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| About 60 per cent of hate crimes in London are targetted against Muslim women |
The police statistics show a total of 816 hate crimes against Muslims in the 12 months to July 2015, up from 478 over the same period in 2013-14. The overall racist and religious hate crimes in London increased by 27 per cent with 13,007 incidents recorded.
According to Metropolitan police, an Islamophobic crime is any offence intended to affect those known or perceived to be Muslim. Reported incidents of hate crimes include cyber-bullying and assaults to extreme violence.
The Merton area in south west London saw the highest increase in Islamophobic attacks with a rise from eight incidents in the year to July 2014 up to 29 in the subsequent 12-month period, an increase of 263%. According to Scotland Yard, the London borough of Westminster had the highest number of incidents in the year 2014-15, with a total of 54 hate crimes.
Tell MAMA, an organisation that monitors Islamophobic attacks, claimed that Muslim women are victims to nearly 60% of hate crimes in London. Further, those wearing a face veil were victims of more ‘aggressive incidents’. However, female victims often avoided contacting the police because they feared it could make matters worse.
Fiyaz Mughal, director of the organisation, said, “We realised that at a street level Muslim women who were visible, and wore the Hijab or the headscarf, were suffering more targeted abuse. We also realised quite early on that women who wear Niqab, the face veil, suffered more aggressive incidents – there was something about the face veil that in a way brought out the worst in the perpetrator.”
Commander Mak Chishty, the police force’s lead for hate crimes, said there were a number of reasons why Muslim women were targetted more than men. “Their physical attire obviously says they are Muslim, they are normally by themselves and with children and the cowardice shown by perpetrators is that it is easier to attack women with children than it is a man,” he said.
Joni Clark, a Muslim convert and mother of two moved her family from Penge in south east London to Whitechapel in east London because she received ‘abuse every single day’. “The attacks affect my children deeply and I fear for their safety so I feel I have no choice but to move.”
This article originally appeared on BBC
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