The hijab hoax a comprehensive failure of empathy.

Empathy for girl lost amid all the social outcry

On Monday, when it emerged that an 11-year-old girl had fabricated her story of being attacked by a scissors-wielding Asian man intent on removing her hijab, some media outlets immediately stripped her name out of reports and blurred her face in photos. I don’t think they had any obligation to do so: she wasn’t the victim of a crime, nor had she been charged with one — the two circumstances when we normally withhold information, either by policy or out of legal obligation. The girl’s name was public by parental consent.

But I certainly think it was defensible. A not inconsiderable number of vile, paranoid people are using the hoax as evidence to support various cretinous beliefs and agendas. It’s conceivable one or two might harass the family. Surely the girl is suffering enough.

Mind you, why now? Why not withhold her name from the beginning? It would go against every journalist’s instincts; again, there certainly was no obligation. But it would have performed the very important function that every other grown-up involved in the immediate aftermath of the alleged attack failed spectacularly to perform: protect the victim. For all they knew, this mysterious Asian fellow with bangs and a hoodie and scissors was still skulking around. The girl said he came at her twice. Who’s to say he wasn’t after her specifically?

Both Toronto Police and the Toronto District School Board had communications officers on the scene. Yet the girl somehow ended up before a phalanx of TV cameras explaining what happened and how she felt about it. It was madness. The TDSB insists it didn’t “set up” the press conference, but rather invited the family to join its spokesperson at the mic after they “express(ed) concern that they were going to be approached by media outside while trying to leave.” But that’s hardly any better at all.

The invitation should never have been issued. If the family had independently decided it wanted to talk to the press, media relations officers should urgently have been trying to talk them out of it. Toronto’s press corps is a tenacious bunch, and rightly so. But I cannot envision reporters insistently badgering a recently assaulted 11-year-old girl and her mother as they’re bustled into a cab. “No comment” would have sufficed.

In his report, the National Post’s Joe Brean mentioned a similar event in 2008: an 11-year-old girl told officials at Balmy Beach Community School that a man in a van had tried to abduct her during lunch hour, and that she got away after biting his hand. It made the news, the police determined it didn’t happen, and then it disappeared from the news forever. We didn’t know the girl’s name. Needless to say, there was no press conference. Because it would have been totally crazy to name an 11-year-old girl who you thought had recently been assaulted, and to put her in front of TV cameras.

The whole thing strikes me as a comprehensive failure of empathy. It was like an 11-year-old girl’s terrifying alleged ordeal immediately became as much or more about social phenomena as about the 11-year-old girl. If the tinfoil hat brigade treats the hoax as evidence of some vast fake hate crime conspiracy, so some of her ostensible supporters latched onto her allegations as compelling evidence of endemic Islamophobia. When it turned out it didn’t happen, they wrote articles and tweets explaining that one fake hate crime doesn’t make all hate crimes fake and bemoaned that she had made things much more difficult for real victims.

These concerns are overblown, I think.

This was hardly the world’s first hoax hate crime. The remote possibility it might have been made up certainly didn’t stop polite Canadian society from publicly and loudly deploring what had supposedly happened, or from assuming that intolerance and bigotry lay behind it, or from declaring that this supposedly isn’t what Canada stands for. There’s no reason to believe an 11-year-old girl harassed or assaulted in similar circumstances tomorrow wouldn’t elicit the same reaction (not that any harm would come from taking a few deep breaths before weighing in).

It’s certainly possible this fiasco might have created one or two new conspiracy theorists. But many of the people who “predicted” this was made up think every manifestation of anti-Muslim intolerance is made up.

No one who thinks that one fake hate crime proves all hate crimes are fake is going to be disabused of that notion by a Buzzfeed explainer. No cause is materially better or worse off because of what she did, and everyone can perfectly safely forget about this (except everyone who conspired to make her face and name public, who should go to their rooms and think about what they did).

For the last time, I hope, her name is Khawlah. She’s an 11-year-old Canadian girl, a Grade 6 student at Pauline Johnson Public School. She did something stupid, it’s not the end of the world, and everything is going to be fine.

THIS WAS HARDLY THE WORLD’S FIRST HOAX HATE CRIME.