Human rights vs culture

On the same floor of the hotel we were staying in while in Malta were four young Egyptian men. They had come over to attend a fair. They were boiling two whole chickens in two enormous pots with water overflowing all over the stove and floor.

I told them they need a woman in there, meaning to help out with the cooking. I think they took this as an offer of a temporary marriage. I quickly took one to meet my husband, saying we were thinking of visiting Egypt.

While talking to them, I had a new insight into the wearing of the burka. There needs to be a real change in their men before we put pressure on women to give up the burkas in their own countries. I could see what it means for the safety and protection of the women who wear them and defend them as a freedom.

What we must do is to make it absolutely clear that this male behaviour is completely unacceptable in public in the EU. In Malta, women are free to be women in public. Women in the UK in the 1970s dressed down in shapeless dull-coloured dungarees with oversized pullovers and t-shirts, in order to assert our independence, and campaigned to "reclaim the streets".

In Beijing, at the Fourth UN Conference on Women, western women were involved in heated discussions on feminism and the wearing of burkas and the headscarf. Burkas made me uncomfortable but at that time I was undecided on my position on the subject and bent over backwards to see their point of view.

They were so defensive about Islam that, unlike the black women's caucus, they could not say "our men behave like dogs and we allow them". One of the decisions we made at that conference was that women's human rights were more important than harmful cultural practices.

Everything is relative - in the 1950s my father was a Taliban in his attitude to his daughter's education. Roman Catholics are not keen on showing bare flesh nor are very religious Jews who go swimming on our local beach in Wales with even their children covered head to foot in their street clothes.

The chador and the burka are a direct result of unbridled sexuality by men and their complete lack of self-discipline, a problem for men, only for men, nothing to do with women. Why should women's normal lives and freedoms be curtailed by men's lack of self-control?