A shocking investigation by Byline Times has revealed that Tell MAMA (Measuring Anti-Muslim Attacks), a UK government-funded agency monitoring anti-Muslim hate crimes, has systematically underestimated the national scale of incidents.

Tell MAMA was formed in 2012 as an initiative of the community interest company Faith Matters and receives millions of pounds in public funding as the Government’s flagship agency monitoring anti-Muslim hate crimes.

But, from 2017 to 2022, the figures it has compiled are consistently lower than anti-Muslim hate crime statistics published by the Home Office based on police data – raising fundamental questions about the accuracy and value of Tell MAMA’s figures.

A Byline Times analysis comparing Crime Survey estimates with Home Office data shows that police records severely under-report anti-Muslim hate crimes in Britain by nearly 90%. This suggests that Tell MAMA’s data provides an even poorer picture – failing to capture what is likely to be many tens of thousands of incidents every year.

As anti-Muslim hatred appears to have reached epidemic levels since 2019, the Government lacks the institutional capacity to understand the scale of this national crisis.

Faith Matters did not respond directly to this newspaper’s questions.

Instead, it replied through its legal representatives, Mishcon de Reya, and published a public response. According to Mishcon de Reya, Tell MAMA’s under-reporting is entirely legitimate as the agency cannot be expected to report more incidents than the police – even though other hate crime monitoring services such as the Community Security Trust tend to produce higher figures for antisemitic hate incidents than those published by the Home Office.

A Decade of Failure?

Last July, Tell MAMA published a major report, ‘A Decade of Anti-Muslim Hate’. This was the first time it had released statistics on anti-Muslim hate crimes since its annual report in March 2020.

According to Mishcon de Reya, “this shows that the number of cases reported has increased steadily over time, including increasing from 1,223 in 2016 to 2,301 in 2021”. It described the report as evidence of Tell MAMA’s national monitoring service since 2012.

“The figure for 2022 is 2,656 and the figure for 2023, which is yet to be published, is higher still… In total, over 20,000 Muslims in the UK have used Tell MAMA’s reporting and monitoring service.”

But, from 2017 to 2022, Tell MAMA’s statistics were consistently lower than anti-Muslim hate crime figures published by the Home Office based on police data.

This is particularly questionable given that, as the UK Statistics Authority points out, police data systematically underestimates hate crimes. Under-reporting is likely worse for anti-Muslim hate crimes due to a lack of trust among communities in how authorities deal with such issues.

For 2017/18, the Home Office reported 2,965 anti-Muslim hate crimes for England and Wales based on police data. For 2017, Tell MAMA reported 1,400 anti-Muslim hate crimes across the entirety of the UK (1,565 fewer cases).

The Home Office reported 3,530 anti-Muslim hate crimes for 2018/19; Tell MAMA reported 2,000 for 2018 (1,530 fewer). The Home Office reported 3,089 for 2019/20; Tell MAMA reported 2,100 for 2019 (503 fewer). The Home Office reported 2,703 for 2020/21; Tell MAMA reported 2,200 for 2020 (503 fewer). The Home Office reported 3,459 for 2021/22; Tell MAMA reported 2,301 for 2021 (1,158 fewer). The Home Office reported 3400 for 2022/23; Tell MAMA reported 2,656 for 2022 (744 fewer).

Despite stating that it works in close cooperation with UK police forces, Tell MAMA’s 10-year report throws little light on how the cases logged in this period relate to police data. The report also adopts a way of categorizing each year that isn’t consistent with Home Office annual reporting, further undermining ways to compare data.

If Tell MAMA’s national monitoring service was robust and useful, its figures would be expected to fill the gaps missed due to police under-reporting.

Overall, from 2017 to 2022, the police recorded 19,146 anti-Muslim hate crimes for England and Wales (excluding Scotland). In the same period – which is when Faith Matters ceased mentioning that it was running a national anti-Muslim hate crime monitoring service in its CIC filings – Tell MAMA reported 13,143 anti-Muslim hate crimes for England, Scotland and Wales combined – 6,003 fewer than the police figures.

Tell MAMA’s figures in this period were, on average, 32% lower than police data.

Police Not Seeing Most Anti-Muslim Hate Crimes

Tell MAMA’s figures therefore offer even less of a useful picture than that provided by flawed police data.

How badly police data under-reports anti-Muslim hate crimes can be understood by comparing data from the Crime Survey for England and Wales, which provides large-scale statistics based on long-term trends derived from surveying the public, with recorded police data published by the Home Office.

The latest available data from the Crime Survey is for 2019/20. It shows that the estimated number of hate crimes was about 190,000. That is approximately 45% higher than hate crimes recorded by the police which were 105,090, indicating that police figures are nearly half the real scale of hate crimes.

The gap is even wider for anti-Muslim hate crimes.

That year, the Crime Survey estimated that 0.8% of the Muslim population (about 3.8 million people according to the 2021 Census) had experienced religiously-motivated hate crimes – which would translate into an estimated 30,400 people experiencing hate crimes. In contrast, the police recorded just 3,089 anti-Muslim hate crimes.

According to the latest data, then, the police under-report anti-Muslim hate crimes by a little under 90%.

Given that Tell MAMA’s statistics from 2017 to 2022 are overall 32% lower than police figures, this suggests that Tell MAMA underestimates the scale of anti-Muslim hate crimes in Britain even further – by more than 90%.

And, after 12 years in operation, Tell MAMA not only appears to lack any strategy to do anything about this, but seems reluctant to even acknowledge the problem.

Distorting the National Picture

The statistical significance of missing more than 90% of anti-Muslim hate crimes cannot be overstated. It means that anti-Muslim hatred is now a national crisis – but one the Government is largely blind to.

Earlier this year, Tell MAMA reported 2,010 incidents of anti-Muslim hatred between 7 October 2023 and 7 February 2024. This is likely to be a small fraction of the real number, which could be closer to more than 20,000 hate crimes (the same number of users Tell MAMA says it has served since 2012).

Tell MAMA’s figures obscure rather than illuminate this crisis, leaving the Government asleep at the wheel on one of the most divisive issues of our time – a challenge which plagues both political parties.

The prevailing approach to this crisis is not based on reality, but on statistical artefacts derived from a tiny fraction of actual incidents.

When Byline Times’ findings were put to Faith Matters for comment, Mishcon de Reya made clear that it wanted this newspaper to refrain from publishing the article until it had sent over a “substantive” reply. Before that reply was sent, however, Tell MAMA published a statement on its website responding to Byline Times’ analysis of its figures.

In this statement, Tell MAMA did not dispute the analysis, but claimed that “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”.

“We are not meant, nor resourced to be, an organization that looks for hate incidents or crimes on the internet or at a street level,” it said. “We report on what is provided to us by victims, and which is unsolicited.”

It added: “No third-party hate crime reporting service will have data that is higher than police forces. That is a simple fact.”

Yet, during the past five years, figures for antisemitic incidents in the UK produced annually by the Community Security Trust (CST) – the Jewish community service which Tell MAMA was modelled on – have been consistently higher than national police figures.

For 2023, CST reported 4,103 incidents of anti-Jewish hate, whereas the Home Office recorded only 1,510 anti-Jewish hate-crimes in this period. In 2021, CST reported 2,261 incidents, while the Home Office recorded 1,288 incidents. In 2020, CST recorded 1,684 antisemitic incidents, while the Home Office recorded 1,205 incidents. (In the past five years, CST figures were only lower than police figures in 2022, by around 300 reports).

The Tell MAMA statement appears to concede that the organization does little in terms of outreach work to ensure that it can detect cases more accurately, noting: “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.”

It accepted that “of course, the numbers of cases we receive will be less than the police”.

Given that police data systematically fails to capture the vast majority of cases of anti-Muslim hate incidents across the country, Tell MAMA’s statement is notable for at once admitting that its figures are even lower than the police’s, while simultaneously failing to acknowledge that missing 90% of anti-Muslim hate crimes is a problem that must be urgently addressed.

The evidence of poor quality data reinforces concerns raised by cross-bench peer Baroness Shaista Gohir – supported by a number of British Muslim members of the House of Lords including former Conservative Party co-chair Baroness Sayeeda Warsi – in several letters sent to ministers of the last Government, seen exclusively by Byline Times.

As reported in the first part of this investigation, those letters raised concerns about Tell MAMA’s opaque governance, its lack of transparency in use of public funds, poor data practices, and a lack of accountability.

Against this backdrop, the question of how the new Labour Government will address rising Islamophobia and anti-Muslim hatred is urgent but unclear.

Faith Matters appears to have spent a considerable resources attempting to silence criticism, rather than addressing concerns. The idea of a government-funded entity threatening litigation to block publication of criticisms of its work raises a question of its own: is it financing this using public funds? Like much else about the organization, we may never know.

Source: Byline Times