Possessing non-consensual images of a Muslim woman who is not wearing face covering should be classified as a criminal offense—even if the photos are taken in public—according to a new parliamentary committee report.
It is well known that the Labour government depends upon the Islamic community to keep it in power, and consequently has begun to preference Islamic culture through a form of two-tier legislation.
The report, issued by the Women and Equalities Committee (WEC), charged with holding government agencies “to account on equality law and policy,” urges Britain’s Parliament to classify the possession of such images as non-consensual intimate image (NCII) abuse and treat it with the same legal consequences as possession of child sexual abuse material (CSAM).
Under current legal definitions enunciated in the Online Safety Act (OSA), such intimate images include people being partially or fully nude, engaging in sexual acts, or using the bathroom.
Proponents of the proposed law say it would protect women from honor violence perpetrated by Muslims offended by the appearance of their female relatives in public without veils.
Opponents argue that passing such a law could mean the introduction of sharia law through the backdoor, with the U.K. Parliament playing the role of an Islamic court that endorses an extremist interpretation of Islamic law on the hijab.
Photos of Unveiled Women Have ‘Catastrophic Implications’
The definition of NCII abuse should be expanded “to include material that is considered ‘culturally intimate’ for the victim, such as a Muslim woman being pictured without her hijab,” the report on Tackling Non-consensual Intimate Image Abuse, published on March 5, stressed.
“In some countries and communities: based on culture, based on religion, just merely being photographed or taken in an image with your arm around somebody has catastrophic implications for them,” the 66-page report noted, explaining that the committee was now using the language of “non-consensual intimate image abuse, not non-consensual sexual image abuse.”
Citing testimony collected at a committee meeting, the report stated that a complaint involving a woman “in a compromising position culturally” or “not wearing a hijab” would be grounds for legal action, even if the image was not “sexual in nature.”
“What counts as intimate for one person can be very different for someone else. It can also be different between different communities and groups,” the report added. In her testimony before the committee, Alex Davies-Jones, who serves as Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State at the Ministry of Justice, said that another governmental body, the Law Commission, had considered calling for the ban of non-consensual images of unveiled women, but refrained from doing so because “it could result in overcriminalization.” She added that when such images of unveiled women are uploaded to the internet, the uploaders could be prosecuted for blackmail or harassment. “But we are keeping this area of law under review and will not hesitate to act if there are gaps,” she said.
Similar Law Imposed in Australia to Prevent Honor Violence
The WEC parliamentary committee recommended basing the proposed legislation on existing Australian civil law, which defines intimate images to include “the person’s religious or cultural background” and the consistent use of a “particular attire of religious or cultural significance.”
The Australian eSafety Commissioner issued an update on the government website in mid-March, asking victims to report “abuse” involving images “without clothing of religious or cultural significance” normally worn in public “such as a hijab or turban.”
However, the final report on image abuse submitted to Australia’s Criminology Research Advisory Council in March 2019 rejected calls to criminalize “cultural standards” like “the non-consensual distribution of an image showing a Muslim woman without her hijab.”
Witnesses in favor of criminalizing non-consensual image sharing of unveiled Muslim women cited the example of a Muslim girl who becomes the victim of an honor punishment because she is out clubbing without her father’s permission and is photographed without her hijab.
Nevertheless, Australia’s Online Safety Act 2021, while not explicitly referring to Islam or the hijab, made it illegal to share non-consensual images if “the person consistently wears particular attire of religious or cultural significance whenever they are in public.”
The U.K. committee report concluded by recommending that “the government should bring forward amendments to the Crime and Policing Bill to make possession of non-consensual intimate images an offense.”
Opposition to the Law
“I don’t think it’s appropriate to treat images which offend religious sensibilities but which of themselves have no sexual content as comparable in some way to images that involve sex or sexual exploitation,” Richard Scorer, head of abuse law & public inquiries at Slater & Gordon, told Focus on Western Islamism (FWI).
“The two things are very different and should not be conflated. To conflate them is to diminish the seriousness of sexual abuse,” Scorer emphasized.
Gavin Ashenden, former chaplain to Queen Elizabeth II, told FWI that the effect of the new legislation “is to introduce sharia law without explicitly admitting it.”
“It is well known that the Labour government depends upon the Islamic community to keep it in power, and consequently has begun to preference Islamic culture through a form of two-tier legislation,” warned Ashenden, a scholar who taught Islam at postgraduate level at the University of Sussex.
“The proposed legislation making it a crime to possess a photograph of a Muslim woman without her hijab rests upon the invention of the category of ‘cultural intimacy’ which is an entirely novel phenomenon under English law,” Ashenden, a lawyer by training, observed.
“In pursuing this course, the government is imposing a particularly strict and unusual form of Islamic culture on what is otherwise a mixture of Christian and secular cultural norms,” he added.
The pattern is similar to the government “promoting radical fundamentalist interpretations of the Qur’an” by accepting the “modern, strictest possible interpretation” of sharia-compliant finance, as Islamic expert Tim Dieppe observed in his recent book, The Challenge of Islam: Understanding and Responding to Islam’s Increasing Influence in the UK.
The Encyclopedia of Islam and the Muslim World explains how the hijab is controversial even among Muslim women, with some Muslim women claiming that wearing the veil is unnecessary and that modesty of the heart is what matters, while others cover their face only when praying, or when outside their homes, or in the presence of men who are not relatives.
“In the early twentieth century, many middle-class, urban Muslim women gave up the veil. In more recent times, movements of cultural pride and religious reassertion have prompted many Muslim women to don it again,” it notes.
David Spencer from the Policy Exchange think tank warned that “the government should be cautious about creating yet more criminal offenses” and should not expect the police “to wade into so-called ‘cultural’ issues when officers are already struggling to deal with the volume of stabbings, sexual assaults and thefts that occur every day.”
Mugshot Retaken
The debate over criminalizing images of unveiled Muslim women has been fueled by reports of a police force reissuing a mugshot of an Islamic State (IS) supporter after she complained she was not wearing a niqab in it.
Farishta Jami, 36, was found guilty of terrorism offenses on February 13 for planning to fly to Afghanistan to join IS and “martyr herself,” the Counter Terrorism Policing (CTP) website reported. The article about Jami’s conviction was illustrated with a photograph of Jami without a face veil.
However, Jami’s barrister, Matthew Brook KC, told Leicester Crown Court that his client objected to the photograph showing her full face for religious reasons.
“This has caused her some considerable distress and the police are going to release a different image. We would request that it is used instead,” Brook said. In response, West Midlands Police issued a photograph of Jami without a face veil.
“If you have a woman who wears a hijab or niqab in her everyday life, if she’s pictured in revealing clothes, it is a violation for her and can cause major repercussions, but the law doesn’t recognize that,” argued Safa Yousaf from Amina: The Muslim Women’s Resource Centre.
