the meaning of an activity can change.

What was previously mainly a religious practice, that wasn't unusual, sudden;y becomes something that differentiates you from the people around you, and becomes a symbol of a difference. People start to think about it in a different way.

You can see similar kinds of phenomena in other displaced cultural groups in places like the US, where practices that were more low-key in the home country can actually become more intense in the expat community.

s’cuse the really excessive typos

It’s interesting where this thread is going, I have been thinking along the same lines too today.

The way I see it, is that within any culture, certain things are just taken for granted as normal and you’d seem a bit nuts to want it written into law. It’s just an understanding. I don’t know the background, but I heard that in Germany it is illegal to name a child something other than a proper name. Perhaps there was a trend at one point, for people giving their kids stupid, humiliating names, and legislation was brought in to stop it, I don’t know, but we don’t have an equivalent law here.

We are reluctant to bring in laws to curb freedoms, generally, for good reasons, so we default to being tolerant, but I bet if people started naming their kids as numbers, or ‘thing’, ‘it’ or ‘idiot’ - dehumanising and humiliating names, then I am sure we’d bring in a similar law to Germany to stop it.

In the topic of this thread, the argument seems to go:

a - what can we do to stop men from other cultures harassing western UK women?

b - let’s not make this solely about them harassing western UK women, women within their own cultures suffer too, and we must think about them too.

c - but surely people should be free to practice different ways of life, as long as they are insular and don’t inflict any negativity outside their enclave.

d - well we can’t just abandon the women and girls to suffer culturally sanctioned abuse - FGM, child marriage, so-called ‘honour’ crimes, etc on British soil, just because their community doesn’t kick up much dust on the outside.

So the dilemma is - how much intervention? How much interference? Do we need new laws?

I think we need to do some basic spelling out of what is and what is not acceptable in the UK and enforce it. For example, all children are expected to go to school full time until they are sixteen. All children must wear clothes which do not restrict their physical activity or put them at a disadvantage in sports. It shouldn’t need to be said but it does.

We should also strongly enforce the laws we have and not hold back ‘because it’s their culture’, for example, a poster upthread said they knew of women who had been brought here as child brides from Bangladesh and could speak no English. Maybe their husbands should be prosecuted child sex abuse and all the relatives and facilitators who arranged it should be prosecuted for child trafficking.

Maybe we should spell out some things, equivalent to Germany’s naming law, that you are not to insist a family member wears a costume to dehumanise themselves when they go out in public. Perhaps a woman walking out and about fully covered, could be viewed as a victim of domestic violence and the family members who insist upon a woman doing it are prosecuted.

Basically, and I think this would go part of a way towards getting the message out there that you can’t disrespect women and girls here.

Isn't homeschooling regulated? If you're not sending your daughters to school (but you are sending your sons) wouldn't this trigger a visit from Ofsted or other supervisory bodies? Because it's illegal not to educate your children?

Am I being completely naive? Are we just letting little girls down completely?

See we home educated for several months when the bullying I mentioned upthread left DD scared to be in a school of any description.

You would think with the total lack of support from the school and the basic attitude of "don't like it then leave" of the head, the LEA would've backed us.

Except they didn't. They were an utter nuisance. Within 48 hours of us notifying school we were withdrawing our DCs, we had some utter cow on the phone demanding lesson plans and educational plans and timescales of when we would return to traditional school. They wanted to know what groups we would sign up for to promote social skills, they wanted explanations of why we were giving up their places. Had we tried to speak to school. It was just a constant barrage of talking at me. Then the killer of "if WE don't think you are doing enough, we will move to get a court order to fine for non-attendance and we will find a school place and they will have to attend".

They didn't get that actually, I didn't want to home educate, but their shit school has damaged her mental health so much, the idea of school made her vomit. She would cry in her sleep and woke up screaming many nights.

There was no understanding at all.

Does it surprise me that other communities may not get the third degree? No, of course not.

But it's another way authority promotes us and them and let's down children.

Als it is my basic point about numbers again. We have 200,000 jews of all kinds in the UK but 3.9m muslims so vastly vastly more muslims. it is the large numbers that can be an issue for the host population as that has a bigger impact on the people already there. Eg in World war 2 the uk brought in 10,000 jewish children in the Kindertransport programme. The difficulty today is sheer weight of numbers - 1m immigration a year (504k net immigration), 120,000 asylum seekers.

I was amazed to learn recently that Canada has 38m people in total. For some reason I thought it was much larger in terms of population. The UK has about 70m. Canada is hugely bigger than the UK in terms of land mass.

The example above of the sober lady pretending to be drunk and then someone from a different culture even goes with her into her bed room is pretty good illustration of the issue with some (but of course by no means all) people from cultures who treat women differently (i.e. worse).

On head coverings for girls (or boys for that matter) I would not stop that happening and I am glad they are permitted in many schools, but I would certainly hope those girls could be exposed to some Western values of freedom. I know these are very difficult issues when we also mostly believe in religious freedom. New arrivals should be helped to learn what is acceptable and what is not here for a start - even if it very basic information that shows how if they do Z X the man might go prison and be expelled from the UK. They not care less if girls are harmed in the UK but if it means the man goes to jail and has to leave the UK they might take a bit more notice.

I mean, that raises the question, how essy it should be made for parents to homeschool. In some EU countries there are laws prescribing kids need to attend at least the Last year of preschool. This was introduced with an eye on nonnative speakers, but the rule applies for all kids alike.

I am sure there are cases, where Homeschooling is warranted, but this should be a rare exception for special circumstances, not something parents should be free to choose.

On a technicality - you can convert 😉
But yes, it's something you have to battle to do rather than the community actively trying to convert you.

I’m Jewish and in our defence we don’t try and convert - you either is or you ain’t! 😉

I know Hasidic communities have their problems and it can be hard to leave - however, under Jewish “law” a woman can get an abortion and is under no obligation to even tell her husband, never mind seek approval.

Yeah, I'm not really 'neutral' on little girls being veiled and covered. If an adult woman chooses it for herself, that's one thing - it can be debated how we work with that in settings like education and healthcare where we really need to see people's faces. But children - no, never. I do think it should be banned for little girls.

I think re rules for men - often when people uproot/are uprooted into a new place they take on some off the culture of the new place and keep other traditions quite strongly. What this often seems to mean in practice is boys/men getting a lot more freedom - maybe drinking, wearing western clothes, having extramarital sex; but girls/women are expected to remain within quite strict rules. So young men end up with a lot less social constraint. You see it happen the other way round too - Western men going to other countries and opining on how much more feminine/more respectful etc women are but completely missing the point that men there are expected to have more responsibilities/specific constraints on their behaviour. (Though on balance I am happier personally with the UK system). So you get a lads on holiday dynamic.

*Not all men

But how can a fully covered six year old veiled girl be about ‚Cultureal identity‘ when it is basically a new phenomenon in the communities?

It doesn‘t make sense. And it is also quite cynical to be ‚neutral‘ about some trend that harms a child. (The veil restricts a girl on many levels.)
And why not be neutral about FGM then, when the main objective is not to radicalize a Community by pushing back?

There is an element in many Muslim communities where the age of covering has gone down, not because the theology has changed, but because there is a sense that this is part of their cultural identity. And in my experience, when you try and ban things that represent cultural identity you often end up having the opposite effect. So a better approach is often to be quite neutral about them.

I'd also point out that in Islam, men also have significant restrictions - including clothing and behavior. I suspect the difference with the Hasid community is that in many ways, they are actually set to remain a kind of enclave, and an orthodox approach to Jewish observances are arguably almost designed to create that kind of situation. Similarly groups like Mennonites - they have very deliberately chosen to create a community that is not integrated. That makes them, in some ways, easier to manage for the larger population.

Why can't men just bloody behave?
Because they don't want to
because they are bigger than us and we can't make them

They can't massage their egos that way, so women must be their victims, women both within and outside of their communities
I agree, it perfectly allows them to have their cake and eat it, no wonder they will not relinquish