Nearly Half of Muslim Students in California Schools Have Been Bullied in Some Way: Report
23 December 2013
One Comment
By Matt Coker
Nearly half of California’s Muslim students say they have been subjected to some form of bias-based bullying, according to a first-ever report released Thursday. “Growing in Faith: California Muslim Youth Experiences with Bullying, Harassment and Religious Accommodation in Schools” was presented by the California chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations (CAIR-CA), whose Greater Los Angeles office is in Anaheim.
“Being called ‘terrorist’ or ‘Bin laden’ is still a reality for many American Muslim students,” says CAIR-LA Civil Rights Manager Fatima Dadabhoy in a statement announcing the report.
“Throughout the course of this study, we were alarmed to find that many Muslim students didn’t even deem this as a form of bullying. Through this report, we hope to show that a decision to dismiss mistreatment as a natural consequence of being Muslim in America, or simply part of growing up, is unacceptable and normalizes a toxic school environment.”
Among the findings, based on a statewide survey of nearly 500 Muslim students ages 11 to 18:
* One in five young women reported being bullied because they wore an Islamic headscarf (hijab) to school;
* One in five youth reported they were unsure of participating in classroom discussions in which Islam or Muslims are discussed and were unsure of whether teachers respected their religion;
* More than a third of bullying victims surveyed indicated that reporting harassment incidents to school administrators was not helpful.
For more on the problem, read the full report:http://ca.cair.com/downloads/GrowingInFaith.pdf
For more on possible solutions, read An Educator’s Guide to Islamic Religious Practices.
Email: mcoker@ocweekly.com. Twitter: @MatthewTCoker. Follow OC Weekly on Twitter @ocweekly or on Facebook!
Original post: Nearly Half of Muslim Students in California Schools Have Been Bullied in Some Way: Report
Bullying can be physical, verbal and/or social. When someone physically bullies another, they use their greater physical strength to cause harm to the weaker person. In verbal bullying, there is no actual contact, but the harm done can be just as large. In these cases, the bully says derogatory things to his/her victim, who usually becomes too intimidated to respond, and ends up taking repeated abuse. In social bullying, a person or people of greater social status excludes someone else. So I suggest a safety application that your child could use if he/she in trouble, just check it here: http://safekidzone.com/#!/page_home.
31 December 2013 at 11:36 am