JEDDAH: Taxi drivers say that prohibited tinted windows have become virtually a necessity for their vehicles because of unwanted attention from young males, and would like to see the ban lifted. “I decided to tint all the rear windows on my car because of the endless hassle,” taxi driver Omar Al-Abbassi told Al-Hayat Arabic daily. “Every time I have a young female customer, whether she is dressed modestly or not, I find a load of youths immediately pouncing. If it's at night it's worse, especially if they see there are no police around. I can't see any reason for objecting to being allowed to blacken out the windows to guard against the evil of those people.” He said there should be “deterrents” in place for any youths who engage in such behavior. “The women only want to get to work or where they study or do what they have to do, but young men seem to think that any young woman in a taxi is some sort of signal to them.” Iyaz Khan Al-Yaumi, a Pakistani, described his woes as a taxi driver as “endless”. “Whenever a woman hails my cab I know there are going to be problems with young men chasing, even if she's dressed as modestly as she possibly can,” he said. “Sometimes they even surround the car and stop it and open the door.” The Traffic Police, in these cases, he said, were “useless”. “I can't do anything as I'm a foreign driver who is basically ignored. When I try to get away from them they beat me up and no one listens to me when I complain! As I said, I'm a foreign driver!” Al-Yaumi added that he believed that the problem only existed in Saudi Arabia. “I've also worked as a taxi driver in Dubai, but encountered no problems there,” he said. Traffic Department spokesman Zaid Al-Hamzi told Al-Hayat that the “complete ban” on blackening out windows was unlikely to be changed, but that the relevant authorities take complaints of hassle from youths seriously. “That goes equally for foreign drivers, and security patrols on the streets take the necessary measures,” he said. Omar Al-Khouli, legal adviser to the Human Rights Commission and professor at King Abdulaziz University, said that the Kingdom's laws do not sufficiently protect women. “Earlier we didn't have any written laws, but instead there were ‘natural laws' that prevented any targeting of women and protected them from any aggression,” he said. “Today there isn't any deterrent in the law protecting women as there is in other countries.” He said today's society had “lost its fear of the law” due to the failures in its application on the street. “Today you can see a young man shamelessly open the door of a taxi, fearing no one, and frighten the young woman inside, something we don't see in other countries because of deterrents in the law,” he said. “That only suggests that we don't respect the law, so we need deterrents that are rigorously put into effect.” Al-Khouli attributed the problem to “contacts with influential, persons intervening, a group that breaks the law, and people above the law to whom the rules do not apply”. “As long as that continues to exist there will be nothing to deter this reckless youthful behavior,” he said.
