An altercation, that’s all it was at first. For a spot in line for the elevator of the Leyweg shopping center in The Hague. “Go away with that child,” Ahlam Benali was told. Things quickly got out of hand. Benali “just had to go to your own country.” And the woman in her mobility scooter suddenly had very good mobility. She stormed towards Benali and blows fell. “It was the humiliation,” she remembers afterwards. Especially when her headscarf was ripped off. “It felt like my identity was being compromised. It was like having my pants pulled down in public.”
Bystanders came to her aid. There were witnesses and video recordings of the argument. But that was initially not enough for the police to record a report. “You know that you live in a deprived area,” Benali was told. “We do not have the capacity to take reports for everything.”
The police processed 8,990 reports of discrimination last year, a third more than in 2022, according to a joint report by the police, the Public Prosecution Service and the regional discrimination reporting points. Responsible Minister Hugo de Jonge (Home Affairs) sent the reports to Parliament on Tuesday.
These regional hotlines received 6,351 reports last year, an increase of 20 percent compared to 2022. This concerns all kinds of different forms of discrimination. The number of reports of anti-Semitism also increased. “The annual figures show that discrimination is a persistent problem,” the minister writes. While the registered figures hardly give an idea of its size. “The willingness to report is low,” says De Jonge. According to him, only one in five people who encounter discrimination also report it.
Moral integrity compromised
Benali did manage to report the crime, but the police judge subsequently imposed a significant sentence. Because the moral integrity of the complainant had been compromised by tearing off her headscarf, combined with statements such as “go to your own country”, especially now that this had also happened in a shopping center, causing “many to witness that insult and abuse.” ”. The woman in the mobility scooter received a fine of 500 euros and a probationary period of two years. Earlier this month, the Court of Appeal in The Hague also upheld that ruling on appeal.
The reporting center ‘discrimination.nl The Hague’ has seen an increase in discrimination complaints from a religious, Islamic background, including disparaging comments about headscarves (Muslim discrimination). “We are concerned about that trend, but we also see that people are finding it increasingly easier to find us,” says the spokesperson for the hotline.
This trend is also visible elsewhere in the country. Last year, more than half of the reports in Amsterdam concerned discrimination on the basis of race, and more than half of the reports concerned Muslim discrimination. “Especially after October 7 [de aanval van Hamas op Israël] and the PVV’s election win in November, we are seeing an increase in the number of reports and incidents of Muslim discrimination,” said a spokesperson.
‘Take off that dirty headscarf’
An image that is also confirmed in the police report from last year. The number of reports of Muslim discrimination to the police increased from 165 in 2021 to 285 last year. The majority involved women who received discriminatory comments about their headscarves.
Like in Hengelo. There, a woman wearing a headscarf had to deal with a man in a mobility scooter in the center of the city. “Take off that dirty headscarf, that’s not right,” she was told. “You must be sterilized so that you cannot have children,” the annual report quotes. A little later she encounters the man again. The woman hears the man say to a shopkeeper: “Look, there you have that dirty Muslim again.” The police are called in. The man ultimately received a fine of 250 euros for ‘simple insult’.
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Such an outcome is rare, says Benali. “The atmosphere is increasingly that people are no longer ashamed to insult women wearing a headscarf. Friends of mine also experience it, but don’t do anything about it. The threshold for going to the police is too high. Too many victims now think that nothing will be done with their reports.”
Such as the counter employee at an Albert Heijn branch in The Hague (name known to the editors). Last April she received a woman at the counter who started cursing and making derogatory comments about her headscarf. She let it get to her and afterwards sought refuge with a colleague. “She understood, she had experienced it herself. But I didn’t tell my bosses about it. You don’t just tell someone something so humiliating. And I certainly didn’t think about a formal report. Nothing is done about it anyway.” Benali received a lot of support during her trial. “There were women in the public gallery that I didn’t know at all. They had the same experience, but did not dare to do anything with it.”
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