The Friday after Donald Trump won the U.S. presidential election, London, Ont.-based Javeed Sukhera — a Muslim — was driving to Seattle with his family.

At the border, his 8-year-old daughter looked petrified. Then his 6-year-old son spoke up. “Are they going to put us in jail? Are they going to shoot us?”

As a child and adult psychiatrist, Sukhera had been dealing with children of refugees and immigrants who were struggling with trauma, but this experience hit home. “This is something that’s much more powerful than anything I’d imagined.”

Sukhera grew up in Toronto where he says he had “very little negative experiences for the most part.

“Yet I see through the eyes of my children that they’re internalizing some very negative information about being brown and being Muslim.”

Forget Darth Vader or the Joker or Cruella de Vil. Kids now have a real-life embodiment of terror in a man whose rhetoric gets him stamped on the flip side of the Daesh (ISIS) coin because he scapegoats entire communities for the actions of a few. Books such as Where the Wild Things Are help children learn to navigate fear because of the distance between reality and fiction. Trump and his gallery of rogues offer no such buffer.

Parents and teachers usually expose their children to U.S. election campaigns as a resource for learning. This time, though, as the campaign unfolded, many scrambled to shield their children from the intimidation that reached their homes after shortsighted politicians used a teaching tool to scar the adults of tomorrow.

South of the border, “The Trump Effect” — the name of a survey of 2,000 teachers by the Southern Poverty Law Center in April — shed light on the disturbing increase in bullying in schools against vulnerable students including Muslims and immigrants.

In Canada, where hate crime reports across the country have increased in the past few weeks, there is no research yet to quantify the effect of racial and ethnic alienation on children. Sukhera’s clinical experience shows two vulnerable groups are hurting from the hate — younger North American-born Muslim children and newcomer youth with pre-existing mental illnesses such as depression, anxiety or resettlement trauma.

These are not children of recent immigrants and refugees — for them everything is still new and exciting — but of those who have been here a few years.

“With Syrian immigrants … I found that specific to post-Nov. 9, there is an increased fear,” Sukhera says. “So you feel more on edge, your fight or flight response becomes more exaggerated and a sense of fear that becomes hyperactive, for example, in cases of full blown post-traumatic stress. People become more hyper vigilant.”

Psychiatrists on both sides of the border are saying Trump’s election was a trigger that destabilized those who had found stability.

“You have a huge burden of trauma, on top of that, you have the intimidation of being harassed as a minority because the POTUS-elect made it okay to say those things on TV and (in) public,” Boston-based, Harvard-educated child and adolescent psychiatrist Othman Mohammad says. “This is too much stress for anyone to handle … let alone be struggling patients with mental illnesses.”

In the past few years, American and Canadian public figures — themselves bathed in privilege — have dehumanized Muslims with a casualness that is breathtakingly myopic and inconsiderate of the world they will leave to children of the 99 per cent.

How do children who are targeted deal with their vulnerability when faced with sneering hostility?

Teenagers have a higher capacity to process the world in times of conflict. They can rationalize, talk to friends, read online to see what’s being talked about, says Mohammad, who is also a school psychiatrist.

With elementary school age children, “the way they read the world is highly, highly dependent on how the parents are actually reading the world.”

“That functions at the level of what is being said but also at the level of (what is) being felt,” Mohammad says. “Even if the parents were saying ‘We’re going to be OK,’ but they look scared and worried, the children can read that worry on their parents’ faces.”

So they might misread, they might exaggerate, they might think they will get deported.

If Muslims are bad, “Are we bad?” Sukhera’s daughter once asked him. “Am I bad?”

Remember Sophia, the 8-year-old Texan, who began packing her belongings in a suitcase in December lest the U.S. army came to throw her family out of America?

“This child does not have the power or knowledge to say, ‘OK, but this is a country with institutions. Nobody can just leave like that’,” Mohammad says.

At least Sophia’s story elicited the graceful #IWillProtectYou from U.S. army vets who let her know that if anyone came to take her away, they would protect her. Most children don’t get that societal reassurance.

Loading... Loading... Loading... Loading... Loading... Loading...

Also at risk are kids, age 13 or 14, who are at a phase where they are trying to figure out who they are, where they fit in. “The Trump Effect is such that all of a sudden you’re questioning not so much whether you belong, but whether the people who welcomed you and work alongside you believe that you do belong,” Sukhera says.

“That’s what I’ve seen people struggle with the most.”

Shree Paradkar tackles issues of race and gender. You can follow her @shreeparadkar

Read more about: