A slight mistranslation.

The BBC reports

A Moroccan trainee teacher has been denied a job in Italy because school authorities feared her headscarf might scare children, local media reported.

Put like that, the decision of the authorities in Samone sounds an utterly pathetic example of Islamophobia. The arguments offered by an official trying to defend the decision do nothing to change that impression:

“(Children) might have been scared and it was better not to run that risk,” official Christina Ferrari said.

I imagined her making a ritual gesture to ward off the Demon of Risk plus a genuflection to The Children™ while she said it. Heaven protect the bambini from seeing terrible headscarfs!

Then I thought, wait a minute. Rural Italy is full of women wearing headscarfs. Even in big cities I saw dozens of grannies in black headscarfs. Headscarfs are not, just not, a big deal in Italy. No one could claim even for a minute that children would be scared of them.

I started to wonder if there was more to the story than met the eye.

I think there is. The newspaper La Repubblica is one of the sources mentioned in the story. This is what La Repubblica reported. The first paragraph says:

Una donna di origine marocchina, Fatima Mouayche, 40 anni, sposa e madre di due bambini, è stata negata la possibilità di frequentare uno stage presso un asilo nido di un paese del canavese perché aveva il capo coperto dal chador, il velo islamico.

It’s a quarter century since my Italian O Level, but here goes:

“A lady of Moroccan origin [note that La Repubblica does not deny her Italian citizenship, unlike the self-consciously PC BBC], Fatima Mouayche aged 40, married with two children, has been denied the possibility of attending a [here my Italian gave out] in the Canavese area because she had her head covered with the chador, the Islamic veil.

Thought so. It was a full veil, not just a headscarf. The officials and people of Samone are being parochial and small-minded but they aren’t being crazy: I can see why rural children unused to the sight of a woman wearing the chador might be frightened, particularly if it covers all but the eyes. On my first day of school I was seriously frightened because my teacher came in wearing a black rain-cape. I thought she was a witch. Wisely, my fears were not indulged, and by the end of the day I had learned a valuable lesson: that even people who wore clothes that looked strange to me could turn out to be nice. It is a pity that the children of Samone are being denied the chance to learn the same lesson.

This has been a long post over the mistranslation of just one word. The reason I bother is that it’s typical of the way that BBC doesn’t even serve its own better ideals well. In its anxiousness to present this as a story of utterly mindless racism, and of pandering to children’s transitory fears, the BBC missed a chance to tell a story that would have made the same points about tolerance more strongly through giving some acknowledgment to the fears that need to be overcome.