France to ban female students from wearing abayas in state schools
bbc.com
Pupils will be banned from wearing abayas, loose-fitting full-length robes worn by some Muslim women, in France's state-run schools, the education minister has said.
The rule will be applied as soon as the new school year starts on 4 September.
France has a strict ban on religious signs in state schools and government buildings, arguing that they violate secular laws.
Wearing a headscarf has been banned since 2004 in state-run schools.
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So surely forcing them to take it off while at school is exacerbating that problem. They either comply with the state and be seen as a sinner by their religion, or stick to their religious belief (forced or not) and are at odds with the state.
The point is that by banning it, they remove agency from the kid. So the parents will be WAY less likely to take out their displeasure of their kid not wearing religiocultural garb on the kid, since the kid has no choice. Far better than the beatings and other less physical abuse that will rain down on a substantial minority of kids if they voluntarily opted out of the garb.
I get the idea that it's freeing children from having to follow their parental oppression, but it would be nice to see some honest statistics on how many kids this actually is.
I would be inclined to think the more rabid fundamentalist types would simply seek a move to a school which allows their kid to wear it. Thereby not really reducing fundamentalism as is the supposed goal, instead segregating and entrenching it.
And it's not even a niqab of hijab we are talking about here, its just a type of traditional dress.
Too bad the thing you want hard data on is virtually impossible to accurately gather with any reliability. What I do know is that as a former fundamentalist evangelical xtian examining my own former in-group, there was a ton of active coordination to poison the well of our young minds against "the world," which meant science, evolution, sex, role of women, higher education, and anyone who was not our flavor of christian. Most kids willfully mimicked their parents opinions, like I did. And of my then in-group, it seemed that for every handful of families, half of them had insane parents (domineering fathers and submissive mothers) that were very happy that the Bible gave a divine mandate/suggestion to beat their children to enforce compliance with the dictates of their faith.