Rucha Kaur
April 18, 2024 | 4 min. read | Analysis
The Sikh community in the United States has known for years that our youth experience disproportionate and bias-based bullying in schools. From individual microaggressions to the most egregious cases of persistent harassment and shocking violence, these lived experiences of our children are intensely real to our community—as is, all too often, a lack of action or accountability to help.
Now, however, our community has a new source of hard data to validate these facts, along with a host of new recommendations and resources to move forward toward positive change.
Last year, the Sikh Coalition—a U.S.-based civil rights organization with more than two decades of experience countering anti-Sikh hate and discrimination, including severe school bullying cases—launched the Sikh Student Survey. With the aid of volunteers, gurdwara leaders, Khalsa schools, and allied organizations across the nation, we reached more than 2,000 Sikh youth in 30 different states with questions about bullying, classroom inclusivity, and other aspects of school climate.
After analyzing the data with our academic partners, we now have arguably the most up-to-date and in-depth exploration of Sikh students’ experiences in the United States.
The results paint an alarming picture.
Sikh youth continue to be bullied at rates higher than the national average, but they don’t necessarily recognize that the treatment they are enduring is, in fact, bullying. For example, 49 percent of our respondents said that they were bullied, but 78 percent described experiencing behavior that qualifies as bullying. Similarly, 82 percent reported experiencing at least one microaggression, but most of them did not describe the behavior in question as bullying; 73 percent of the students who said they were never bullied reported experiencing at least one microaggression.
Depending on your perspective, these data present interesting or alarming questions about how Sikh students view bullying and what qualifies as acceptable treatment of themselves by non-Sikh peers. Is the discrepancy between actual and self-reported bullying, or whether or not a microaggression ‘counts’ as bullying, a function of resilience, confusion, or some other factor among our youth?
Regardless of the reasoning, however, the consequences are unfortunately significant: Sikh students who experience any form of bullying or microaggressions generally registered worse mental health outcomes.
It is arguably equally disturbing that Sikh students are not getting the support and help they need. In perhaps the most egregious finding from the study, 11 percent of students reported being bullied by a teacher or other school staff—the most frequent instances of such behavior included “mispronounced my name on purpose,” “made fun of my accent or a family’ member’s accent,” and “touched or pulled my religious head covering.” This kind of behavior, while extreme, surely relates to low confidence among students when it comes to reporting bullying incidents: 74 percent of Sikh students claimed to know how to report bullying at their school, but 46 percent “never” or “almost never” do—possibly because 63 percent said that teachers or staff “almost never” or “never” intervened in bullying that was happening right in front of them.
One additional finding that merits special mention is that Sikh boys—especially those who keep dastaars or patkas—experience not only more bullying, but more physical, violent forms of bullying. To be sure, the experiences of all our youth matter tremendously, regardless of their gender identity. But we cannot ignore this added stress experienced by young Sikh males given that the United States, and indeed much of the world, is grappling with how to better navigate what increasingly appears to be varied and complex crises among men.
All these data underscore tremendous challenges for Sikh students, but they are also the foundation for a set of more than 50 policy recommendations within WAYRF to combat bias-based bullying, facilitate student safety, collect bullying data, and provide for student mental health. Policy-makers at every level—in the White House and federal agencies, Congress, state legislatures, and state and local education agencies—have roles to play in addressing these issues, as do administrators and teachers.
Our sangat, however, also has a responsibility to step up.
We must continue to take our children’s education and representation into our own hands, starting conversations and sharing resources with teachers. We must be civically engaged so that our elected officials know our community and take our calls for safe and inclusive schools seriously. And we must recognize that whatever our personal or cultural bias brings us, the realities of the system that our students exist in today—from the new risks of cyberbullying to the lack of cultural competence in American schools to a justice system that fundamentally does not treat Black or brown children fairly—mean that parental intervention in bullying isn’t just a matter of telling kids to ‘toughen up’ and looking the other way.
Just as every parent’s foremost goal is for their own children to grow and thrive, we can make the betterment of all our children’s educational experiences a collective goal of the Sangat. This starts with an honest accounting of the problem, but it persists with a chardi kala spirit to achieving meaningful change.
Rucha Kaur is the Community Development Director at the Sikh Coalition, the nation’s largest Sikh civil rights organization. View “Where Are You Really From? A National Sikh School Climate Report” online via thesikh.co/WAYRF.
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