Elham Asaad Buaras

New Zealand’s Christchurch terrorist attack triggered a spike in anti-Muslim crimes in Australia, with Muslim women bearing the brunt of the violence and harassment, according to a joint report by Charles Sturt University and the Islamic Science & Research Academy.

The report, released on March 15, to coincide with the third anniversary of the Christchurch massacre, is based on incidents reported to the Islamophobia Register Australia (IRA) by victims, proxies, and witnesses during 2018 and 2019.

The report, titled Islamophobia in Australia III, notes online incidents were 18 times higher in the two weeks after March 15, 2019, when an Australian white supremacist, Brenton Tarrant, murdered 51 people in an attack on two mosques in Christchurch.

The report includes 247 verified incidents (138 physical and 109 online). It follows 349 incidents in the second report (published in 2019) and 243 incidents in the first report (published in 2017).

Incidents recorded include that of a patient in the chair of a Muslim dentist calling all Muslims “terrorists,” a family assaulting a woman at the zoo, and a pregnant woman being repeatedly punched in a café, a case that made the news.

Anti-Muslim hate is deeply gendered, with women comprising 82 per cent of in-person victims – up from 72 per cent in the second report and 68 per cent in the first. Of those women, 85 per cent were wearing hijab and 48 per cent were alone when the attacks occurred, while 15 per cent of them were accompanied by children. Most of the perpetrators, 74 per cent, were male.

The data suggested security guards or cameras did not make Muslims any safer, as there was “no meaningful correlation” between the existence of cameras or guards and the severity of an incident.

Incidents recorded by the IRA also showed that “anti-Muslim hate breaches social and professional hierarchies”. The report’s lead researcher, Dr Derya Iner, said the sample of incidents was “the tip of the iceberg,” noting that hate crime was vastly under-reported internationally and the register’s ability to collect data depended on the community’s awareness of it.

“We are not saying that this report represents everything in Australia, but this is a suitable sample to show manifestations of Islamophobia across Australia,” Iner said.

In 12 per cent of cases over the first reporting period (2014–2016), Muslims were associated with terrorism or portrayed as killers, but that number has risen sharply, with 39 per cent of incidents making that association in this most recent report. “I think this is the impact of online far-right groups. To bring people to that level of intense hate, you need to have a good excuse, and the best excuse is to associate Muslims with terrorism and portray them as killers,” Iner said. He noted that this was one of the most common narratives online about Muslims after the Christchurch massacre.

In the wake of the Christchurch terror attack, 40 per cent of the reported harassments were online (mostly on Facebook) and included threats to kill Muslims, with 55 per cent of those threatening mass killing. Of the in-person incidents, which included both verbal and physical attacks, 63 per cent occurred in commonly frequented places like shopping centres or on public transport.

“Muslims are attacked, harassed, among people in crowds. There is not enough social pressure on perpetrators to deter them, to prevent them from doing it,” Iner said.

“Hate culture is accommodated by silence. Bystanders are around, but silent.“