Muslim women rarely report attacks, study finds
Most Islamophobic verbal, physical, sexual attacks are going unreported, U of T study concludes
When she started wearing her hijab in Grade 6, Sidrah Ahmad was asked by her teacher to stand in front of her class and explain her choice.
Then 11 years old, Ahmad was the only person who wore a headscarf in her Toronto school.
“People in Grade 6 should not have to do that,” Ahmad said of the uncomfortable position she was put in. “I just had to be on. You’re just aware you’re being watched. You’re aware you have to perform and not show a crack in the armour.”
More than two decades after the moment she still wonders, “What do we call that?”
It was a memory that came flooding back when Ahmad, now 34, embarked on her thesis project for her master’s in adult education and community development at the University of Toronto.
She didn’t realize that things could have been much worse for a Muslim woman in the GTA.
Since June, she has been documenting and studying the everyday experience and impact of Islamophobic violence faced by 21 Muslim women in the GTA — these range from being yelled at, sworn at, spit at and experiencing physical and sexual assault.
Of the 40 incidents they shared with her, police were involved in only three. The rest were not reported. Ahmad called the qualitative study, to be published this month, “Invisible Violence Against Hypervisible Women.” “So much of this violence is invisible,” Ahmad said. “We’ve seen from #MeToo that the actual reported cases of sexual violence are just the tip of the iceberg of what women experience.
“I believe the same is true for hate crimes against Muslim women. Actual reported hate crimes are just a tip of the iceberg of what we’re experiencing in the city.”
The women Ahmad spoke to ranged in age and race.
The youngest was 18; the oldest, 58. Nine were Black Muslims. Fourteen out of 21 were mothers, some grandmothers — their children witnessed the targeted attacks against them. Eighteen of them wore a hijab or niqab.
Their stories “humbled” Ahmad. She expected her social media call out for participants in June 2017 to bring forward university students and activists. Instead she got “aunties” — older women, many of them immigrants.
Verbal harassment was the most frequent form of Islamophobia — occurring on a weekly basis.
Those who couldn’t speak English well at the time of the attack told her they only knew how to say “thank you” to the people who spoke to them angrily.
Others described how they were called “terrorists” by people who tried to hit them with a car, punch them on the street or pull their hijab on the subway.
“People don’t take microaggressions seriously,” said Sabreena Ghaffar-Siddiqui, a researcher at McMaster University who focuses on hate crimes and discrimination. “If (a Muslim girl) said that ‘when I take the bus . . . people look at me funny, they make me feel scared’ . . . people aren’t going to take that seriously.”
“If she says ‘I was actually attacked,’ people take it more seriously.”
One woman, part of Ahmad’s study, described how a man intimately grabbed her and said, “What if I did this? Would your dad come over and beat me up . . . bomb my house?”
After these experiences, Ahmad learned public spaces have become cautionary spaces for these women. They stopped going to grocery stores alone, became vigilant on sidewalks and bus stops. They’d never stand at the yellow line at a subway station, but always against the wall.
“Why can’t we as a city take a step back and just very calmly look at how are Muslim women in this city faring?” Ahmad asked. “What is walking down the street like for them? What is taking the TTC like?”
Part of the problem is the stereotypes that have manifested. Participants told her how people assume Muslim women are easy targets.
“There’s this idea that Muslim women are abused, oppressed persons,” Ahmad said. “In some cases people think ‘oh OK I can abuse her some more.’ ”
One of the aims of Ahmad’s study is to create a tool kit to offer resources and support where she finds very few. “These women just go to their families,” she said. “There’s no place they can go to and say ‘I faced Islamophobia.’ ”
“I think about these women a lot when I walk around the city,” Ahmad said. She no longer stands near the yellow line to wait for a train.
Ahmad sees herself in the 11-yearold who was in the news this past week for making false allegations of assault — as a kid who wore the hijab, she too, once told a lie. After reading the book Matilda, she told everyone she experienced the fictional girl’s telekinetic powers. Back then, no one called Ahmad “an evil Muslim.”
“All of these women that I’ve listened to, who haven’t had their stories heard, who are too afraid to come forward, this will make them even more hesitant,” she said.
Ghaffar-Siddiqui, too, hears these stories every day, as part of her ongoing research. “These aren’t recorded in the hate crime database,” she said. “They stay within the person.”
The story of the 11-year-old who falsely alleged her hijab was cut captured international attention because, “99 per cent of stories don’t get out there,” according to Ahmad. “So when one story does come out, we grab on to it like a life preserver.”
“People have the audacity to say this 11-year-old girl lied so Islamophobia is not happening at all.”