10,000 reasons to protect students from religious bullying

Choking a Muslim student with her hijab. Punching a Sikh boy wearing a turban. Burning a Jewish boy with hot wax. A just-released Department of Education report found that an alarming 10,848 incidents of religiously-motivated bullying and harassment took place in U.S. public schools during 2015-16. That’s approximately 30 incidents per school day, 150 per school week and 602 per school month. Religiously-motivated hate crimes have spiked across our country, and we now know that religiously-motivated harassment and bullying are infiltrating our nation’s schools. Our federal government, however, is not doing enough about it.

A 2018 report by South Asian Americans Leading Together found that over a quarter of incidents of reported hate violence and xenophobic political rhetoric against South Asian, Muslim, Sikh, Hindu, Middle Eastern, and Arab individuals in November 2016-November 2017 involved students and youth. A 2014 report by the Sikh Coalition found that over half of Sikh children in the U.S. said they were bullied in school, and 67 percent reported being bullied if wearing a turban. And the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) found that anti-Semitic incidents in K-12 schools and on college campuses nearly doubled last year.

{mosads}The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services has found that victims of bullying can suffer from negative physical, school and mental health issues, and those who bully can engage in violent and risky behaviors into adulthood. 

Until very recently, however, this problem has been almost entirely ignored by the federal government. While the Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights (OCR) has amassed data on sex, race, and disability, until this spring, it did not collect data on religiously-motivated bullying and harassment. Gathering data on bullying against religious minorities is critical to providing an accurate portrait of the problem and developing an effective response. That is why our organization has long advocated for this crucial approach and, in 2016, OCR finally announced it would do just that.

However, OCR’s just-released mandatory Civil Rights Data Collection report is a wake up call that OCR must go much further. It is frankly unconscionable that up until now, this serious and pervasive problem has gone largely unaddressed through statutory prohibition or enforcement mechanism. OCR has taken an important step by gathering data, but to do so thoroughly, OCR must collect detailed information on individual religions, types of harassment or bullying by religion – i.e., whether it was a violent assault or verbal harassment, where incidents are occurring, and the context behind each incident.

And the problem goes even deeper.  Currently, our federal civil rights laws do not properly protect students from discrimination based on religion. Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 prohibits discrimination on the basis of “race, color, or national origin” in federally assisted programs and activities, but it does not protect students from harassment based on religion. This omission has led to governmental failure when it comes to protecting religious minorities from religious-harassment.

While Department of Education guidance has extended the protections of Title VI to students based on their ethnic or ancestral background, it still does not protect students based on religious harassment absent an ethnic or ancestral component. For this reason, there is a blurred line as to what is prohibited and what is permitted under Title VI. For example, OCR has not found a single violation in a campus anti-Semitism case, despite the high numbers of incidents we know exist. In a 2015 Brandeis Center-Trinity study, the majority of Jewish college students surveyed reported experiencing anti-Semitism on campus, and the ADL report found that anti-Semitic incidents on college campuses spiked a frightening 89 percent in 2017.

Our federal government must act.

First, Congress must enact legislation to fix the glaring loophole that exists in our federal civil rights laws to protect students of all religious groups from religious-based harassment. Congress could amend Title VI of the Civil Rights Act or the Higher Education Opportunities Act, or it could introduce new stand-alone legislation to prevent such harassment. Second, OCR must clarify and define protections extended to religious minority students under current policy, as well as the limitations imposed by the First Amendment. Lastly, collecting data is an excellent first step. However, the data recently collected by OCR only included religion as a whole. OCR must disaggregate existing data and collect additional data in order to properly and effectively address the problem.

With over 10,000 incidents of religious harassment and bullying in America’s public schools, it is imperative Congress and the president address this longstanding problem. Religiously-motivated harassment must be combated as vigorously as all other forms of bigotry.

Vogelstein is the Director of Legal Initiatives at the Louis D. Brandeis Center for Human Rights Under Law, an independent, non-partisan institution for public interest advocacy, research and education that advances civil and human rights.