Muslim women remove headscarves as London transport fear grows

Anxious Muslims take taxis to avoid the Tube, oversight body hears

Experts say many Muslims are now avoiding public transport in London. Getty Images

Hate crime against Muslims is forcing them to avoid London’s transport network, with women taking off their headscarves for fear of attracting attention, the city’s politicians have been told.

Iman Atta, the director of Tell Mama, which monitors anti-Muslim hate crime, said the situation was the worst she had encountered and believes that those incidents reported are “the tip of the iceberg”.

She gave evidence to the London Assembly’s Police and Crime Committee, which is investigating hate crime on the capital’s public transport network.

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Ms Atta told the committee that last year, Tell Mama recorded its highest ever figures of more than 6,500 cases, a 175 per cent increase on 2022 levels. Of those, about 300 were on public transport.

The experiences of Muslims, particularly the “hotspots” in the capital that she says Tell Mama has identified, mean that many are now changing their behaviour.

“Many are actually looking into not using public transport. We get reports of families saying ‘oh we would actually rather book a taxi or an Uber for our sister, our mother’ to go to their destination and not use public transport,” she said.

Ms Atta added that Muslim women now “decide to take off their headscarves so they’re not seen to be Muslim when they use public transport, so there’s a change of behaviour”.

Muslim women now take off headscarves to travel on public transport in London, says Iman Atta, the director of Tell Mama. Getty Images

She said the cases reported to Tell Mama have an “element of hate allied to them but also sexual harassment attached to them as well”.

The “increased level of safety anxiety about using public transport” has led to “people taking different routes to get to their destinations, which is impacting on people’s daily lives".

“You use public transport to get to the workplace, you’re already carrying that impact of what happened to you into the workplace or when you’re going back home,” she told the committee.

Ms Atta, a Palestinian who moved to the UK in 2008, said she believes there is significant under-reporting of anti-Muslim hate crime on the public transport.

“There is a belief that nothing will be done if it’s reported, there’s the normalisation of abuse - people live with it - and are happy to go about their day-to-day business if they’re verbally abused or assaulted,” she said.

“I myself am more and more cautious when using public transport and it was not the case when I came in to the UK a few years ago. So it’s quite a turbulent time.”

The most recent hate crime statistics show that anti-Muslim hate crimes rose by 19 per cent in the year ending March this year, and that 44 per cent of all religious hate crimes were against Muslims.

The Home Office, which released the data, said there was a “clear spike” in these offences in August last year, which coincided with the Southport murders on July 29 and the subsequent rioting in several English towns and cities.

In response, Prime Minister Keir Starmer announced that mosques and Islamic centres in the UK had been granted £10 million in extra security funding.