Canberra Muslim woman Nurcan Baran says she has stopped wearing her hijab for fear of being attacked.

On Thursday Speaker Bronwyn Bishop and Senate President Stephen Parry approved new interim rules to force Muslim women who cover their faces to sit in a separate glass-enclosed public gallery in Federal Parliament. But Prime Minister Tony Abbott stepped in and asked Ms Bishop to reconsider the ruling.

Mrs Baran said the increasingly strident debate has stirred unease with Canberra’s Muslim community.

The 22-year-old mother and part-time law student at the University of Canberra began thinking about wearing a hijab at 13, but did not start wearing one until she was overseas in 2012 aged 19. The self-proclaimed “proud Muslim feminist” emphasised she chose to wear the hijab and was not forced.

“They say it is meant to stop men looking for you. It is not,” she said. “It is for that woman’s own modesty and I think instead of being viewed as a tool of oppression it needs to be viewed as a woman’s choice.”

But Mrs Baran said she chose to stop wearing the hijab in December 2013 because of negative treatment she was receiving in Canberra. She told 7.30 ACT she was worried she would be attacked while out with her daughter and felt forced to take off the hijab in order to feel safe.

She said there was no difference between those forcing women to cover up and those forcing women to uncover. “I don’t think men have the right to tell women how to dress whether you are Western or from the Middle East,” she said. “I think we really need to make it clear that they really don’t have that right.”

But despite her stance Mrs Baran made her own decision to not wear her hijab in Canberra. “I didn’t feel self confident. I didn’t want to go out. I didn’t want to take my daughter for walks,” she said. “I didn’t want to go back to uni, and I just kept on thinking to myself, ‘how can I become a lawyer and help people if I can’t even face the world?’ And that’s what I felt as a hijabi woman in Canberra.”

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Female Muslim medical students have been verbally abused and have had patients refuse to be treated by them in a fortnight where the spectre of ignorance has raised its ugly head in the Hunter.

Two female students were walking back to their car at Maitland hospital last Wednesday when they were verbally abused by a car-load of men because they were wearing the religious head dress, known as a hijab. A nurse who witnessed the incident assisted the terrified women to flee the tirade of obscenity.

“I’ve always met lovely people since I have been in Australia; but what happened to us was a horrible experience,” one of the students said. She said several of her Muslim female friends had reported some patients had refused to be treated by them. “We are taught in medicine not to take offence, but ultimately we are human and it does hurt; you do feel it,” she said.

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