Muslim kids in California schools continue to report being bullied or harassed at a higher rate than other students in the state and the country, according to a new report by the Council on American-Islamic Relations.
The survey, released Wednesday, found 40% of respondents, ages 11 to 18, experienced bullying at school for being Muslim. That figure included 16% who said they were abused or harassed at least once a week, once a month or “sometimes.”
The mistreatment included students being called terrorists, made fun of because they wore a hijab, and reduced to tears from teasing, the report said.
“Sometimes people might say, ‘Hey, going to bomb the school now?’ ” said a student quoted in the study, which gathered anonymous responses from 1,500 kids in public and private schools.
A similar survey by the organization in 2017 found more than half of Muslim students reported being made fun of, insulted or abused, which authors linked to “Islamophobic rhetoric” in the 2016 presidential campaign.
“I am cautiously optimistic that there is a drop in these reported numbers of bullying,” said Ammad Wajahat Rafiqi, an attorney with CAIR in San Francisco, who contributed to the latest report. “But we are also concerned that the numbers continue to be very high.”
School administrators and teachers are becoming more aware of the problem, Rafiqi said. But the California Department of Education should do more to uphold students’ right to be educated in a safe environment by mandating and funding anti-bullying training at schools, he added.
“If stricter legislation as well as more proactive and mandatory trainings aren’t implemented, we might continue to see these numbers in the years moving forward,” he said.
