From Post Industrial
When Shaimaa Houri Zada, a 14-year-old Chartiers Valley High School student, limped into her ninth-grade art class, her skin was flushed and bruises had begun to form across her neck and face.
Just a few minutes earlier, on Friday, December 14, 2018, she stopped to use the restroom between classes. She was ambushed there: confronted, punched, and kicked in a bathroom stall. She thought the aftermath would be the same as usual — that no one would notice that she’d been brutalized by fellow students outside her teachers’ watch.
“I just went back to class,” Shaimaa said in an interview with Postindustrial, publicly describing the attack for the first time. This wasn’t new to her. She had been so badly bullied at her previous high school — Carlynton High School in Carnegie, Pennsylvania — that she transferred to Chartiers to escape.
Shaimaa, a Muslim who wore a hijab to school, emigrated from Syria with her family, seeking refuge in the United States from the brutality of the ongoing Syrian civil war. Shaimaa kept this information private, not discussing it with her classmates. Her differences — her language barrier, hijab, and skin tone — without any context, made her a target for bullying. Fellow students called her “psycho”. They called her “terrorist.”
She reported the comments to teachers, she said, but teachers often didn’t know how to deal with the teasing, the bullying. Administrators would send her, sometimes twice per day, to the principal’s office. She didn’t understand why, and the attention only brought more teasing from her classmates.
And then there were incidents like this one.
“I thought no one was going to do anything, like always,” she said.
Instead, the teacher asked her what happened, and after Shaimaa explained, the teacher called the principal to the classroom, who then alerted her parents. As she awaited their arrival, standing with a school resource officer outside the school entrance, Shaimaa fainted. The school resource officer called an ambulance, and she woke up in the Children’s Hospital of Pittsburgh, where she would spend two nights. She’d sustained severe bruises across her face in the attack, along with a concussion that would lead to more doctor’s appointments, and a neck injury that required a brace. She had been a student at Chartiers Valley for two months. Shaimaa and her family had been living in Pittsburgh as Syrian refugees for almost a year and a half.
They didn’t realize that a video of the attack would soon go viral, broadcasting their family’s pain, experience, and story to the world.
