2 | Experiences of serious harm Like the ECAJ report, the Islamophobia in Australia report offers powerful anecdotal information about the personal effects of Islamophobic abuse. For example: • A Muslim man reported an incident on a train trip he took with his wife and three children, all aged under ten. His wife wears the hijab. Another man on the train approached the family and asked if they were Muslim. When he found out they were, he verbally abused the parents. He then approached the children and said he would ‘love to kill them all’. The man told the Islamophobia Register: ‘I cannot forget that journey for my entire life as I was sitting helplessly and watching him abuse myself, my wife and my children’.16 • A man praying in a car park was told to ‘get your own country’. He said: ‘I felt terrorised, harassed and scared by this man just because of my faith’.17 • Another woman was verbally abused while accompanied by her six-year-old daughter at a train station. She said: ‘How do I explain to a little child the harshest realities of religious and cultural discrimination Muslims are facing throughout the world?’18 10 Roundtables The roundtables held by the AHRC and VEOHRC also canvassed the experiences of people of faith. Although Australia has not experienced an incident of racial or religious hatred on the scale of the Christchurch killings, many roundtable participants expressed the view that incidents of violence, abuse and intimidation against members of their communities, both online and offline, were increasing. As well as detailing several cases of serious harms, roundtable participants pointed to an increasing atmosphere of hostility and discrimination, which can create an environment in which serious harms can occur. Incidents reported had begun at an early age. One participant spoke of a Muslim girl who had been labelled a ‘terrorist’ from her early years at school. A female teacher from a Muslim primary school recounted a public excursion where a man in the street verbally abused a group of her students, who were in school uniform. Though she reported this incident to the police, it was not taken further. When the teacher tried to address the incident with her students, they told her not to worry, as they had experienced this kind of abuse in public before: ‘We’ll get over it’, they said.