Report Hate is a new online tool for Sikh community members to report incidents of harassment, discrimination and hate violence.
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| [Photo Source: Facebook.com/SikhCoalition] |
March 1, 2016: On February 2, 2016, exactly two months after the tragic shooting in San Bernardino, California, the Sikh Coalition launched Report Hate—a new online tool for Sikh community members to report incidents of harassment, discrimination and hate violence.
According to the nonprofit’s press release, the new reporting resource was developed to make it easier for Sikhs to report incidents–even if the incidents are not legally actionable or a crime.
“America belongs to all of us,” the Sikh Coalition’s Law and Policy Director, Arjun Singh, said in the emailed release. “Data helps drive change and victims of bigotry and hate violence should document and report their mistreatment through this new tool.”
The Sikh Coalition intends to use the information to better identify “the types of bigotry Sikh Americans face as well as the geographic areas where Sikh Americans are acutely vulnerable.” The data also enables the Sikh Coalition to “better target its outreach efforts” to law enforcement, educators, community leaders and lawmakers at the local, state and federal levels.
According to the nonprofit, Sikh Americans practice the fifth largest religion in the world. The Sikh articles of faith, including the beard and turban, represent equality and justice for all.
“The Sikh articles of faith are easy targets for the bigoted and hateful,” Singh explained. “We are committed to combating this problem, especially when hate violence and hateful rhetoric are on the rise.”
According to Sapreet Kaur, the Sikh Coalition’s executive director, in the years since September 11th—when the group was founded—the nonprofit has done some significant work, both on the preventative side and crisis response. In the past two months, the number of legal intakes the Sikh Coalition has processed has increased three-fold as compared to recent years.
“This [past] September there was this heinous attack on Inderjit [Singh] Mukker in the suburbs of Chicago. In the last six weeks of the year, we saw nearly a threefold increase in violence against Sikhs reported to us,” she said in an earlier interview with India.com. “We’ve been able to address a lot of them.”
“The data that we are seeing–there’s been a significant uptick of reported incidents that are biased based,” she added. “We’ve seen an uptick. And when you speak to community members, you also hear about incidents of people shouting things at them—bigoted remarks. [The community] has seen an increase in that.”
Last month, Parminder Singh, a turbaned and bearded Sikh truck driver, was driving across the country with his family when he stopped at a rest stop near Knoxville, Tennessee. In the parking lot, another truck driver angrily shouted, “Why did you come here? Go back to where you came from!” Singh called the police and contacted the Sikh Coalition.
“This type of incident is something many Sikh American families in the United States have experienced at some point over the past 15 years, however, these verbal attacks almost never get reported,” he said in the release. “The new Report Hate resource now allows this incident to become an important data point that highlights the much bigger problem of hate in America.”