They said it would set women free. The data says otherwise.

Ten years ago, France and Belgium banned the veil — insisting it was about liberating Muslim women from coercion.
I spent months digging through a decade of enforcement records across ten European countries to see if that promise held up.
It didn't.
The women these laws were built to "protect" are the ones being stopped, fined, and pushed out of public life — while the coercion the laws claim to fight barely shows up in the numbers at all.
This is the story of a law that quietly punishes the people it was written to save.
Link to full article in comments

The text critiques a decade of enforcement data on European veil bans, arguing that laws purportedly enacted to liberate Muslim women have instead marginalized and penalized them. While the argument effectively highlights policy irony and challenges official justifications, a comprehensive analysis must account for the underreporting of domestic coercion and varying regional enforcement frameworks. Read the full analysis at the original source.