The hijab is not for children. It was right to drop these distasteful images | Amina Lone
Transport for London’s traffic safety campaign showed a four-year-old girl in a headscarf. A Muslim mother complained, and she was right
Road accidents are the biggest cause of death among young people – so when any child road safety project is thrown off course, it’s hugely frustrating. The Children’s Traffic Club campaign, sponsored and funded by Transport for London, is excellent but for the cultural and religious depictions used in its story books. And, I might add, it is entirely reasonable to expect a £2m campaign to get it right. Especially one conceived in our diverse capital city.
The portrayal of a pre-school female child wearing a hijab was most obviously offensive, because it is commonly accepted that Muslim women – if they choose to wear a hijab – do so in adolescence or after puberty because of the link to the growing sexuality of a woman’s body. But all the characters were lazy stereotypes. Political correctness gone awol, you might say.
Source: Guardian Transport
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