Hijab-cutting incident never happened, police say

A few years ago in Toronto, an 11-year-old girl lied to police. She claimed a man tried to abduct her off the street, but she bit his arm and escaped. Two days later, she admitted she made it up. Her identity was never disclosed and nothing much happened.

“She’s only 11, it’s not like she can be charged with criminal mischief,” a police staff sergeant said at the time.

The case of Khawlah Noman, 11, a grade six student at Pauline Johnson Public School, seems similar. She also falsely claimed to have been attacked by a strange man, which police now say did not happen. But it could not have played out more differently.

At 9:15 a.m. last Friday, Noman’s school contacted police to report her claim that, as she walked to school that day with her brother Mohammad Zakariyya, 10, a man assaulted her with scissors, twice a few minutes apart, trying to cut off her hijab. Less than 20 minutes later, the Toronto Police tweeted an alert. The first news story was posted well before 10 a.m., international interest followed soon after and the school was swarmed with reporters.

A Toronto District School Board spokesperson put the media in touch with the child’s mother, Saima Samad, who agreed to do interviews. That is how a child who was thought to be the victim of a hate crime was being interviewed about it inside her own school, identified by name, and invited by reporters to address her alleged attacker on television.

“This was the decision of the family, not the TDSB,” said Ryan Bird, who is also a spokesman for the TDSB.

This was reality justice and it quickly became fake news. There was no scissorwielding 20-something Asian male with bangs and a hoodie.

But the enthusiastic reporting based on scant information fed into the caricature that mainstream media erupts in pious, sympathetic nodding anytime they hear about Islamophobia.

There used to be a news maxim that “Jews are news,” which made sense when anti-Semitism was the greater cultural concern. Now, it is the hijab that is guaranteed clickbait.

“Today we’re experiencing the very same thing with Muslims,” said Karen Mock, an educational psychologist and human rights consultant who chaired the committee that developed the Ontario government’s hate crime strategy. “These things do get blown out of proportion when it’s a marginalized or racialized group.”

“I think the most important thing to get across is the number of actual hate crimes every year far outweighs the false reports,” Mock said.

The instant panic, which drew impassioned responses from leaders at three levels of government, also showed that, no matter whether they are welcomed or vilified, Muslims are used as a test for a nation’s authenticity.

“The bottom line here is that this story involves a child who made a mistake,” said Ihsaan Gardee, executive director of the National Council of Canadian Muslims. “We doubt she would have foreseen the full consequences of her actions.”

“The failure occurred with the person who lied,” said Brian Levin, director of the Centre for the Study of Hate and Extremism at California State University, San Bernardino. But for politicians, when there are warning signs, like a young person involved, an educational context, a lack of corroboration, “it never hurts to wait a day.”

He said it should not be a surprise that members of the public, including children, will lie, and the official response has to accommodate that possibility. False crime reports are common, usually for things like personal animus, domestic problems, insurance fraud. At the extreme, they constitute serious crime in and of themselves, such as fake bomb threats, or “swatting,” in which a false report is designed to provoke a police reaction.

“Hate crime hoaxes are pretty rare. However, when they do happen, they often involve school or college aged folks,” said Levin. The motivation, he said, is often “some kind of reputational enhancement,” or a distraction or diversion from something negative in their own life, or a ploy for sympathy.

“This is a double tragedy,” he said. “People don’t hear about every hate crime… What it ends up doing is casting doubt on the far more that don’t make it into the media.”

Mock similarly said the case should not be ignored because a child lied. Perhaps she was being harassed or bullied and no one was listening to her. Perhaps she herself wanted to get rid of her hijab. Perhaps this was meant as a call for help. Could this be crying wolf to the principal, and being unable to walk it back once the news cameras arrived in her school?

“We don’t know and nobody should be passing judgment until we find out,” Mock said.