HALIFAX—A teenage girl in Halifax said she felt frozen with fear when a man yelled anti-Muslim insults at her this week on a downtown street.

“I never thought it would happen to me. It made me feel so out of place, and like I don’t belong here,” she said in an interview Wednesday.

Halifax Regional Police confirmed that a report was filed just before 11 p.m. Monday about a confrontation that happened between a woman and a man around 3 p.m. at the corner of Spring Garden Rd. and Queen St.

Const. Amy Edwards, a spokesperson for the police, said the man reportedly used “abusive and derogatory language,” towards the woman, who later called to report the incident.

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StarMetro spoke with the 17-year-old girl, who wishes to remain anonymous for fear that her alleged attacker could see her name in the news and seek her out.

She said she’s lived in Halifax for more than three years and is going into her second year at Dalhousie University. She said she has regularly walked from the Sexton campus on Barrington St. to a bus stop on Spring Garden Rd.

She said when she left class around 3 p.m. on Monday, she donned her headphones, as usual, and turned the volume up on her music while she walked, alone, towards the bus. She was near the Halifax Central Library when she noticed a man trying to get her attention.

“A guy was in my face and he looked like he was yelling, so I took my headphones out and said, ‘Excuse me?’ So he just turned around again and said, ‘F— you, f— all Muslims.’”

She said he also told her to go back to her home country — a cutting remark, she added, because she considers Canada her home. She was born in Egypt and grew up in Saudi Arabia before moving to Halifax.

The woman was wearing a hijab at the time of the incident, as she’s done every day for the past two years. She said nothing like this has ever happened to her before.

The experience was shocking, alienating and terrifying, she said.

“I was really scared that he might be armed or have a weapon or something. So my instinct was just, run away, get the first bus, whatever bus it is, get on it and just find your way back home.”

She said she cried on the bus home, overwhelmed, trying to process what happened.

“It was a very terrible feeling, and I kind of just wanted to go back home and just sit with my mom and my dad and … be in a place where I feel like I belong.”

She didn’t immediately report the incident because she didn’t know she could. But when she told a friend the story several hours after it happened, the friend urged her to call the police.

Edwards said people can and should tell police about any instances of potential harassment, such as this one.

“It’s kind of important that people know that if they have a situation like this, where they’re scared or unsafe, that they need to call the police, and we go to all kinds of situations and investigate each one of them individually,” she said.

The woman’s description of the man was not “great,” according to Edwards, so police are looking for any video footage or witnesses that could help them identify the man. The woman said he was white, in his 20s or 30s, and of average height.

A friend of the girl shared her story on Twitter on the day it happened. Houssam Elokda said he tweeted about it because he didn’t want the alleged anti-Muslim attack to go unnoticed.

“Islamophobia is a very real issue. It’s something that should not be taken lightly, and I thought it was very important that people know that this type of hate can exist within any society,” he said in an interview.

“The correct way to respond to it is not to ignore it and pretend it’s not there, but it’s to acknowledge it and face it head-on,” he added.

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The girl said there were plenty of people on the busy street who walked by as the incident was happening. She said people looked on in surprise, but no one immediately intervened.

“I don’t want to say like, ‘Oh my God, people should have intervened.’ I took a quick action and kind of just ran away as soon as he started yelling at me, so I don’t know if people talked to him or not (afterwards),” she said.

“The whole thing was just like two, three minutes. But you know, what happens in two or three minutes can stay with you for life.”

She said a friend is driving her home from school until she feels “100 per cent comfortable” walking on her own again.

Taryn Grant is a Halifax-based reporter and a freelance contributor for StarMetro. Follow her on Twitter: @tarynalgrant

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