ABSTRACT
Consistently, across Western Europe Muslim women increasingly face growing rates of Islamophobia. For example, women made up 82% of victims of reported physical Islamophobic attacks in France during 2015. Similarly in the Netherlands Meld Islamofobie found that women constitute 90% of victims of Islamophobia recorded between January and June 2015, of these, 98% were identifiable as Muslim women. Belgian Muslim women are similarly disproportionately victimised; for example the organisation Muslim’s Rights Belgium found that 73% of reported Islamophobia victims during 2014 were female, or more recently an analysis by the Collectif Conte L’Islamophibie en Belgique identified that 63.6% of those who came forward to report Islamophobia between January 2012 and September 2015 are women. The nature of Islamophobia experienced by Belgian Muslim women includes physical violence, verbal abuse, hate mail, online hate speech and also more subtle forms of institutional exclusion.
