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Melanie Sharma-Barrow and her 12-year-old daughter were abused by a New World shopper who spilled a right-wing theory in Auckland.
A mother of three who was racially abused by another supermarket shopper with “chilling composure” says society still seems unprepared to criticize far-right beliefs.
Melanie Sharma-Barrow and her 12-year-old daughter were at the fish counter at their local New World, Victoria Park, Auckland, on Friday at 12.30pm when a woman in her 20s and 30s came up repeating a sentence she couldn’t. hear. .
“The fourth time I heard it quite clearly: you are not that high on the tree of evolution.”
Sharma-Barrow said the supermarket failed to act, police were slow to act and hate speech should be taken more seriously. He fears that little has been learned from the terrorist attacks on the Christchurch mosque.
A Foodstuffs spokeswoman defended how its staff handled the incident, saying the customer was understood to have a mental condition. But Sharma-Barrow said that mental illness and racism are not synonymous and that it is too often used as an excuse.
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He tried to walk away to get the wife away from his daughter, saying “it wasn’t very nice.”
“She kept saying: you are shorter than us.”
The woman removed her mask to “tell us what she thought of our condition.”
A man who claimed to be her father told the woman that she was wrong, asked her to apologize, and said that “sometimes she says things like this.”
“The woman was calm. It was chilling, ”Sharma-Barrow said.
During the entire interaction, “no one person got involved,” so he went to speak to the staff.
“I said: I was just a victim of racial abuse, where have you been?”
RNZ
While more comprehensive hate speech legislation is expected to be announced, crafting specific offenses for the most serious hate crimes is not on the agenda.
A group of young women on staff graciously rallied around her and her daughter.
Staff members also expressed feeling racially attacked by the comments, but they didn’t seem to have much power other than looking at the abuser until she was so uncomfortable that she left the store, Sharma-Barrow said.
No security guards came to her aid, and she questioned how big corporations planned to stop incidents that could spark violence.
“I’m amazed that in light of everything that happened in Christchurch … if something goes wrong, everyone is ill-prepared.”
Foodstuffs New Zealand’s director of corporate affairs, Antoinette Laird, said staff “took the appropriate steps at the time to monitor the situation.”
“The customer is a regular visitor to the store and we understand that they have a mental health condition that may have contributed to the exchange.”
The company believed that some situations should be handled “delicately” and the store decided that a “calm and gentle approach to handling the problem would provide a better outcome for everyone.”
Sharma-Barrow said it received a call from a store manager Monday afternoon that appeared to suggest that Foodstuffs had not investigated the events.
He said the manager confirmed that they did not even know the woman’s name, so mental health could not be given as a defense.
Sharma-Barrow was told that the store would hand over CCTV footage to the police and that they would ban the woman if she returned.
“[The manager] I fully took into account our concerns that it might have gotten worse, and came away thinking they had learned lessons for the future about mental health and racism. “
Sharma-Barrow believed that everyone had a responsibility to stop hate speech regardless of someone’s mental illness.
Sharma-Barrow reported the incident to police and was told by an officer that he was disappointed that the supermarket had not taken the abusive customer’s details. On Monday, he was told that a file had not been created, 72 hours after he reported it.
Police were unable to trace details about the incident and answer for Stuff’s deadline.
