France has gone ahead with the banning of the niqab in public places, on penalty of €150 fine. Meanwhile in the UK MP Philip Hollobone says he won’t meet constituents who wear a burqa or niqab,a clear breach of the Equality Act of 2006.

Niqab and Burka

Syria has banned the wearing of the niqab, the full-face veil, at its universities in order toprotect the country’s secular identity it says. At the end of April, Belgium’s lower house voted to make it an offence to wear the full Islamic veil in public. In Germany, although resisting calls for a state-wide ban, seven individual states have acted to ban teachers wearing the Islamic headscarf.

Italy has not passed any national legislation but that hasn’t stopped Italian province Novara fining a Tunisian woman €500 in May for wearing her veil on the way to the mosque. In Spain, Barcelona has just banned full-face veils in public building including markets and libraries. Turkey bans Islamic headdresses in universities and public offices.

So what is motivating this upsurge in hostility to a specific form of religious dress?

France has been consistently secular in insisting that religious symbols have no place in the modern classroom, protecting the rights of students to decide their religious beliefs for themselves.

This seems like a principled position. Placing religious symbolism around teachers who, by definition, are authority figures entrusted with the education of students, will inevitably give an official stamp of approval to those religious beliefs.  The catholic church knows only too well how effective religious indoctrination can be if children experience it from an early age.

And in education, it is essential that the student can judge the facial expression of the teacher, without which there will be confusion and ambiguity. For effective education the face needs to be visible and that is simply a pragmatic point. The removal of religious symbolism and dress from educational institutions is an important part of the separation of church and state.

Almost certainly the same principle applies in offices where effective communication is important and there must be no indication of religious favouritism. So there is at least a rational behind making faces visible and keeping religious symbols out of public institutions. However, France intends the ban to apply anywhere in public so it’s not really about communication nor about religious symbolism in public buildings.

The debate is about much more than that. The protagonists of the ban argue that it is something to do with identity and integration, about national culture and values. Those who are wearing the veil are, it is claimed, persisting in an identity which is non-integrated and that seems to be what causes the most offence to those with the fire in their bellies. For them, it is necessary to make people conform to an identity which is determined in law.

Of course, the same argument applies to an orthodox Jew who wears the traditional dress, monks and nuns who eschew the wearing of secular dress, the Sikh’s turban, or potentially any other sign of individual expression through dress. This assumption of a national identity to which everyone should conform has more than a hint of totalitarianism about it. But even claiming a specific national identity is problematic.

In what sense is there really a national identity to which we all subscribe? Ask ten English people what the English national identity consists of and you’ll get ten different answers ranging from cricket to morris dancing, from fox-hunting to ferret-racing, from Rule Britannia and the Raj to balti cooking. Most likely, they’ll answer “I don’t know” and then pick from a very wide range pretty much at random. That’s hardly surprising because all national cultures are complex mixtures, all countries have mixed populations, a wide spectrum of beliefs, regional and international traditions and even the languages show overlaps in vocabulary.

The truth is that we only regard ourselves as having a particular nationality because that is, by chance, what we have grown up with. It is neither intrinsic to us, nor unchanging. In my own case, very much in agreement with Amin Maalouf’s philosophy, I do not feel I belong to any particular country, I share in a number of different cultures. Whatever nationalistic sentiments we might espouse, we all share many cultures.

So when we hear the clamour of politicians playing the race card, responding to the crude Islamophobia of their constituents, we should reflect perhaps on the reality of our own cultures. It was Eddie Izzard who memorably demonstrated in a TV series that England was the ultimate mongrel nation, as are all nations.

There is no reason to ban the wearing of religious dress in public – it’s a fundamental expression of individual freedom which is far more important than forced conformity to some xenophobic judgement about what constitutes the national character. Nor is it about the freedom of the women wearing the veil. In a secular society, they can see around them the option of breaking with their tradition, but it is fundamentally their choice.

The right to believe in whatever we choose is fundamental, as is the right to criticise those beliefs. I have the same right to argue about the irrationality of religion as someone else has to wear a cross demonstrating their Christian belief. I can dispute the contents of the Bible and the Qur’an with the same right as anyone else has to believe in them. It is in all our interests to resist the rise of xenophobic intolerance, especially in its more pernicious form as a defender of culture and values.

It’s bad enough when it’s one on one but there have been several headlines highlighting gang beatings literally kicking and stamping people to death and then gleefully boasting.  Just one step beyond ‘happy slappings’, except when the outcome is lethal even they’re not stupid enough to create video evidence.

Why, why, why do they do it?  Is human life so worthless?  What is it about us as a race that allows such behaviour?  Even if we as individuals happened across such an event, what could we do to stop it?

Yes, we know that these teenage killings are testosterone fuelled with some kind of quasi tribal motive.  Territory and ‘respect’ are factors.  In essence it’s no different to football related violence where young men (and not so young men) gang together for the sake of a coloured jersey and engage in violent activity.  Maybe at a major event like the World Cup they will form alliances and take on the local constabulary.  For some reason this doesn’t seem to happen in Rugby circles.  But these knife killings and savage beatings are a step beyond.

What kind of society are we that breeds callous killers, a knife carrying gang culture and gratuitous violence?  I do believe anonymity is at the heart of this and could be addressed by more extensive of use of CCTV.

It may be that the media plays a part by providing the inspiration in the form of violent movies and graphical console games, but at the end of the day you can’t say they are the root cause.  I don’t believe anybody is born evil, we are all a mixture of nature and nurture and I am sure that the violence is a function of the nurture.

In the past, a criminal would be known in their community and would suffer from the ongoing ignominy even after a sentence was served.  The community would be wary of them and they would have to earn respect over a long time.  Today, in our crowded towns and cities, everybody is virtually anonymous.  If criminals commit crime today they are not recognised by the rest of the community, in fact it is this lack of sense of community that is the underlying cause of our troubles.

I believe technology has a role to play, CCTV is a good preventative measure but currently the quality is too poor to secure solid convictions.  We need more cameras and better cameras.  What about the ‘Big Brother’ overtones? Frankly, I don’t give a damn, if it is used responsibly and it makes our lives safer, what’s the problem?

I started writing this report as a guilt ridden UK national. How could we as a nation produce someone like the mother of Shannon, who purportedly colluded in the kidnapping of her own daughter and then tried to cash in on it?

Since starting this report, the case of Josef Fritzl has come into the news and I can recall the earlier cases of child sex abuse in Belgium. Mark Dutroux was convicted and sentenced to life (the maximum under Belgian law) for the kidnapping and murder of 4 young women. Before their deaths they were imprisoned and sexually abused for months. The kidnappings were in two pairs, the first were two 8 year olds who starved to death when Dutroux was imprisoned on unrelated charges. Then there is the case of Natascha Kampusch, the Austrian girl kidnapped at the age of 10 and imprisoned as a sex slave for 8 years by Wolfgang Priklopil who threw himself under a train when Natascha managed to escape.

All this around the anniversary of the disappearance of Madeleine McCann. What of this poor child who I feel is still alive and suffering abuse right now or at best being groomed for some salacious activities by a depraved maniac or secret ring of paedophiles. Is it possible she could be rescued even now? Her parents have been vilified (incorrectly in my opinion) and granted arguido status by the Portugese police. The McCanns may be guilty of a lot of things but arguidos they are not. Their despair is apparent and yes, they know they shouldn’t have left her with her twin siblings alone while they dined nearby with friends. We’ve all made mistakes, luckily few of us have suffered such consequences, but that doesn’t hide the fact that some evil person stole her from the holiday apartment. The opportunity shouldn’t have been available but it was and there’s no point in vilifying her parents, their grief is real and is only compounded by the knowledge of their own actions in this tragedy.

How many more unreported victims are there out there in the EU? This supposed haven of civilisation still harbours the most horrendous (as yet undiscovered) monsters. How long will it be before we read yet another macabre tale of murder and abuse? All around us, in the most innocent of surroundings there are monsters lurking, ready to kidnap and abuse our children and dispose of them in the most gruesome manner when they tire of them or their usefulness diminishes. The family butcher at the end of the road, the retired gentleman of polite disposition who you meet in the library, the wide eyed tourist, are they all potential suspects? Do you know someone who you suspect is abusing children? They must be interacting with the rest of society at some level. They need to buy petrol for their cars, food from supermarkets or even take their children to school?

What can be done to stop it? How can we identify them? If we could profile them how could we proceed without evidence, even with suspicious reports? Not easy questions but ones perhaps we could address and solve in the 21st century?

The reasons we have this not entirely accurate notion are many, but include the influence of American film and television, particularly shows like Law and Order and CSI, in which women (and men) meet nocturnal doom with such frequency it’s a wonder any of them emerge into the morning light to cultivate the next generation.

With this in mind, it’s easy to see how I was taken aback by what happened to me one evening shortly after my arrival in the United States seven years ago. It was dusk – the last sunlight was gone but it was still just light enough to see – and I was walking along a quiet road which cuts through the university farm near where we live; following it from our apartment to meet my wife as she got off work. It was as pleasant a walk as a city built on the grid system on an utterly flat alluvial plain can offer: a three-mile trek past fields and silos and agricultural aromas reminding me of home, with the sky deepening to gas-flame blue and the first stars coming out.

A car passed me going in the opposite direction, slowed, u-turned and pulled up alongside me. The driver, a woman, asked if I wanted a lift somewhere. I looked at her rather oddly for a moment, more in surprise that she seemed oblivious to the possibility of my having a concealed butcher knife about my person than anything else. My resemblance to Freddy Kruger is passing at best, but in the available light we might as well, from her point of view, have shared a womb. So, in what I judged to be the woman’s own best interests, I declined. Besides, I was liking the walk and don’t much enjoy conversing with strangers.

After she’d driven off, it occurred to me that the reason she’d stopped was that she was surprised as well – enough to override any fear she might have had of ending up in several pieces in a shallow grave somewhere. Scratch that – she was so surprised that she’d not only stopped, she’d actually turned around and been prepared to take me in the opposite direction to the one in which she was traveling. And the reason for her surprise was that I was walking.

Fresno - not a walker's paradise...

The United States does have its ‘walking’ cities: places like New York, Chicago and San Francisco where for a variety of reasons it’s impractical to drive, or in many cases even to own a car. These cities all have excellent and comprehensive transit systems which make it easy to ride between any two points; and where the bus, the subway or the trolley don’t go, it’s an easy matter to cover the remaining distance on foot.

But by and large, walking just isn’t something you do in America. The country isn’t designed with pedestrians in mind. Fresno, California is typical of many newer American cities: it’s sprawling. A population of 500,000 is stretched across an area more than half the size of Greater London. The city blocks are half a mile on each side, bounded by main thoroughfares which are four to six lanes wide. To cross these without falling foul of the jaywalking laws, you must use a crosswalk, usually controlled by a light which remains green for pedestrians for about five seconds at a time. Getting all the way across in one shot requires, at the very least, a gait something like an Olympic race walker’s. Away from the main roads and into the neighbourhoods, you’re lucky if the streets even have sidewalks. There are so few opportunities for pavement-pounding that it’s a wonder the shoe industry in the US isn’t in perpetual crisis.

The distances pose many practical problems. The ‘local’ store might be a mile or two away. There’s no public transport except for a handful of taxis and the lumbering and thinly-spread bus network, which on a good day can take an hour to get you from the outskirts to downtown. Walking gets you nowhere fast. The wide main streets and the four freeways do. You need a car.

But I’d just arrived from England, where I’d been used to walking a mile and a half to and from work every day. I didn’t have a driver’s licence yet and was already starting to see the effects of American cuisine on my midriff. I was still enough of a new immigrant to see the absurdity in driving three miles to the gym in order to walk for three miles on a treadmill. Nevertheless, I needed to get some exercise, and three miles was no distance at all to me.

Fast forward seven years. The nearest supermarket is indeed more than a mile away. It’s a trip I now wouldn’t dream of making on foot – over a distance which, when I was younger, I would walk once a week, uphill, carrying four heavy bags of groceries from the bus stop to our house. Of course, food is cheaper here and I can afford to buy more of it, but that’s hardly the point.

Another consideration is the scenery. Walking is all very well in San Francisco or New York, where there’s always plenty to see and do on the way and you can always jump on a bus which is actually going where you want to go if you get tired. But in a city like Fresno, trudging over flat ground for block after identikit block, towards traffic lights marking intersections which never seem to get closer, gets old pretty quickly. There’s also the fact that this is the second most polluted county in the entire country, not to mention triple-digit summer temperatures, to take into consideration. Jumping into the car to go even a short distance doesn’t, for the most part, take a second thought.

People do walk – those who can’t afford to run a car or even take the bus. I’ve not yet reached the point where the sight of someone strolling down the side of the road would have me slamming on my brakes, flinging open my passenger door and inviting them to take a load off. In fact, with the price of gasoline careening off the scale, things look as if they might come full circle. Instead of driving to the store, I might slip a backpack on and ride my bike – or, good heavens, even walk. If I do, I doubt I’ll be recklessly offered any more lifts. Especially not by someone going the opposite way. They wouldn’t be able to afford it.