Hansen, Rasmus Vestergaard

Kjærgaard, Mette Fink

In January 2022, the Danish social democratic government commissioned a paper to chal- lenge the “culture of honour”. It worked under the name ‘the forgotten struggle for women's liberation’. In August 2022, the commission presented nine recommendations, the seventh being to prohibit pupils wearing headscarves in Danish schools. This started a debate about the commission in itself, how it worked, and whether this seventh recommendation would combat social control in Denmark. This paper use Tingbjerg Skole as a critical case study and investigates whether the proposition of prohibiting headscarves as a solution to social control and how they think pupils will be influenced by a ban on the headscarf. The main evidence is based on interviews conducted by the author with the head teacher and teachers in the school. The paper found out that social control was present in some girls' decisions to wear the headscarf and absent in other instances. By actualising this law, the state forces girls who have chosen to wear the headscarf to not wear it which is both social control and will also have consequences for the girls' participation in social and civil society. The paper also proves that criminalising the headscarf will further stigmatise Muslim women. The pa- per therefore concludes that the commission should scrap the seventh proposition. The pa- per proposes to keep the other recommendations made by the commission, such as strength- ening the børnetelefonen and create a national campaigning week focusing on rights. The paper likewise includes a notice to the commission and an article to folkeskolen.dk summa- rizing the findings of said paper

A study of consequences of a headscarf ban in Danish primary schools

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