'Islamophobic bullying made school a nightmare' - BBC Three

Malak, 23



“Please don’t leave the house today. Not unless you really have to.” My dad is calling me from work to remind me to stay safe. He’s made the same call for the past two days after a gunman opened fire on two New Zealand mosques during Friday prayers. On that awful day in March, I sat at home in my student house in Nottingham, fighting back tears and watching on social media as the death toll steadily rose.



It might sound like my dad is a bit overprotective – I’m 23, after all – but he knows that in the wake of such an awful attack, with tensions and fears running high, that I, a young Muslim wearing a hijab, could easily face abuse or worse. He made the same call to me in summer 2017, after the Finsbury Park mosque attack which killed one person and injured nine others. And again after two other terror attacks which happened that summer on Westminster and London Bridges. Sadly, it doesn’t seem to matter if Muslims are the victims or the perpetrators of an attack - we can still feel like easy targets.



This was the case after the New Zealand attack. The week following the Christchurch shooting, Tell Mama, a group which records anti-Muslim attacks, received more than double the number of hate crime reports than it would in an average average week, according to figures supplied to the Guardian. The same thing happened in the wake of the Westminster and London Bridge attacks in 2017. And in Greater Manchester, that same year, after the terror attack which specifically targeted women and children at an Ariana Grande concert - reports of anti-Muslim hate crime rose again by more than 500%, according to official police figures, which include online hate crime.



Although the number of reported incidents since those attacks has declined, overall, it does feel like Islamophobia has worsened over the past two decades. In 2018 alone, according to government figures, religious hate crime increased by 40% across the UK, with more than half directed at Muslims.