By Miranda Devine

SYDNEY, AUSTRALIA – THE Prime Minister, John Howard, prompted an angry backlash last week when he told talkback radio that he wanted all Muslims to integrate fully into Australian society, learning English and “accepting Australian values”. “In certain areas, such as the equality of men and women … people who come from societies where women are treated in an inferior fashion have got to learn very quickly that that is not the case in Australia.”

Which is all very well, but is it any wonder some Muslim families might want to segregate their daughters from the raunch culture that has engulfed the 21st-century West, in which a girl’s worth is measured by her “hotness”, 10-year-olds learn the art of “turkey slapping” from Big Brother, and schoolgirls have breast augmentation so they can look like Pamela Anderson.

Why would you want to integrate your eight-year-old daughter into a culture that seems to take its decadent cue from Paris Hilton, when your religion offers an apparent safe haven?

Better to dress little Fatima in a burqa and keep her away from the “infidel” girls at school in an attempt to preserve her innocence as long as you can. Better yet, send her to an Islamic school so she won’t be polluted by association.

When you feel powerless to protect your family against the onslaught of marketeers sexualising pre-teens, suddenly the fundamentalist ravings of imams such as Melbourne’s radical Sheik Mohammed Omran against the “Bondi Beach people” might begin to look somewhat rational.

It is not a recipe for social harmony, of course, but most conversations about Muslim integration into the West seem to ignore this elephant in the living room.

“Most Muslims who have migrated to this country have been shocked by how universal values [and] gender etiquettes lasting a thousand years have been tossed aside in an orgiastic free-for-all in the last 20,” Salmaan, a Muslim Australian who does not own a TV, wrote in an email to me last year. “This is not what my parents expected when they came.”

Integration is not just about accepting female equality, as the Prime Minister suggests, but about the willingness of moderate Muslim families to trust their daughters to a culture that seems to tolerate the premature sexualisation of girls.

Anecdotes from the adolescent front line suggest their angst is not unfounded.

For instance, a year 8 student, aged 15, attending a Sydney private girls’ school has apparently been given permission to sleep with her boyfriend in the family home at weekends. Since the peer group moves in concert, other parents despair at their ability to rein in their 14- and 15-year-old daughters while competing with such a lenient model of parenting.
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