Marcus Franz, a physician and former MP from the conservative Austrian People’s Party created outrage on social media after he said the non-Muslim European girls in Vienna have started to wear Islamic headscarves so as to prevent street harassment and assault by male Muslim migrants.
During an appearance last week on OE24, a local Austrian television station, Franz stated, “Speak with women on the street, speak with children, speak with young girls. I myself know fathers who, when their daughters come home in the evening when they live in the problem area, give them headscarves so they won’t be recognized as Austrians. I know this personally, in the 15th district of Vienna, this is a fact.”
The doctor and former MP went on to say that native Austrian women were afraid because of ‘permanent micro-aggressions’ and being sexually propositioned by Muslim men on the streets of Vienna. This is especially common in the districts where lots of migrants live.
Franz added that European girls who don’t wear Islamic headscarves were being “propositioned with unpleasant aggression and attitudes, and the girls and women, quite simply, are afraid.”
“You can see it in the population if you work in a social profession like me”, Franz remarked. “We need to distinguish clearly between the settled population and those who have arrived more recently.”
This story shares unsettling similarities to how some native German girls who attend the schools with significant migrant populations have also been wearing hijabs in order to prevent harassment and aggressive behavior aimed at them.
In March last year, a number of news outlets reported that the headmaster of school in Frankfurt, Germany, told a mother whose daughter was being aggressively bullied by Muslim students due to her blonde hair, Christianity, and because she didn’t wear a headscarf, to cover her up with a hijab to prevent the harassment.
“Your daughter does not have to say that she is German. Besides, you can give her a headscarf!” the headmaster told her.
The mother of the student told BILD, a German news outlet, that she was ‘forced to take her daughter out of school for her protection’ because she was being bullied by the Muslim girls to such a significant degree.
In late 2016, a UN-sponsored advertisement in Germany encouraged women to wear Islamic headscarves to show ‘tolerance’. The German government used public funds to run the 18 second ad.
Many women in Sweden have also started to wear Islamic headscarves to avoid sexual harassment and assault. Sexual assaults in Sweden have skyrocketed since the migrant crisis began in 2015.
Migrant violence against women has spread like a like a plague throughout Europe since the EU first allowed an enormous influx of migrants from Northern Africa and the Middle East in 2015. Reports of sexual harassment and assault against European women is much greater in Western European countries where more migrants have been allowed in (i.e. Germany, Sweden, Austria).
