When Taranjeet, 36, had his shop windows smashed, he felt both helpless and scared. He also found it extremely difficult to explain to his wife and children, why they had been targeted with a horrific Islamophobic attack, when they themselves are not Muslim. “Both my wife and kids have had it really bad. When the shop windows were smashed, they were inside and I was out. My wife is always scared now. Actually, she did not want to go back to the shop for a whole month. My kids at home always say ‘Daddy why are they hurting us? Is it because they don’t like us? But we haven’t done anything wrong to them.’ What should I say to them? That they are hitting us because they think we are Muslim?”
Islamophobia does not distinguish between people’s experiences of victimisation. It’s for those reasons that as part of hate crime awareness week, I and a colleague are presenting evidence to MPs about a form of Islamophobic hate crime that people often either ignore, or are just not aware that exists. This is not Islamophobia against Muslims, but Islamophobic hate crimes against non-Muslim men. The experiences of non-Muslim men who suffer Islamophobia because they look Muslim remain invisible in both official statistics and empirical research.
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