Staff at a swimming pool in Hanover, Germany, have faced threats after telling Muslim women not to wear jeans or street clothes in the pool, dye their hair, or leave large amounts of rubbish in the pool during Friday “women’s days”.
The staff claim to have received threats from the male relatives of the Muslim women according to leaked confidential documents from a city committee meeting. The city spokesman Ulrike Serbent confirmed the women who were causing the problems were Muslims, Die Welt reports.
“We wanted to avoid creating a xenophobic tone,” Serbent said, claiming that was the reason the problems were not publicised.
“The women come from a different culture, in which bathing is understood more as a joint meeting and less as swimming,” Serbent said adding: “We are working on effective measures. So we are thinking about whether to include the Integration Advisory Councils to talk to the women so that they behave differently with us.”
The Muslim women are said to not only wear street clothes in the swimming pools and use the water to dye their hair, but also bring in food and have “picnics” by the side of the pool and leave large amounts of rubbish in their wake.
Due to the threats against staff who attempt to enforce the facilities rules, newspaper Hannoversche Allgemeine Zeitung claims that security will be hired to guard the swimming pool starting next month.
Female Muslim bathers who wore the Islamic swimwear, known as the burkini, caused controversy in German swimming pools last year as some attempted to ban the garment claiming it was unhygienic.
While “women’s day” is expected to continue at the pool in Hanover, in France a Muslim women’s association based in the city of Marseille caused outrage after proposing a gender-segregated women-only burkini day.
German swimming pools have also become the site of a high increase in sex attacks and sexual molestation incidents, many of which feature migrants as alleged attackers.
A leaked internal report from Düsseldorf claimed that the number of swimming pool child sex attacks had dramatically increased, reading: “In particular, offences of rape and sexual abuse of children in bathing establishments is significant,” and adding: “The perpetrators are, for the most part, immigrants.”