Sadly, we have to respond again to what Byline Time’s thinks is a ‘gotcha’ moment, given what is clearly now a targeted and organised campaign against Tell MAMA. A campaign involving a triage of Nafeez Ahmed, a Baroness and Byline Times. We are not going to comment further on what has been an exhausting process that has drawn resources away from the core nature of our work – to assist victims of anti-Muslim hate.
In their analysis of our data in the ‘A Decade of Anti-Muslim Hate’ report (2023), Byline clearly demonstrate their ignorance of what Tell MAMA is – a third party hate crime reporting service. These are centres or services within communities that allow people to report into them, if they are not comfortable reporting to police forces, or if they feel more comfortable approaching a community based organisation. Here is an example of what a third party hate crime reporting service is. This is precisely what Tell MAMA is funded to be, though according to Byline Times, we should be in direct comparison and contrast with police forces across England and Wales, as though Tell MAMA should be collecting all of the data of anti-Muslim hate cases in the U.K. This is a fundamental point, because it shows how Byline have literally gone off at a tangent.
READ: The Truth, Nafeez Ahmed and Byline Times – ‘Indefensible Reporting’
READ: Parliamentary Privilege, Smears and Conspiracies Aimed at Tell MAMA
Apart from this being fantastical thinking, we can add this to the conspiratorial thrust of what has been thrown at us – that we are somehow secretly monitoring Muslims. Our experiences of Byline Times have been listed here and here, though now we have to deal with what we can only call a serious deficit or shortfall in understanding what a third party hate crime reporting service is.
In other words, the central premise of Byline’s article on our data is that we are not reflecting the whole state of anti-Muslim hate in the U.K. This also shows that their reporting is not in good faith, since they are attempting to hold Tell MAMA to a bar that no other community hate crime reporting service is held to. No third party hate crime reporting service will have data that is higher than police forces. That is a simple fact and it is impossible to record all hate crimes and particularly difficult given the scale, nature, geographical location and nationality of British Muslims from over 50 Muslim majority countries.
Byline Times will suggest that we under-estimate the scale of anti-Muslim hate crimes. Again, we are not meant, nor resourced to be an organisation that looks for hate incidents or crimes on the internet or at a street level. We report on what is provided to us by victims, and which is unsolicited. Byline will also suggest that between 2017-2022, the police recorded 19,146 anti-Muslim hate crimes for England and Wales. They will also suggest that Tell MAMA/Faith Matters reported on 13,143 anti-Muslim hate crimes during this period.
Even by their own figures, we provided over 60% of cases to police forces, over 95% of which would not have been received by them. This is the fundamental point, and this is a collaborative and not competitive process.
What is also important to note is that Tell MAMA is the only hate crime service working with British Muslim communities that has an information sharing agreement and is a trusted partner with police services in England and Wales. Once again, this is a collaborative process, not a competitive one since we are a third party reporting service for people who don’t want to report to the police.
So let us summarise:
- The role of Tell MAMA is to provide a monitoring and victim support service to British Muslims (and others) who suffer targeted hate or discrimination. Each individual receives a wrap-around multi-layered service from Tell MAMA which supports their emotional well-being whilst ensuring that we either advocate for them, collect evidence, support them at courts or work with them through a range of complicated and interlinked agencies such as local authorities, GP’s and other local services.
- We do not go looking for cases or seeking material online or offline. If we did so, we would be here with a workload that would far exceed the limited resources we have and the data would not be credible. Of course, the numbers of cases we receive will be less than the police and 95% of the cases, when analysed by Tell MAMA, do not initially get reported to the police. That is the point of Tell MAMA, to provide another access and route so that people can get access to justice. In doing so, the data that we collect is unique in the client reporting it to us as a trusted partner and which helps the police build up a national picture of hot-spots and trends, assess where there may be issues specific to local areas, make arrests etc. Additionally, some of the cases are related to employment and discrimination in goods and services or housing and which are not fed into the police. (Those involving risk to life, assaults, threat of assaults, far right agitation etc are just some examples of what is fed into police forces.)
- Tell MAMA has been in existence for about a decade and in that period our data and access by people has significantly built up. (Even Byline’s figures in their article will show a year on year growth in reporting). We are therefore the largest non-police hate crime reporting service for British Muslims in the U.K. There is no doubt about that and for Byline Times to deny the value of this in supporting victims and in giving statutory authorities a richer picture of what is taking place, is disingenuous. Furthermore, naturally, our figures will not be higher than police forces in England and Wales. That is a fact and we have never suggested this.
Trust and confidence in getting communities to report in is a slow and difficult process and more work is needed to ensure that we can remain a service that people, (who don’t want to report into the police), can do so through us. That is one of the fundamental principles of Tell MAMA.Tell MAMA has been in existence since 2011/2012 and this year will report on the highest number of recorded cases.Also, we do not include police data in our total tally of cases, whereas other hate crime reporting services do. That shows unique organic growth and traction in Muslim communities and the fact that this work takes time, resource and decades of consistency.
For example, the Community Security Trust (the CST), which monitors antisemitism in the U.K. was registered as a charity in 1994 and has been working in this area for 30 years. This is our twelfth year of work, where the range, types of nationality, geographical spread and complexity within Muslim communities and dare we say, a fear of statutory agencies in some parts of them, makes this work exceptionally difficult. However, according to Byline Times, they don’t do nuance, but look at people in terms of figures, thereby doing a grave injustice to people and to this work.
- We also have to ask why Byline Times think that damaging Tell MAMA’s standing or reputation helps add value to monitoring anti-Muslim hate incidents. It simply means that people who do not want to report to the police, have fewer opportunities to, if we close. Precisely how does this help to counter anti-Muslim hate and support the victims of it?
- According to Byline Times, the police data is ‘flawed’ (their term in text sent to us), and the data of Tell MAMA is not useful. We wonder whose data they may consider as being truly useful going forward if the police data and Tell MAMA data is flawed etc. A genuine question – whose data do they think is reliable? Or shall we start guessing by some of the types of people and organisations on Byline’s web-site and who have written on their platform and who have a history of community divisiveness?
We should also add that the article that they will publish in the coming days belittles both agencies, (the police and Tell MAMA), and then suggests that there is significant under-reporting in anti-Muslim hate cases, according to the Crime Survey for England and Wales. How is their article supporting trust and confidence in either agency and again, how is this helping the work on countering anti-Muslim hate? - Tell MAMA fully acknowledges and has always accepted that significant under-reporting of anti-Muslim hate takes place and this is a real issue. There is no disagreement on this, yet to suggest that the people who report to us and who get assistance and help by us, is less than useful work in building a better picture of the state of anti-Muslim hate in the U.K. is plainly perverse. Byline Times seems to take a ‘slash and burn’ approach in making the case about building up a stronger picture of the state of anti-Muslim hate. In using numbers they detach this work away from the human element and impact and the emotional and physical cost to people’s lives, and they fundamentally demean a third party services which gives access and opportunity to those who don’t want to report to the police.
- Lastly, Byline Times also assumes that with the limited resources we have, we should be able to accumulate higher figures of anti-Muslim hate than police forces; as though when there is a physical attack, Tell MAMA would have the resources to be able to record every incident that the police gets to, and where the majority of British Muslims should approach Tell MAMA first. Both of these positions show breath-taking naivety, based on fantastical and magical thinking and again, overlie an insidious attempt to undermine the work of Tell MAMA. Furthermore, comparing our resources to police forces in England and Wales is quite a stretch of the imagination.
So, there we have it – Byline Times. Clearly in a place where psilocybin can’t even reach.