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New data has revealed over the past year, the number of anti-Asian hate incidents - which can include shunning, slurs and physical attacks - is greater than previously reported. And a disproportionate number of attacks have been directed at women.

The research released by reporting forum Stop AAPI Hate on Tuesday revealed nearly 3,800 incidents were reported over the course of roughly a year during the pandemic. It's a significantly higher number than last year's count of about 2,600 hate incidents nationwide over the span of five months. Women made up a far higher share of the reports, at 68 percent, compared to men, who made up 29 percent of respondents. The nonprofit does not report incidents to police.

Russell Jeung, professor of Asian American studies at San Francisco State University and the forum's founder, told NBC Asian America that the coalescence of racism and sexism, including the stereotype that Asian women are meek and subservient, likely factors into this disparity.

"There is an intersectional dynamic going on that others may perceive both Asians and women and Asian women as easier targets," he said.

The data, which includes incidents that occurred between March 19 of last year and Feb. 28 of this year, shows that roughly 503 incidents took place in 2021 alone. Verbal harassment and shunning were the most common types of discrimination, making up 68.1 percent and 20.5 percent of the reports respectively. The third most common category, physical assault, made up 11.1 percent of the total incidents. More than a third of incidents occurred at businesses, the primary site of discrimination, while a quarter took place in public streets.

According to the data, Asian women report hate incidents 2.3 times more than men. A further examination of the submitted reports showed that in many cases, the verbal harassment that women received reflected the very intersection of racism and sexism.

One Chinese American woman reported that a "man on the subway slapped my hands, threatened to throw his lighter at me, then called me a 'c---- b----.' He then said to 'get the f--- out of NYC.'" Another woman, who's Filipino American, reported that while in a Washington, D.C., metro station with her boyfriend, a man shouted "Chinese b----" at her, coughed at the couple and physically threatened them.

Jeung emphasized that women have always dealt with harassment from men and public safety issues more broadly. But the pandemic, he said, has provided another "excuse" for people to target Asian women.

"We've noticed that from the very beginning, it's been a real consistent pattern," Jeung said. "Bullies attack who they think are vulnerable, and we see this in our elderly and youth populations."

Jeung cautioned against describing the latest numbers as a sudden "surge" in hate incidents because many of the 2020 incidents were reported retroactively in 2021, according to the report, and there has always been a "clear" issue of underreporting in the community.

"We thought we had a lull or it seemed like there was a lull over the summer, but I think people were just reporting less and that it became sort of normalized," he explained. "But now with increased attention, I think people are reporting again. I think that there's been a continued harassment of Asians and now we're continuing to see that reported."

The wave of violence directed at Asian American seniors at the beginning of the year, particularly the graphic attacks that have been captured on video, have likely prompted more attention from both the community and mainstream media, Jeung said. And it's galvanized a vocal response that's likely led to more reporting.

While these attacks on elders have catalyzed calls for action, Jeung made a distinction between this particular violence, most of which has not been found to be explicitly racially motivated, and the racism those in the community have been facing due to the problematic link between the virus and Asian Americans.

"I think there are separate trends, the violence that we're seeing now and the racism we saw last year, but they are related," Jeung said. "We're really careful to note that this violence against Asian Americans in high-crime neighborhoods has always been high. And so the combination of both the racism from last year and crimes against Asian elderly are now significant enough to get national attention."

The scholar noted that this doesn't negate the possibility of implicit bias in these attacks on elders, but he cautioned against grouping the two trends as one issue.

"That's the problem - people conflate it," he said. "So decoupling them then helps diagnose different solutions."

Karthick Ramakrishnan, founder and director of demographic data and policy research nonprofit AAPI Data, previously also warned against defaulting to a "simplistic understanding of what's going on," adding that the violence cannot be neatly summed up by solely the heightened anti-Asian sentiment witnessed throughout the pandemic. He said a confluence of factors, including the effects of poverty and financial struggle exacerbated by the pandemic, as well as opportunity, could have played into it.

"There's a complex variety of factors, but the fundamental reality is that there's an increase in the number of Asian Americans who feel unsafe," he said.

Such issues have been elevated to the executive branch as President Joe Biden has addressed the issue of anti-Asian attacks. In addition to referencing the violence in his first national prime-time address Thursday night, he also signed a memorandum earlier this year that in part issued guidance on how the Justice Department should respond to the heightened number of anti-Asian bias incidents.

Jeung said addressing the root cause of the violence requires more education, more expanded civil rights protections and more restorative justice models. The memorandum - which focuses on hate incidents, rather than hate crimes - allows for a more holistic approach to combating racism against Asian Americans in public streets, transit, private businesses and other settings, he said.

"If you just narrowly focus on hate crimes, you only address a sliver of the racism that Asian Americans are experiencing," Jeung said. "Biden's memo that actually addresses hate incidents rather than hate crimes is actually helpful, because that gives us the opportunity to frame the issue comprehensively."

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There were 3,800 anti-Asian racist incidents, mostly against women, in past year

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"There is an intersectional dynamic going on that others may perceive both Asians and women and Asian women as easier targets," one professor said.

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BOSTON - A national spike in anti-Asian hate crimes - including a recent mass shooting in Atlanta that left eight people dead, six of them women of Asian descent - is prompting state lawmakers to push a bill they say would expand and clarify hate crime laws in Massachusetts.

Among other steps the bill would combine the state's two existing hate crimes laws and add gender and immigration status as protected classes when determining if a hate crime has been committed.

One of the co-sponsors of the bill, state Rep. Tram Nguyen, said during a legislative panel Wednesday that the Atlanta killings brought to the national consciousness the racial bias many Asian Americans experience.

"The rise in anti-Asian hate incidents did not come out of nowhere. There has been a long and troubling history of racism and discrimination," said Nguyen, a Democrat and the first Vietnamese American elected to the Massachusetts House.

Nguyen recalled in 2016 when she was a legal services attorney and speaking in Vietnamese to a client, a recent immigrant, outside a Boston courthouse when a man rode by on a bike and told her to get out of his country saying "you don't belong here."

"Ask any Asian person and I'm sure most of us will have stories to tell you about being ridiculed for the way we look, whether it's our slanted eyes or our small stature, for our accents for those of us who are newer immigrants," she added. "Even for those of us who have been in this country for generations, there's this general assumption that we're perpetual foreigners."

She said the pandemic has intensified anti-Asian stigma but added that hate crimes are not limited to those of Asian descent and are meant to terrorize not just individuals but entire communities.

The Senate co-sponsor of the bill, Democratic Sen. Adam Hinds, said the bill "is about saying loudly and clearly that violent bigotry is not acceptable."

He said the bill is not about creating new laws but combining and improving hate crimes laws already on the books. He also said the bill does not step on First Amendment rights and would not create new mandatory minimum sentences.

Besides adding gender and immigration status as protected classes, the bill seeks to make sentencing proportional to actions, strengthen penalties for repeat offenders, and clarify that bias has to be contributing factor - but not the only factor - for the hate crimes statute to kick in.

Massachusetts needs to send a clear message that hate crimes will not be tolerated, state Attorney General Maura Healey said.

Healey pointed to an attack Monday on an Asian American woman near New York City's Times Square during which the 65-year-old was kicked and stomped. Police have since arrested a 38-year-old man in connection with the assault.

"It's horrifying. It's so wrong," the Democrat said. "What's also problematic and wrong and disheartening is the fact that people witnessed that and did nothing."

"What does that say about where we are as a society?" Healey added. "What we have seen happening in our communities is unacceptable, can't be tolerated, and is really corrosive to the kind of communities that we're trying to aspire to be in this country."

The problem isn't helped when anti-Asian and other kinds of bias become normalized by those in elected office, Healey added.

Supporters of the bill say bias crimes aren't just focused on Asian individuals.

Evelyn Dolan said she became a victim of hate-based harassment when she moved into a new home and her neighbor began calling her by a racial slur, taunted her then-15-year-old daughter, and harassed visitors.

"He stands on the porch and holds up bananas and jumps around like a monkey. It's been a real terror," said Dolan, who also spoke at the legislative panel. "Most of us have experienced some type of racism, harassment in our lives but for me I never thought that the harassment would be in my home, my safe place, my family's safe place."

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Anti-Asian attacks prompt call for updated hate crimes law

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BOSTON - A national spike in anti-Asian hate crimes - including a recent mass shooting in Atlanta that left eight people dead, six of them women of Asian descent - is prompting state lawmakers to push a bill they say would expand and clarify hate crime laws in Massachusetts.

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https://www.nbcnews.com/news/asian-america/anti-asian-attacks-prompt-call-updated-hate-crimes-law-rcna576

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HRC responded to troubling federal data showing unacceptably high levels of hate crimes - and an increase in those targeting LGBTQ people - as disclosed by the FBI today.

Today's report shows that hate crimes based on sexual orientation represent 16.7% of hate crimes, the third largest category after race and religion. The report also shows an uptick in gender identity based hate crimes rising from 2.2% in 2018 to 2.7% in 2019.

"Yet another year with alarming levels of bias-motivated crimes underscores just how urgent it is to address this hate crimes epidemic. This year, we saw a tragic new record of fatal violence against transgender and gender non-conforming people in this country, particularly against Black and Brown transgender women. These alarming statistics represent real trauma for individuals and families across this country who have to bear the brunt of these hate crimes. As the Biden-Harris administration assumes office, we must recommit ourselves to advocating for mandatory hate crimes reporting across the country, better training for law enforcement officers to recognize bias-motivated crimes, and greater inclusion and equity in our communities."

Alphonso David, Human Rights Campaign President

Because reporting hate crimes to the FBI is not mandatory, these alarming statistics likely represent only a fraction of such violence. The number of law enforcement agencies reporting hate crimes data decreased by 451 from 2018 to 2019. 71 cities with populations exceeding 100,000 either did not report data to the FBI or affirmatively reported zero hate crimes which is clearly not credible. The lack of mandatory reporting means that the FBI data, while helpful, paints an incomplete picture of hate crimes against the LGBTQ and other communities.

That is why since the passage of the Matthew Shepard and James Byrd Jr. Hate Crimes Prevention Act (HCPA) in 2009, HRC has worked with the FBI to update the agency's crime reporting, from providing training materials to sharing details on hate crimes when they occur. HRC continues to press for improved reporting, passage of state laws that protect LGBTQ individuals from hate crimes and expanded education and training initiatives.

It's not only LGBTQ people who are affected by this epidemic of violence. Bias-motivated crimes based on race, religion, disability and gender remain at troublingly high levels. Racially-motivated crime remains the most common hate crime, with nearly half of race-based hate crimes targeting Black people. For the fourth year in a row, there was a significant uptick in hate crimes targeting the Latinx community, increasing 9% from last year. Crimes involving religion-based bias increased with crimes targeting Jewish people and Jewish institutions rising 14% and anti-Muslim hate crimes rising 16%.

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New FBI Hate Crimes Report Shows Increases in Anti-LGBTQ Attacks - HRC

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Skip to Content Share on Twitter LinkedIn Facebook Email HRC responded to troubling federal data showing unacceptably high levels of hate crimes - and an increase in those targeting LGBTQ people - as disclosed by the FBI today. Today's report shows that hate crimes based on sexual orientation represent 16.7% of hate crimes, the third largest category after race and religion.

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In April 2020, I wrote an article for Health magazine about the horrific rise in anti-Asian hate crimes during the COVID-19 pandemic, calling attention to different mental health resources that Asians can utilize. This was amid a small wave of national awareness and condemnation of these crimes. But after a few weeks, people got tired of paying attention to us. Asians, and the racism we faced, went back to being an invisible issue. Though I expected this, it didn't lessen the disappointment. Just because others were no longer listening to us doesn't mean these hate crimes stopped. If anything, throughout 2020 and into 2021, incidences of anti-Asian hate crimes only continued to skyrocket.

The Center for the Study of Hate & Extremism found that in 2020, anti‐Asian hate crimes grew by 149 percent. During the first year of this pandemic, Stop AAPI Hate (an online hate crime reporting center launched in March 2020) received nearly 3,800 reports of hate crimes against Asians. Plus, that number doesn't even take into account the many unreported incidents nor non-violent racist incidents against Asians. Using anti-Asian slurs, making slant eyes - these acts of racism, long categorized as "harmless," all contribute toward the myth that Asians are perpetual foreigners. This myth is why so many people readily attacked Asians after feeling empowered by the previous administration's racist rhetoric of the " China virus" and " Kung Flu."

On March 16, 2021, about a year after COVID-related anti-Asian racism began to escalate, a white man shot and killed eight people at three different massage parlors in the Atlanta area, six of whom were Asian women. This news felt like another massive blow to Asians - kicking us while we're still down. One year later, not only does it still feel like a hostile environment for Asians in America, but it's actually become even less safe for us to simply exist; Stop AAPI Hate reported that, between March 2020-Feb 2021, Asian women especially have been the targets of these hate crimes, and are 2.3 times more likely to report these incidents.

Do you know who's really having a bad day? Every Asian person since the start of this pandemic.

These days, I've recognized there is truly nothing as exhausting as begging others for the bare minimum of being viewed as human, of having the violence and murders toward your people be put on the news and acknowledged for what they are: hate crimes. I don't know how to explain to people why they should not be okay with Asians, mostly elders and women, being used as scapegoats for COVID-19 and attacked. I don't know how to put into words this overwhelming helplessness, knowing that widespread awareness of anti-Asian hate is only raised when our collective trauma goes viral on social media.

Perhaps actor Steven Yeun put it best in his recent interview with The New York Times Magazine: "Sometimes I wonder if the Asian-American experience is what it's like when you're thinking about everyone else, but nobody else is thinking about you."

Taking care of your mental health means so very little when your mental and physical well-being largely depends on whether or not a white man is "having a bad day."

We, as Americans, need to have a serious discussion about mental health - but in a different context than is currently happening. The way we approach mental health right now is harming people of color at a disproportional rate. The media needs to acknowledge the way "poor mental health" has been weaponized by white supremacists as an excuse to commit acts of domestic terrorism against people of color. Eight innocent people, six of whom were Asian women, were gunned down by a white terrorist in Georgia, who chalked up his shooting spree to a "sexual addiction" and having "a bad day." Having a bad mental health day is not a justification for committing hate crimes and mass murder. Further, it's an insult to those who actually do struggle with mental health. The fact that I needed to type this out is shocking and degrading beyond words.
In my article for Health, I listed mental health resources for Asians struggling during this pandemic. In addition to those resources, the Asian Mental Health Collective offers location-based access to therapists. Bridges is a NYC-based mental health service with a directory of Asian therapists offering remote and tele-therapy during the pandemic.

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The Pandemic Is at Turning Point - But to Me, As An Asian American, Things Feel Worse Than Ever

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As vaccines become readily available and the COVID pandemic appears to be on the verge of resolution, anti-Asian hate only continues to increase. Here, one writer's perspective on the situation, and why it's so important to do your part as an ally.

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Several recent attacks have not been charged as hate crimes, fueling protests and outrage among many Asian-Americans.

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Don Lee, a community activist in New York, has been calling for more anti-Asian attacks to be publicly identified as hate crimes. "Let's call it what it is," he said. "These are not random attacks." Credit... Chang W. Lee/The New York Times

On a cold evening last month, a Chinese man was walking home near Manhattan's Chinatown neighborhood when a stranger suddenly ran up behind him and plunged a knife into his back.

For many Asian-Americans, the stabbing was horrifying, but not surprising. It was widely seen as just the latest example of racially targeted violence against Asians during the pandemic.

But the perpetrator, a 23-year-old man from Yemen, had not said a word to the victim before the attack, investigators said. Prosecutors determined they lacked enough evidence to prove a racist motive. The attacker was charged with attempted murder, but not as a hate crime.

The announcement outraged Asian-American leaders in New York City. Many of them protested outside the Manhattan district attorney's office, demanding that the stabbing be prosecuted as a hate crime. They were tired of what they saw as racist assaults being overlooked by the authorities.

"Let's call it what it is," said Don Lee, a community activist who spoke at the rally. "These are not random attacks. We're asking for recognition that these crimes are happening."

The rally reflected the tortured public conversation over how to confront a rise in reports of violence against Asian-Americans, who have felt increasingly vulnerable with each new attack. Many incidents have either not led to arrests or have not been charged as hate crimes, making it difficult to capture with reliable data the extent to which Asian-Americans are being targeted.

That frustration erupted on a national scale this week after Robert Aaron Long, a white man, was charged with fatally shooting eight people, including six women of Asian descent, at spas in the Atlanta area on Tuesday night.

Investigators said it was too early to determine a motive. After Mr. Long's arrest, he denied harboring a racial bias and told officials that he carried out the shootings as a form of vengeance for his "sexual addiction."

The Atlanta shootings and other recent attacks have exposed difficult questions involved in proving a racist motive. Did the assaults just happen to involve Asian victims? Or did the attackers purposely single out Asians in an unspoken way that can never be presented as evidence in court?

Many Asian-Americans have been left wondering how much cultural stereotypes that cast them - especially women - as weak or submissive targets played a role.

A surgical glove lies near the spot where a Chinese man was stabbed in Manhattan's Chinatown last month. Credit... Dakota Santiago for The New York Times

Other incidents that clearly seemed racially motivated have not resulted in arrests. The police are still searching for a man who called an Asian-American mother the "Chinese virus" and spat at her child in Queens last week.

As the debate over what legally qualifies as anti-Asian bias unfolds, the community is grappling with the reality that the law is simply not designed to account for many of the ways in which Asian-Americans experience racism.

In New York State, to charge such attacks as hate crimes, prosecutors would need to show that the victims were targeted because of their race.

But proving a racist motive can be particularly difficult with attacks against Asians, experts say. There is no widely recognized symbol of anti-Asian hate comparable to a noose or a swastika. Historically, many Asian crime victims around the country were small-business owners who were robbed, complicating the question of motive.

"There's a recognizable prototype with anti-Black or anti-Semitic or anti-gay hate crime," said Lu-in Wang, a law professor at the University of Pittsburgh. "They're often more clear-cut."

Asian-Americans are sharply divided over the best measures to curb the violence, reflecting the wide ideological and generational differences within a group that encompasses dozens of ethnicities. There are about 1.2 million Asians in New York City, according to census data, making up 14 percent of the city's population.

Some have called for lowering the bar to bring hate-crime charges, toughening penalties and boosting funding for the New York Police Department to investigate attacks against Asians.

Others have opposed these proposals, saying more policing could harm their own communities, worsen racial tensions and disproportionately target the Black and Latino communities that have long dealt with aggressive policing.

"I've rarely seen people who are more socially privileged be the ones accused of hate crimes," said Anne Oredeko, the supervising attorney with the racial justice unit at Legal Aid, a public defenders group. "Often what you end up seeing is people of color being accused of hate crimes."

Under New York State law, certain offenses can be upgraded to hate crimes, increasing the potential prison sentence. As evidence, prosecutors often point to hateful verbal statements or social media posts by the defendant.

Among large American cities, New York City had the largest increase in reported hate crimes against Asians last year, according to an analysis of police data by a center at the California State University, San Bernardino. There were 28 such incidents in 2020, up from 3 in 2019, according to New York Police Department data.

In the past month alone, several assaults on Asian victims have been reported to the police, including an attack on an older woman who was pushed outside a bakery in Queens. None of the incidents has been charged as a hate crime.

In fact, the only person who has been prosecuted for an anti-Asian hate crime in New York City this year is Taiwanese. He was accused of writing anti-Chinese graffiti outside several businesses in Queens.

The authorities acknowledge that the data is limited and imperfect. A pending bill that is expected to pass by June would set up a more standardized system for New York's courts, police and prosecutors to report hate crime incidents.

Stewart Loo, a deputy inspector who heads the Police Department's Asian Hate Crimes Task Force, said in an interview that Asian-Americans are often reluctant to report crime because of language barriers or worries over having their immigration status questioned. Many also fear retaliation from perpetrators, he said, or simply do not want to make trouble.

Deputy Inspector Stewart Loo, who leads the Asian Hate Crimes Task Force, spoke at a press conference in Queens to call attention to recent attacks on Asian-Americans. Credit... Andrew Seng for The New York Times

"The process is very daunting," Mr. Loo said. "You have to go to the police station, you have to talk to detectives, you have to talk to prosecutors."

Last year, the attacks in New York City that did get prosecuted as hate crimes typically involved people blaming Asians for spreading the coronavirus, echoing the rhetoric of former President Donald J. Trump, who has referred to the disease as the "China virus" and the "Kung Flu."

For instance, a white woman was charged with a hate crime last March after she bumped into an Asian woman crossing the street in Manhattan and said, "You're the reason why the coronavirus is here," before spitting on her and pulling out some of her hair, according to prosecutors.

In the Chinatown stabbing last month, prosecutors said there was no evidence that the defendant, Salman Muflehi, targeted the victim because he was Asian or saw the victim's face before stabbing him. Mr. Muflehi did tell the police afterward that he did not like the way the victim had looked at him.

Mr. Muflehi immigrated from Yemen to New York as a teenager. He has suffered from severe mental health issues for years, often getting into fights and landing in jail, according to interviews with his brother and mother. They say he has never expressed any hatred against Asians.

He has previously been arrested on accusations that he assaulted both his brother and his father. Most recently, he was charged in January with punching a Hispanic man in the head, prosecutors said. (Prior news reports incorrectly identified that victim as Asian.)

Mr. Muflehi remains in jail. He faces four criminal charges, including attempted murder. Adding a hate crime designation to the charge would raise the minimum sentence he faces from five years to eight years.

The 36-year-old victim, whose identity has not been made public, was hospitalized for more than two weeks. He was released on Sunday.

Police investigators recommended the stabbing be charged as a hate crime, but the Manhattan district attorney's office disagreed.

Shirley Ng, a community organizer in Manhattan's Chinatown, supports easing the criteria for hate crime charges and eliminating bail for them, because, in her view, officials have been too lenient in cases involving Asian victims.

"It's too easy to say these suspects have mental illness," Ms. Ng said. "Sometimes they are also cognizant that they're out to hurt people."

Others say tougher enforcement could end up pitting Asian-Americans against Black and Latino communities, inflaming racial tensions.

Wayne Ho, president of the Chinese-American Planning Council, a social services agency, said many of his Asian colleagues were verbally harassed during the pandemic but chose not to alert law enforcement because they worried the perpetrators, who were often people of color, could be mistreated by the police.

"I asked myself, do I want this person in jail?" said Alice Wong, one of Mr. Ho's colleagues. "Just because you put someone in jail doesn't make them not hate anyone anymore."

Recognizing this challenge, some law enforcement officials have called for people who commit hate crimes to attend antiracism classes as an alternative to prison.

The approach was used after four teenage girls last March assaulted a 52-year-old Asian woman on a bus in the Bronx while accusing her of spreading the coronavirus, according to prosecutors. One of the girls beat her with an umbrella.

With the consent of the victim, prosecutors allowed three of the girls to be cleared of criminal charges if they participated in an educational program on hate crimes for two months. Their identities have not been made public because they are minors.

Elizabeth OuYang, a civil rights lawyer who supervised the program, said the program helped debunk stereotypes for the girls, who are Black and grew up without much interaction with Asian-Americans. By the end, Ms. OuYang felt confident that they were remorseful about what they had done.

"The girls are good kids," Ms. OuYang said. "They're not evil monsters. I swear on my mother's grave they will not commit another hate crime again."

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Asian-Americans Are Being Attacked. Why Are Hate Crime Charges So Rare? (Published 2021)

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Several recent attacks have not been charged as hate crimes, fueling protests and outrage among many Asian-Americans. Send any friend a story As a subscriber, you have 10 gift articles to give each month. Anyone can read what you share.

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https://www.poynter.org/fact-checking/2021/hate-crimes-against-asian-americans-what-the-numbers-show-and-dont/

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SAN FRANCISCO (AP) - Prosecutors in Seattle and San Francisco have charged men with hate crimes in separate incidents that authorities say targeted people of Asian descent amid a wave of high-profile and sometimes deadly violence against Asian Americans since the pandemic began.

Hundreds of protesters took to the streets of Los Angeles and throughout the San Francisco Bay Area on Saturday, the latest in a series of rallies in response what many said has become a troubling surge of anti-Asian sentiments.

"We can no longer accept the normalization of being treated as perpetual foreigners in this country," speaker Tammy Kim told a rally in LA's Koreatown.

At rally attended by more than 1,000 people in San Francisco's Civic Center, the city's police chief, Bill Scott, drew loud applause when he said, "Hate is the virus, and love is the vaccination."

On Friday, prosecutors in King County, Washington, charged Christopher Hamner, 51, with three counts of malicious harassment after police say he screamed profanities and threw things at cars in two incidents last week targeting women and children of Asian heritage, The Seattle Times reported Saturday.

In San Francisco, Victor Humberto Brown, 53, made a first court appearance after authorities say he repeatedly punched an Asian American man at a bus stop while shouting an anti-Asian slur.

Brown was initially booked on misdemeanor counts, but prosecutors recently elevated the case to a felony, the San Francisco Chronicle reported. He said in court that he has a post-traumatic stress disorder.

In Seattle, according to court documents, Hamner yelled profanities and threw things at a woman stopped at a red light with her two children, ages 5 and 10, on March 16. Three days later, authorities say Hamner cut off another car driven by an Asian woman, yelled a profanity and the word "Asian" at her and then threw a water bottle at her car after charging at her when she pulled into a parking spot.

Hamner was being held on $75,000 bail on Saturday. It wasn't immediately clear if Hamner, who has not yet made a court appearance, had retained an attorney or would be assigned a public defender.

In the first instance, the woman told her 10-year-old daughter to try to take a cellphone photo of the man. The woman, identified by KIRO-TV as Pamela Cole, posted about the incident on social media and a friend's husband identified Hamner as a possible suspect.

The second woman who was accosted had a dashboard camera in her vehicle that captured the license plate of the other car, which is registered to Hamner, according to court documents. The police detective investigating the case reviewed the video and determined the women's assailant "was clearly Hamner," according to the charges.

Cole, who said she identifies as part Chinese and part Malaysian, told KIRO-TV she felt like "a sitting duck" when Hamner approached her car, hitting his fists together and screaming at her to "Get out! Get out!" while spewing profanities about her Asian heritage.

"I was in complete shock. Are you talking to me?" Cole told the station.

"He jumps out the car, and he's charging at us," she said. "That was the scariest part for me."

In San Francisco, Ron Tuason, an Army veteran of Filipino, Chinese and Spanish descent, told the Chronicle he was at a bus stop in the city's Ingleside neighborhood on March 13 when Brown approached him, yelling "Get out of my country" before using a racial slur meant to denigrate Asian people. Tuason said Brown also said, "It's because of you there's a problem here."

Tuason, 56, said he believes Brown was referring to the coronavirus. Brown punched him multiple times, he said, knocking him to the ground. He suffered a black eye and a swollen cheek as a result of the attack and said he's also experiencing memory loss.

Police found Brown shortly after Tuason called 911.

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2 in Seattle, San Francisco face anti-Asian hate charges

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SAN FRANCISCO (AP) - Prosecutors in Seattle and San Francisco have charged men with hate crimes in separate incidents that authorities say targeted people of Asian descent amid a wave of high-profile and sometimes deadly violence against Asian Americans since the pandemic began.

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San Antonio resident Mike Nguyen is afraid to be outside these days. Earlier this week, he was driving with his colleague when they pulled over to help someone pick up boxes, but he froze up when they parked the car on the side of the street.

He couldn't leave the car. It's not that he didn't want to help. It was the death threats he had received recently that kept him in.

"I can't even go out and help a fellow person in the community because I'm afraid that I might get attacked," said Nguyen, whose restaurant was vandalized and spray-painted with racist slurs after he spoke out against Gov. Greg Abbott's lifting of a statewide mask mandate. "I'm not stepping out of this car right now."

Nguyen said that while he was angry over the racist attack on his business, news of a gunman killing eight people - including six women of Asian descent - at three spas in the Atlanta area has added a heightened sense of fear to the already complicated mix of emotions he's feeling.

"I'm emotionally tired. I'm angry. I'm frustrated," he said. "I think a lot of Asian Americans are frustrated that you see these crimes happening, but nothing's happening. There's no stop to it, and people are trying to make it that it's not a hate crime."

Cherokee County authorities identified the four victims of the shooting at Youngs Asian Massage in Acworth, Georgia, as Delaina Ashley Yaun, Paul Andre Michels, Xiaojie Tan and Daoyou Feng, according to media reports. The only survivor of the shooting, Elcias R. Hernandez-Ortiz, remains hospitalized with significant injuries. On Thursday, Fulton County officials named the victims from the other two shootings as Soon C. Park, Hyun J. Grant, Suncha Kim and Yong A. Yue.

The attacks in Atlanta are the latest in a wave of increasing assaults in the U.S. targeting Asians during the global COVID-19 pandemic. As the virus spread, the anti-Asian hostility climbed. Former President Donald Trump regularly referred to COVID-19 as the "Chinese virus." For over a year now, Asian Texans have battled a heightened sense of fear on top of disproportionate job losses and business closures during the pandemic. A recent Pew Research Center study even found that 58% of Asian Americans say that people more commonly express racist views toward their group since the pandemic began.

Stop AAPI Hate, an organization founded during the pandemic to track incidents of anti-Asian discrimination, received 3,795 reported incidents of racism against Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders across the United States between March 19, 2020 and Feb. 28, 2021. Of those attacks, 68% targeted Asian women, according to the group's most recent report.

In Texas, Stop AAPI Hate has tracked 103 anti-Asian racist incidents that have occurred since March 2020, when a native of Myanmar and his two sons were stabbed in a Midland Sam's Club by a man who believed the father was Chinese and spreading the coronavirus in the store.

Asian Texans have also reported verbal abuse and being spit at and coughed on, according to the group.

"Honestly, I don't feel safe anymore," said a Chinese American Austin resident who spoke on condition of anonymity because she feared that she could be targeted. She said that last month, a white man driving past her stuck out his middle finger at her for no reason.

"Even when I'm driving inside my car, I cannot take off my mask. I have to put it on," she said. "I don't want those things to happen again. I really don't know if they have a gun, if they're gonna shoot me any time. I don't know. I just feel like it's a trauma."

In Houston, the Police Department released a statement Wednesday announcing a plan to increase patrols in certain neighborhoods and to organize a town hall to address concerns about anti-Asian hate crimes.

Amy Zhang, a Ph.D student in sociology at the University of Texas at Austin and a researcher for the AAPI COVID-19 Project, said that pandemic-related racism and more cautious tendencies among the Asian population combined to impact the Asian community harder and earlier than other groups.

"People were experiencing things, especially early on, that were very much this racialization of being Asian as contagion, where just existing in public while Asian was kind of seen as a threat to some people," said Zhang. (Zhang previously worked for the Texas Tribune as a fellow.)

This kind of racialization of a disease can result in material impacts like unemployment increases, rises in depression and anxiety rates and a distrust of other people, according to Kara Takasaki, another UT-Austin Ph.D student and analyst for the AAPI COVID-19 project.

Amy Mok, the founder of the Asian American Cultural Center in Austin, also added that labeling the virus as Asian will impact the social reality for Asian Americans for many months, and possibly years, to come.

"There are questions from our children we do not know how to answer, when they ask, 'Why do they hate us so much? Why do they call it Chinese virus or Kung-flu virus?'" Mok said. "So it is very hard for children. And then they go back to school and they have their friends, young friends, saying 'Oh, you are the Chinese virus.'"

And with Tuesday's attack in Atlanta targeting Asian women, the intersection between misogyny and anti-Asian discrimination remains ever-present in Texas and across the country. The labels that people attribute to Asian women perpetuates a culture of hypersexualization, Mok said.

"Look at how we label Asian women: madame butterfly, mail-order bride," Mok said. "The exotic, the erotic Asian woman, so we are reduced to be what? Sex objects."

A harsh reality and an uncertain path forward

Takasaki noted how structural racism within a society ultimately cuts off a population's access to basic resources like federal assistance and health insurance, which in turn can lead to a lack of solutions when people's mental and physical health worsens.

Asian American businesses often face a much longer road to recovery after a crisis or disaster, according to Russell Jeung, a San Francisco State University professor and one of the founders of Stop AAPI Hate. Asian restaurants and stores took the longest to recover after the 2008 recession, Jeung said, adding that Chinatowns across the country were already experiencing economic problems before the pandemic from the effects of gentrification.

"Asian Americans have really been hit hard with joblessness during COVID-19, and that's partially due to a lot of us work[ing] in the service sector, and those businesses have closed down," Jeung said. "Secondly, a lot of us work in ethnic enclaves and ethnic neighborhoods, ethnic markets, and because of racism, people have shunned going to Chinese restaurants, Vietnamese nail salons, and so those businesses have had to close."

State Rep. Gene Wu, D-Houston, said that while he hasn't directly seen any incidents of discrimination taking place in his district, some residents may be afraid to report experiencing racism. He recently introduced a resolution in the Legislature that expresses support for eradicating racism and calls on law enforcement to fully investigate any reported incidents of anti-Asian hate.

"Asian American businesses have suffered not so much because of direct discrimination, because of race, but because of the poor handling of the response to COVID," Wu said. "Is there a component of businesses are not doing well because people don't like Asian people? I'm sure that's there, but there's no way for me to quantify that."

Several business owners told The Texas Tribune that hostility toward Asian Texans and the struggles of the service industry during the pandemic have made them question their line of work.

"There are days where you get up, and you literally don't feel like doing anything because it just seems like there's so much burden, and it's just easier not to think about it," said Kristina Zhao, the owner of Sichuan House, a San Antonio restaurant.

Alice Lee, the executive director of the Southwest Management District in Houston that includes the city's Chinatown, added that the pandemic combined with the rise in discrimination has hit Asian women the hardest, especially in the wake of this week's attacks in Atlanta.

"His attack against Asian women is just horrific. It's really women who have lost the most during the pandemic," Lee said. "They are the ones who lost the most jobs. They have to stay home while their kids do online learning. They can't really pivot to other employment, so really that's a double or triple whammy for women in general."

High unemployment rates and anti-Asian discrimination have also worsened institutional inequities when it comes to other areas of life like access to health care and work satisfaction, according to Zhang and Takasaki.

Beyond the wave of violence, there's the outsize impact of the pandemic on Asian workers. Between March 2020 and January 2021, the Asian population in the state filed an average of 31,908 claims per month, representing an annual increase of 1,087%, according to data from the U.S. Department of Labor. That rise in unemployment far outpaced the increases experienced by all other racial groups in the state, although around 45% of claims since March 2020 did not report the applicant's race.

Recent research from the Bureau of Labor Statistics also suggests that the ability to work from home during the pandemic heavily depends on race and educational attainment. The non-Hispanic white population works from home at the highest rate of any racial group in the nation, and over 67% of people with a college degree have the ability to telework. On the other hand, less than a quarter of high school graduates have access to remote work.

Still, Asian Texans are hoping that better times lie ahead, and they have found comfort in their families and coworkers for the time being, despite the immense challenges that they continue to face.

K.C. Youn, who owns an environmental engineering company in Houston, immigrated to the United States from South Korea 61 years ago while a senior in high school. He still gets emotional any time he thinks about the partnerships made between American and Korean soldiers during the Korean War, and the connection between his Korean and American identities remains close to his heart.

"Many of my friends who traveled and immigrated to Europe and so on, they all basically want to come to the United States eventually because this is the place to be in this world," Youn said. "But unfortunately, even the United States is not perfect."

Nguyen is grateful for the Asian American community having his back throughout the pandemic and especially since his restaurant was tagged with racist graffiti. Many people have asked him how they can help or show him support, and he decided to start collecting gift card donations to provide free meals for San Antonio residents. So far, he's raised over $3,000.

"There's a saying, a proverb, that says 'If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together,'" said Christine Ha, who owns Xin Chao, a Houston restaurant. "And I think that's something that we try to instill in our staff as well at both restaurants, just to remember that yeah, it's hard, but we're all here for each other."
Disclosure: University of Texas at Austin has been a financial supporter of The Texas Tribune, a nonprofit, nonpartisan news organization that is funded in part by donations from members, foundations and corporate sponsors. Financial supporters play no role in the Tribune's journalism. Find a complete list of them here.

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"I don't feel safe anymore": Asian Texans grapple with racism after a gunman killed Asian women in Atlanta

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Sign up for The Brief, our daily newsletter that keeps readers up to speed on the most essential Texas news. San Antonio resident Mike Nguyen is afraid to be outside these days. Earlier this week, he was driving with his colleague when they pulled over to help someone pick up boxes, but he froze up when they parked the car on the side of the street.

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Several recent attacks have not been charged as hate crimes, fueling protests and outrage among many Asian-Americans.

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Don Lee, a community activist in New York, has been calling for more anti-Asian attacks to be publicly identified as hate crimes. "Let's call it what it is," he said. "These are not random attacks." Credit... Chang W. Lee/The New York Times

On a cold evening last month, a Chinese man was walking home near Manhattan's Chinatown neighborhood when a stranger suddenly ran up behind him and plunged a knife into his back.

For many Asian-Americans, the stabbing was horrifying, but not surprising. It was widely seen as just the latest example of racially targeted violence against Asians during the pandemic.

But the perpetrator, a 23-year-old man from Yemen, had not said a word to the victim before the attack, investigators said. Prosecutors determined they lacked enough evidence to prove a racist motive. The attacker was charged with attempted murder, but not as a hate crime.

The announcement outraged Asian-American leaders in New York City. Many of them protested outside the Manhattan district attorney's office, demanding that the stabbing be prosecuted as a hate crime. They were tired of what they saw as racist assaults being overlooked by the authorities.

"Let's call it what it is," said Don Lee, a community activist who spoke at the rally. "These are not random attacks. We're asking for recognition that these crimes are happening."

The rally reflected the tortured public conversation over how to confront a rise in reports of violence against Asian-Americans, who have felt increasingly vulnerable with each new attack. Many incidents have either not led to arrests or have not been charged as hate crimes, making it difficult to capture with reliable data the extent to which Asian-Americans are being targeted.

That frustration erupted on a national scale this week after Robert Aaron Long, a white man, was charged with fatally shooting eight people, including six women of Asian descent, at spas in the Atlanta area on Tuesday night.

Investigators said it was too early to determine a motive. After Mr. Long's arrest, he denied harboring a racial bias and told officials that he carried out the shootings as a form of vengeance for his "sexual addiction."

The Atlanta shootings and other recent attacks have exposed difficult questions involved in proving a racist motive. Did the assaults just happen to involve Asian victims? Or did the attackers purposely single out Asians in an unspoken way that can never be presented as evidence in court?

Many Asian-Americans have been left wondering how much cultural stereotypes that cast them - especially women - as weak or submissive targets played a role.

A surgical glove lies near the spot where a Chinese man was stabbed in Manhattan's Chinatown last month. Credit... Dakota Santiago for The New York Times

Other incidents that clearly seemed racially motivated have not resulted in arrests. The police are still searching for a man who called an Asian-American mother the "Chinese virus" and spat at her child in Queens last week.

As the debate over what legally qualifies as anti-Asian bias unfolds, the community is grappling with the reality that the law is simply not designed to account for many of the ways in which Asian-Americans experience racism.

In New York State, to charge such attacks as hate crimes, prosecutors would need to show that the victims were targeted because of their race.

But proving a racist motive can be particularly difficult with attacks against Asians, experts say. There is no widely recognized symbol of anti-Asian hate comparable to a noose or a swastika. Historically, many Asian crime victims around the country were small-business owners who were robbed, complicating the question of motive.

"There's a recognizable prototype with anti-Black or anti-Semitic or anti-gay hate crime," said Lu-in Wang, a law professor at the University of Pittsburgh. "They're often more clear-cut."

Asian-Americans are sharply divided over the best measures to curb the violence, reflecting the wide ideological and generational differences within a group that encompasses dozens of ethnicities. There are about 1.2 million Asians in New York City, according to census data, making up 14 percent of the city's population.

Some have called for lowering the bar to bring hate-crime charges, toughening penalties and boosting funding for the New York Police Department to investigate attacks against Asians.

Others have opposed these proposals, saying more policing could harm their own communities, worsen racial tensions and disproportionately target the Black and Latino communities that have long dealt with aggressive policing.

"I've rarely seen people who are more socially privileged be the ones accused of hate crimes," said Anne Oredeko, the supervising attorney with the racial justice unit at Legal Aid, a public defenders group. "Often what you end up seeing is people of color being accused of hate crimes."

Under New York State law, certain offenses can be upgraded to hate crimes, increasing the potential prison sentence. As evidence, prosecutors often point to hateful verbal statements or social media posts by the defendant.

Among large American cities, New York City had the largest increase in reported hate crimes against Asians last year, according to an analysis of police data by a center at the California State University, San Bernardino. There were 28 such incidents in 2020, up from 3 in 2019, according to New York Police Department data.

In the past month alone, several assaults on Asian victims have been reported to the police, including an attack on an older woman who was pushed outside a bakery in Queens. None of the incidents has been charged as a hate crime.

In fact, the only person who has been prosecuted for an anti-Asian hate crime in New York City this year is Taiwanese. He was accused of writing anti-Chinese graffiti outside several businesses in Queens.

The authorities acknowledge that the data is limited and imperfect. A pending bill that is expected to pass by June would set up a more standardized system for New York's courts, police and prosecutors to report hate crime incidents.

Stewart Loo, a deputy inspector who heads the Police Department's Asian Hate Crimes Task Force, said in an interview that Asian-Americans are often reluctant to report crime because of language barriers or worries over having their immigration status questioned. Many also fear retaliation from perpetrators, he said, or simply do not want to make trouble.

Deputy Inspector Stewart Loo, who leads the Asian Hate Crimes Task Force, spoke at a press conference in Queens to call attention to recent attacks on Asian-Americans. Credit... Andrew Seng for The New York Times

"The process is very daunting," Mr. Loo said. "You have to go to the police station, you have to talk to detectives, you have to talk to prosecutors."

Last year, the attacks in New York City that did get prosecuted as hate crimes typically involved people blaming Asians for spreading the coronavirus, echoing the rhetoric of former President Donald J. Trump, who has referred to the disease as the "China virus" and the "Kung Flu."

For instance, a white woman was charged with a hate crime last March after she bumped into an Asian woman crossing the street in Manhattan and said, "You're the reason why the coronavirus is here," before spitting on her and pulling out some of her hair, according to prosecutors.

In the Chinatown stabbing last month, prosecutors said there was no evidence that the defendant, Salman Muflehi, targeted the victim because he was Asian or saw the victim's face before stabbing him. Mr. Muflehi did tell the police afterward that he did not like the way the victim had looked at him.

Mr. Muflehi immigrated from Yemen to New York as a teenager. He has suffered from severe mental health issues for years, often getting into fights and landing in jail, according to interviews with his brother and mother. They say he has never expressed any hatred against Asians.

He has previously been arrested on accusations that he assaulted both his brother and his father. Most recently, he was charged in January with punching a Hispanic man in the head, prosecutors said. (Prior news reports incorrectly identified that victim as Asian.)

Mr. Muflehi remains in jail. He faces four criminal charges, including attempted murder. Adding a hate crime designation to the charge would raise the minimum sentence he faces from five years to eight years.

The 36-year-old victim, whose identity has not been made public, was hospitalized for more than two weeks. He was released on Sunday.

Police investigators recommended the stabbing be charged as a hate crime, but the Manhattan district attorney's office disagreed.

Shirley Ng, a community organizer in Manhattan's Chinatown, supports easing the criteria for hate crime charges and eliminating bail for them, because, in her view, officials have been too lenient in cases involving Asian victims.

"It's too easy to say these suspects have mental illness," Ms. Ng said. "Sometimes they are also cognizant that they're out to hurt people."

Others say tougher enforcement could end up pitting Asian-Americans against Black and Latino communities, inflaming racial tensions.

Wayne Ho, president of the Chinese-American Planning Council, a social services agency, said many of his Asian colleagues were verbally harassed during the pandemic but chose not to alert law enforcement because they worried the perpetrators, who were often people of color, could be mistreated by the police.

"I asked myself, do I want this person in jail?" said Alice Wong, one of Mr. Ho's colleagues. "Just because you put someone in jail doesn't make them not hate anyone anymore."

Recognizing this challenge, some law enforcement officials have called for people who commit hate crimes to attend antiracism classes as an alternative to prison.

The approach was used after four teenage girls last March assaulted a 52-year-old Asian woman on a bus in the Bronx while accusing her of spreading the coronavirus, according to prosecutors. One of the girls beat her with an umbrella.

With the consent of the victim, prosecutors allowed three of the girls to be cleared of criminal charges if they participated in an educational program on hate crimes for two months. Their identities have not been made public because they are minors.

Elizabeth OuYang, a civil rights lawyer who supervised the program, said the program helped debunk stereotypes for the girls, who are Black and grew up without much interaction with Asian-Americans. By the end, Ms. OuYang felt confident that they were remorseful about what they had done.

"The girls are good kids," Ms. OuYang said. "They're not evil monsters. I swear on my mother's grave they will not commit another hate crime again."

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Asian-Americans Are Being Attacked. Why Are Hate Crime Charges So Rare? (Published 2021)

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Several recent attacks have not been charged as hate crimes, fueling protests and outrage among many Asian-Americans. Send any friend a story As a subscriber, you have 10 gift articles to give each month. Anyone can read what you share.

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https://www.voanews.com/usa/anti-asian-hate-crime-crosses-racial-and-ethnic-lines

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The authorities said they were investigating at least four of the attacks as possible hate crimes, including one that left a man in critical condition.

People gathered in Columbus Park in Chinatown to rally against hate crimes on Sunday. Credit... Gabriela Bhaskar for The New York Times

A 68-year-old Sri Lankan man was riding the subway in Lower Manhattan on Friday when another passenger yelled a racial slur and punched him in the head, leaving him bloodied and in critical condition.

On Saturday morning, a 66-year-old man of Asian descent was punched in the face on the Lower East Side.

Then on Sunday came three more attacks, the police said: A woman of Asian descent was thrown to the ground in Midtown, another was hit in the face with a metal pipe on the Lower East Side and a third was punched twice in the face after she attended a demonstration in Union Square in support of Asian-American victims with her young daughter.

The attacks around New York City over the weekend, coming as hundreds of marchers gathered in multiple protests to call for an end to such assaults, were yet more examples of violence directed at Asian-Americans amid a new wave of xenophobia that emerged during the pandemic.

The assaults underscored the feelings of fear and vulnerability that had taken hold in the Asian-American community, even before a shooting in the Atlanta area last week left eight people dead, including six women of Asian descent.

Katie Hou, 37, who is Chinese-American and was attacked on Sunday afternoon after she went to the demonstration in Union Square, said in an interview that she was recovering and hoped her encounter would not scare other Asian-American people from speaking out.

"People need to be vigilant about their safety, but at the same time, we need to do something to stop this from happening again," she said.

The police said they were investigating at least five different attacks that took place between Friday and Sunday, and three people have been arrested in connection with three of them.

But much is still not known about the victims or the attackers, at least two of whom appeared to be behaving erratically before the incidents.

In the assault on the subway, the man who was arrested, Marc Mathieu, posted a long, rambling video on Facebook the morning of the attack, in which he spoke unintelligibly about violent security forces working at the Staten Island Ferry, among other disjointed topics.

The man who attacked the woman after the demonstration on Sunday pulled down his pants and exposed himself to witnesses and yelled at passers-by, telling them they were going to jail, according to one witness of the attack.

Both of those cases are being investigated as hate crimes, the police said. But the criminal justice system has faced challenges in definitively proving racist motives in apparent anti-Asian crimes. Some advocates have pointed to shortcomings in the laws that govern hate crimes.

Acknowledging the spate of violence, Mayor Bill de Blasio on Monday pledged that the city would increase the police presence in Asian communities and encouraged people to report crimes.

"It sickens me, and it angers me, and we will deal with it aggressively," he said at a news conference. "I want everyone, in every way you can, to help support our Asian-American neighbors, speak up for them, help report anything you see."

While it is difficult to measure the extent of the recent violence against people of Asian descent, in part because many crimes go unreported, the number of police investigations into hate crimes has gone up this year, compared with the same period last year.

Police Commissioner Dermot F. Shea, during an interview with Pix11 on Thursday before the recent attacks, said the department was investigating 10 anti-Asian hate crimes reported through mid-March, compared to none in early 2020 before the pandemic reached New York.

The department recorded 29 anti-Asian attacks last year, including 25 that investigators believed stemmed from anti-Asian sentiment and the perception that the victim was carrying the coronavirus, according to police statistics released in January.

The Police Department created a unit last year under its hate crimes task force that is specifically focused on hate crimes against people of Asian descent.

"It's very important that we find people who do this and take them off the streets," Mr. de Blasio said on Monday.

George O'krepkie, a witness to the assault, said the attacker threw what appeared to be a crumpled-up newspaper at the victim before charging at him and yelling a racial slur.

"He was on top of him," he said. "Within seconds there was blood everywhere."

The victim was taken to NewYork-Presbyterian Lower Manhattan Hospital in critical but stable condition. It was not clear if he had been released, but a man who answered the phone number listed for the victim declined to comment.

Mr. Mathieu was arraigned on Monday on one count of second-degree assault, and prosecutors, who ultimately determine whether to charge anyone with a hate crime, said they were investigating if the attack constituted such a crime.

Relatives of Mr. Mathieu did not immediately respond to requests for comment. A lawyer for Mr. Mathieu declined to comment.

The police have not released the name of the man who they believe attacked a man on the Lower East Side on Saturday. That attack is also being investigated as a hate crime.

On Sunday, Ms. Hou, who works in accounting, said she had taken her 7-year-old daughter to a rally at Union Square to learn about racial tensions in America, particularly after the shooting in Atlanta. She said the two had left the rally around 11:30 a.m. when a man walked up to Ms. Hou and asked for a sign she was carrying that read, "Hate Has No Peace" and "Racist = Psychopath."

She said she gave him the sign because she thought he wanted to protest. But he smashed it on the ground, she said. As she tried to confront him, he punched her twice in the face, she said, but the two did not exchange any words.

DeVonn Francis, 27, who witnessed the attack, said the man began yelling at people, saying they were going to jail. Mr. Francis and others followed the man to a nearby subway station, where he exposed himself before getting on the train and riding away.

Hours later on Sunday, a 41-year-old woman of Asian descent was walking in Midtown on West 31st Street when she was grabbed from behind and thrown on the ground, police said.

Patricia Melendez, 37, was arrested on charges of assault and disorderly conduct. It was not clear if Ms. Melendez had a lawyer, and her relatives could not be reached for comment.

It was not immediately clear how seriously the victim was injured, but the police said they were investigating that attack as another possible hate crime.

Still later on Sunday afternoon, a 54-year-old woman of Asian descent was walking on the Lower East Side when a man confronted her and struck her in the face with a metal pipe. Police did not name the victim, but said she suffered a laceration to her nose and was taken to a nearby hospital.

The police arrested Elias Guerrero, 38, on several charges including hate crime assault, resisting arrest and harassment.

Relatives for Mr. Guerrero did not immediately respond to requests for comment on Monday. It was not clear whether he had a lawyer.

Ashley Southall and Daniel E. Slotnik contributed reporting, and Susan Beachy contributed research.

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As Protesters Rally Against Anti-Asian Hate, N.Y.C. Records 5 Attacks

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The authorities said they were investigating at least four of the attacks as possible hate crimes, including one that left a man in critical condition. A 68-year-old Sri Lankan man was riding the subway in Lower Manhattan on Friday when another passenger yelled a racial slur and punched him in the head, leaving him bloodied and in critical condition.

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https://www.nbcbayarea.com/news/local/man-accused-of-assaulting-sf-asian-vet-charged-with-hate-crime/2504189/

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https://www.fbi.gov/investigate/civil-rights/hate-crimes

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White supremacy and hate are haunting Asian Americans | CNN Politics

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In one sense, it's immaterial whether the accused killer in the Atlanta spa shootings admits to a racist motivation. Asian Americans, already traumatized by a rising tide of hate, violence and rhetoric, have been living in fear for months.

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An Asian American Army veteran experienced verbal and physical abuse while at a bus stop in San Francisco.Ron Tuason, 56, claims he was assaulted for wearing a veteran's hat near Ocean and Plymouth Avenues on March 13 at around 4 p.m., according to .

His attacker, later identified as Victor Brown, 53, reportedly screamed racist insults before punching him multiple times. Tuason - who relies on a cane to walk - was knocked to the ground. "When he noticed me," Tuason said, "he got aggressive and charged across the street, 'Go back where you came from, you caused this problem', referring to COVID, and do you want to get hurt? You're not a veteran, I'm a veteran.'" Tuason reportedly attempted to film the incident using his mobile phone, but Brown stopped him. "I had one arm out, my left arm, but he sidestepped that and came in from the outside, and he waylaid me, and he laid me out right here and it was very swollen," he continued. "There was a chain link fence and I hit the steel post, and I was followed up with two lefts and a knee."Tuason, a longtime San Francisco resident, is of Filipino, Chinese and Spanish descent. As a former combat engineer, he was stationed in Louisiana and Germany in the 1980s. "Because of the color of my skin, and because I like to wear a hat that says I served - that people who are minorities who are often neglected, overlooked invisible - we served," he shared. Shortly after the attack, Brown was apprehended by the San Francisco Police Department for assault, battery with the hate crime enhancement, possession of narcotic paraphernalia and resisting arrest, among others. Prior to the incident, Brown already had three outstanding warrants, including one for the battery of a bus driver in Santa Clara County and one for battery in San Jose. Feature Image via KPIX CBS SF Bay Area
Enjoy this content? Read more from NextShark! NextShark is Getting Too Many Reports of Racial Attacks Against Asians, So Here's Our Solution Chinese Billionaire Gets 5 Years in Prison for Sexually Assaulting 9-Year-Old Man Arrested Over Domestic Abuse, Murder of Modesto Woman Korean Adoptee Sues to Become Part of Family and Learn Her Origins in Landmark Ruling

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Asian American Army Veteran Beaten in Clear Hate Crime in SF

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An Asian American Army veteran experienced verbal and physical abuse while at a bus stop in San Francisco. Ron Tuason, 56, claims he was assaulted for wearing a veteran's hat near Ocean and Plymouth Avenues on March 13 at around 4 p.m., according to KPIX.

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https://time.com/5938482/asian-american-attacks/

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Several recent attacks have not been charged as hate crimes, fueling protests and outrage among many Asian-Americans.

Send any friend a story
As a subscriber, you have 10 gift articles to give each month. Anyone can read what you share.

Don Lee, a community activist in New York, has been calling for more anti-Asian attacks to be publicly identified as hate crimes. "Let's call it what it is," he said. "These are not random attacks." Credit... Chang W. Lee/The New York Times

On a cold evening last month, a Chinese man was walking home near Manhattan's Chinatown neighborhood when a stranger suddenly ran up behind him and plunged a knife into his back.

For many Asian-Americans, the stabbing was horrifying, but not surprising. It was widely seen as just the latest example of racially targeted violence against Asians during the pandemic.

But the perpetrator, a 23-year-old man from Yemen, had not said a word to the victim before the attack, investigators said. Prosecutors determined they lacked enough evidence to prove a racist motive. The attacker was charged with attempted murder, but not as a hate crime.

The announcement outraged Asian-American leaders in New York City. Many of them protested outside the Manhattan district attorney's office, demanding that the stabbing be prosecuted as a hate crime. They were tired of what they saw as racist assaults being overlooked by the authorities.

"Let's call it what it is," said Don Lee, a community activist who spoke at the rally. "These are not random attacks. We're asking for recognition that these crimes are happening."

The rally reflected the tortured public conversation over how to confront a rise in reports of violence against Asian-Americans, who have felt increasingly vulnerable with each new attack. Many incidents have either not led to arrests or have not been charged as hate crimes, making it difficult to capture with reliable data the extent to which Asian-Americans are being targeted.

That frustration erupted on a national scale this week after Robert Aaron Long, a white man, was charged with fatally shooting eight people, including six women of Asian descent, at spas in the Atlanta area on Tuesday night.

Investigators said it was too early to determine a motive. After Mr. Long's arrest, he denied harboring a racial bias and told officials that he carried out the shootings as a form of vengeance for his "sexual addiction."

The Atlanta shootings and other recent attacks have exposed difficult questions involved in proving a racist motive. Did the assaults just happen to involve Asian victims? Or did the attackers purposely single out Asians in an unspoken way that can never be presented as evidence in court?

Many Asian-Americans have been left wondering how much cultural stereotypes that cast them - especially women - as weak or submissive targets played a role.

A surgical glove lies near the spot where a Chinese man was stabbed in Manhattan's Chinatown last month. Credit... Dakota Santiago for The New York Times

Other incidents that clearly seemed racially motivated have not resulted in arrests. The police are still searching for a man who called an Asian-American mother the "Chinese virus" and spat at her child in Queens last week.

As the debate over what legally qualifies as anti-Asian bias unfolds, the community is grappling with the reality that the law is simply not designed to account for many of the ways in which Asian-Americans experience racism.

In New York State, to charge such attacks as hate crimes, prosecutors would need to show that the victims were targeted because of their race.

But proving a racist motive can be particularly difficult with attacks against Asians, experts say. There is no widely recognized symbol of anti-Asian hate comparable to a noose or a swastika. Historically, many Asian crime victims around the country were small-business owners who were robbed, complicating the question of motive.

"There's a recognizable prototype with anti-Black or anti-Semitic or anti-gay hate crime," said Lu-in Wang, a law professor at the University of Pittsburgh. "They're often more clear-cut."

Asian-Americans are sharply divided over the best measures to curb the violence, reflecting the wide ideological and generational differences within a group that encompasses dozens of ethnicities. There are about 1.2 million Asians in New York City, according to census data, making up 14 percent of the city's population.

Some have called for lowering the bar to bring hate-crime charges, toughening penalties and boosting funding for the New York Police Department to investigate attacks against Asians.

Others have opposed these proposals, saying more policing could harm their own communities, worsen racial tensions and disproportionately target the Black and Latino communities that have long dealt with aggressive policing.

"I've rarely seen people who are more socially privileged be the ones accused of hate crimes," said Anne Oredeko, the supervising attorney with the racial justice unit at Legal Aid, a public defenders group. "Often what you end up seeing is people of color being accused of hate crimes."

Under New York State law, certain offenses can be upgraded to hate crimes, increasing the potential prison sentence. As evidence, prosecutors often point to hateful verbal statements or social media posts by the defendant.

Among large American cities, New York City had the largest increase in reported hate crimes against Asians last year, according to an analysis of police data by a center at the California State University, San Bernardino. There were 28 such incidents in 2020, up from 3 in 2019, according to New York Police Department data.

In the past month alone, several assaults on Asian victims have been reported to the police, including an attack on an older woman who was pushed outside a bakery in Queens. None of the incidents has been charged as a hate crime.

In fact, the only person who has been prosecuted for an anti-Asian hate crime in New York City this year is Taiwanese. He was accused of writing anti-Chinese graffiti outside several businesses in Queens.

The authorities acknowledge that the data is limited and imperfect. A pending bill that is expected to pass by June would set up a more standardized system for New York's courts, police and prosecutors to report hate crime incidents.

Stewart Loo, a deputy inspector who heads the Police Department's Asian Hate Crimes Task Force, said in an interview that Asian-Americans are often reluctant to report crime because of language barriers or worries over having their immigration status questioned. Many also fear retaliation from perpetrators, he said, or simply do not want to make trouble.

Deputy Inspector Stewart Loo, who leads the Asian Hate Crimes Task Force, spoke at a press conference in Queens to call attention to recent attacks on Asian-Americans. Credit... Andrew Seng for The New York Times

"The process is very daunting," Mr. Loo said. "You have to go to the police station, you have to talk to detectives, you have to talk to prosecutors."

Last year, the attacks in New York City that did get prosecuted as hate crimes typically involved people blaming Asians for spreading the coronavirus, echoing the rhetoric of former President Donald J. Trump, who has referred to the disease as the "China virus" and the "Kung Flu."

For instance, a white woman was charged with a hate crime last March after she bumped into an Asian woman crossing the street in Manhattan and said, "You're the reason why the coronavirus is here," before spitting on her and pulling out some of her hair, according to prosecutors.

In the Chinatown stabbing last month, prosecutors said there was no evidence that the defendant, Salman Muflehi, targeted the victim because he was Asian or saw the victim's face before stabbing him. Mr. Muflehi did tell the police afterward that he did not like the way the victim had looked at him.

Mr. Muflehi immigrated from Yemen to New York as a teenager. He has suffered from severe mental health issues for years, often getting into fights and landing in jail, according to interviews with his brother and mother. They say he has never expressed any hatred against Asians.

He has previously been arrested on accusations that he assaulted both his brother and his father. Most recently, he was charged in January with punching a Hispanic man in the head, prosecutors said. (Prior news reports incorrectly identified that victim as Asian.)

Mr. Muflehi remains in jail. He faces four criminal charges, including attempted murder. Adding a hate crime designation to the charge would raise the minimum sentence he faces from five years to eight years.

The 36-year-old victim, whose identity has not been made public, was hospitalized for more than two weeks. He was released on Sunday.

Police investigators recommended the stabbing be charged as a hate crime, but the Manhattan district attorney's office disagreed.

Shirley Ng, a community organizer in Manhattan's Chinatown, supports easing the criteria for hate crime charges and eliminating bail for them, because, in her view, officials have been too lenient in cases involving Asian victims.

"It's too easy to say these suspects have mental illness," Ms. Ng said. "Sometimes they are also cognizant that they're out to hurt people."

Others say tougher enforcement could end up pitting Asian-Americans against Black and Latino communities, inflaming racial tensions.

Wayne Ho, president of the Chinese-American Planning Council, a social services agency, said many of his Asian colleagues were verbally harassed during the pandemic but chose not to alert law enforcement because they worried the perpetrators, who were often people of color, could be mistreated by the police.

"I asked myself, do I want this person in jail?" said Alice Wong, one of Mr. Ho's colleagues. "Just because you put someone in jail doesn't make them not hate anyone anymore."

Recognizing this challenge, some law enforcement officials have called for people who commit hate crimes to attend antiracism classes as an alternative to prison.

The approach was used after four teenage girls last March assaulted a 52-year-old Asian woman on a bus in the Bronx while accusing her of spreading the coronavirus, according to prosecutors. One of the girls beat her with an umbrella.

With the consent of the victim, prosecutors allowed three of the girls to be cleared of criminal charges if they participated in an educational program on hate crimes for two months. Their identities have not been made public because they are minors.

Elizabeth OuYang, a civil rights lawyer who supervised the program, said the program helped debunk stereotypes for the girls, who are Black and grew up without much interaction with Asian-Americans. By the end, Ms. OuYang felt confident that they were remorseful about what they had done.

"The girls are good kids," Ms. OuYang said. "They're not evil monsters. I swear on my mother's grave they will not commit another hate crime again."

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Asian-Americans Are Being Attacked. Why Are Hate Crime Charges So Rare? (Published 2021)

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Several recent attacks have not been charged as hate crimes, fueling protests and outrage among many Asian-Americans. Send any friend a story As a subscriber, you have 10 gift articles to give each month. Anyone can read what you share.

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New data has revealed over the past year, the number of anti-Asian hate incidents - which can include shunning, slurs and physical attacks - is greater than previously reported. And a disproportionate number of attacks have been directed at women.

The research released by reporting forum Stop AAPI Hate on Tuesday revealed nearly 3,800 incidents were reported over the course of roughly a year during the pandemic. It's a significantly higher number than last year's count of about 2,600 hate incidents nationwide over the span of five months. Women made up a far higher share of the reports, at 68 percent, compared to men, who made up 29 percent of respondents. The nonprofit does not report incidents to police.

Russell Jeung, professor of Asian American studies at San Francisco State University and the forum's founder, told NBC Asian America that the coalescence of racism and sexism, including the stereotype that Asian women are meek and subservient, likely factors into this disparity.

"There is an intersectional dynamic going on that others may perceive both Asians and women and Asian women as easier targets," he said.

The data, which includes incidents that occurred between March 19 of last year and Feb. 28 of this year, shows that roughly 503 incidents took place in 2021 alone. Verbal harassment and shunning were the most common types of discrimination, making up 68.1 percent and 20.5 percent of the reports respectively. The third most common category, physical assault, made up 11.1 percent of the total incidents. More than a third of incidents occurred at businesses, the primary site of discrimination, while a quarter took place in public streets.

According to the data, Asian women report hate incidents 2.3 times more than men. A further examination of the submitted reports showed that in many cases, the verbal harassment that women received reflected the very intersection of racism and sexism.

One Chinese American woman reported that a "man on the subway slapped my hands, threatened to throw his lighter at me, then called me a 'c---- b----.' He then said to 'get the f--- out of NYC.'" Another woman, who's Filipino American, reported that while in a Washington, D.C., metro station with her boyfriend, a man shouted "Chinese b----" at her, coughed at the couple and physically threatened them.

Jeung emphasized that women have always dealt with harassment from men and public safety issues more broadly. But the pandemic, he said, has provided another "excuse" for people to target Asian women.

"We've noticed that from the very beginning, it's been a real consistent pattern," Jeung said. "Bullies attack who they think are vulnerable, and we see this in our elderly and youth populations."

Jeung cautioned against describing the latest numbers as a sudden "surge" in hate incidents because many of the 2020 incidents were reported retroactively in 2021, according to the report, and there has always been a "clear" issue of underreporting in the community.

"We thought we had a lull or it seemed like there was a lull over the summer, but I think people were just reporting less and that it became sort of normalized," he explained. "But now with increased attention, I think people are reporting again. I think that there's been a continued harassment of Asians and now we're continuing to see that reported."

The wave of violence directed at Asian American seniors at the beginning of the year, particularly the graphic attacks that have been captured on video, have likely prompted more attention from both the community and mainstream media, Jeung said. And it's galvanized a vocal response that's likely led to more reporting.

While these attacks on elders have catalyzed calls for action, Jeung made a distinction between this particular violence, most of which has not been found to be explicitly racially motivated, and the racism those in the community have been facing due to the problematic link between the virus and Asian Americans.

"I think there are separate trends, the violence that we're seeing now and the racism we saw last year, but they are related," Jeung said. "We're really careful to note that this violence against Asian Americans in high-crime neighborhoods has always been high. And so the combination of both the racism from last year and crimes against Asian elderly are now significant enough to get national attention."

The scholar noted that this doesn't negate the possibility of implicit bias in these attacks on elders, but he cautioned against grouping the two trends as one issue.

"That's the problem - people conflate it," he said. "So decoupling them then helps diagnose different solutions."

Karthick Ramakrishnan, founder and director of demographic data and policy research nonprofit AAPI Data, previously also warned against defaulting to a "simplistic understanding of what's going on," adding that the violence cannot be neatly summed up by solely the heightened anti-Asian sentiment witnessed throughout the pandemic. He said a confluence of factors, including the effects of poverty and financial struggle exacerbated by the pandemic, as well as opportunity, could have played into it.

"There's a complex variety of factors, but the fundamental reality is that there's an increase in the number of Asian Americans who feel unsafe," he said.

Such issues have been elevated to the executive branch as President Joe Biden has addressed the issue of anti-Asian attacks. In addition to referencing the violence in his first national prime-time address Thursday night, he also signed a memorandum earlier this year that in part issued guidance on how the Justice Department should respond to the heightened number of anti-Asian bias incidents.

Jeung said addressing the root cause of the violence requires more education, more expanded civil rights protections and more restorative justice models. The memorandum - which focuses on hate incidents, rather than hate crimes - allows for a more holistic approach to combating racism against Asian Americans in public streets, transit, private businesses and other settings, he said.

"If you just narrowly focus on hate crimes, you only address a sliver of the racism that Asian Americans are experiencing," Jeung said. "Biden's memo that actually addresses hate incidents rather than hate crimes is actually helpful, because that gives us the opportunity to frame the issue comprehensively."

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There were 3,800 anti-Asian racist incidents, mostly against women, in past year

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"There is an intersectional dynamic going on that others may perceive both Asians and women and Asian women as easier targets," one professor said.

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Experts say the everyday harassment women have learned to put up with - the catcalling and lewd gestures - connects directly with more serious abuses.

A memorial for Sarah Everard in London. Credit... Mary Turner for The New York Times

-Caroline Criado Perez, author of "Invisible Women: Exposing Data Bias in a World Designed for Men" [In Her Words is available as a newsletter. Sign up here to get it delivered to your inbox.]
Sarah Everard in London. Soon Chung Park, Hyun Jung Grant, Suncha Kim, Yong Ae Yue, Delaina Ashley Yaun, Xiaojie Tan and Daoyou Feng in Atlanta.

Eight women, two continents apart, killed in the space of two weeks. The suspects in both cases are men.

In London, Ms. Everard disappeared while walking home from a friend's house, and was found dead a week later. A police officer was charged with kidnapping and murdering her.

In Atlanta, a gunman stormed three massage parlors and shot and killed eight people - seven of them women, six of them Asian - raising speculation that the attack was racially motivated. A suspect was arrested that same evening.

While the details of the two cases differ significantly, experts suggest that the current available evidence points to a potential commonality: misogyny. And, in light of the two events, activists in Britain and in the United States have urged the authorities to treat misogyny as a greater threat to national security, even upgraded to the level of a hate crime.

In the days after Ms. Everard's body was found and protests calling for deeper social change grew across the United Kingdom, the British government announced an experimental pilot program (though there is no fixed start date yet) that would categorize cases of gender-based violence and harassment motivated by misogyny as hate crimes.

"Across the country, women everywhere are looking to us not just to express sympathy with their concerns, but to act," Baroness Helena Kennedy, a member of the House of Lords, the upper chamber of the British Parliament, said during a debate on the policy. "Stop telling them to stay at home and be careful, and start finding those responsible for the violence."

In Atlanta, the arrested suspect told the police he had a "sexual addiction," according to the Cherokee County Sheriff's Office, prompting some activists to call for him to be charged with a hate crime there, too.

"What can't be forgotten is the hate crime statute says 'because of gender' as well," Scott McCoy, interim deputy legal director for L.G.B.T.Q. rights and special litigation at the Southern Poverty Law Center, told CNN. "The angle of misogyny has to be looked at."

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Sarah Everard. Credit... Metropolitan Police, via Shutterstock

As women around the world watched the two events unfold, they started sharing their own stories on social media of having been in similar situations that had the potential to escalate and turn similarly violent. Women spoke of all of the things that they - like Ms. Everard - did " right," including walking on well-lit streets, and talking on the phone or clutching their keys in their pockets while doing so - and described how they still ended up in dangerous situations. Asian women spoke of all of the ways in which sexism and racism coalesce to expose them to a unique form of harassment that can lead to violence and abuse.

Their stories confirm that violence against women isn't an aberration, but a "global public health" crisis of " epidemic proportions," as the World Health Organization describes it.

It is such a widespread, daily occurrence that it is rare to find a woman who hasn't experienced some kind of sexual harassment or assault. Roughly one in three women around the world has been subjected to physical or sexual violence by an intimate partner, a family member, a friend, an acquaintance or a stranger, according to a W.H.O. report published this month. The perpetrator is almost always a man, the report notes, and rates are higher in poorer communities. In the United States, one online survey in 2018 found that 81 percent of women had experienced some kind of sexual harassment during their lifetimes. In the United Kingdom, 97 percent of women aged 18 to 24 said they had been sexually harassed, according to UN Women UK. These numbers are all from before the coronavirus pandemic; with the onset of the health crisis, domestic abuse surged and public spaces became eerily empty, leaving women feeling increasingly worried about their safety.

The data is also conservative. Violence against women is consistently underreported because women are scared of retaliation for speaking out or they fear the stigma associated with sexual violence, said Kalliopi Mingeirou, chief of the UN Women's initiative to end gender-based violence.

It also goes unreported because so much harassment - the uncomfortable staring, the catcalling, the lewd gestures, the public masturbation - is seen as simply normal nuisances that women have learned to put up with.

"We're not joining the dots, nobody is making connections," said Laura Bates, author of "Why Men Hate Women." "There is a big picture here that we are just repeatedly missing. There are connections between the normalized daily behaviors that we brush off and the more serious abuses."

Ms. Bates, in 2012, created the Everyday Sexism Project so that women could share things that had happened to them that they felt were too insignificant to report or make a fuss over as a way to highlight how pervasive the problem is, and to pick up on patterns of aggression.

It is now one of the world's largest databases of its kind with thousands of entries from women around the world who felt uncomfortable, vulnerable, threatened by men. In one example, a woman recalls that when she was in school, at age 13 or 14, a few girls complained to a teacher that the boys in their class had been groping them and the teacher said that they were "being oversensitive." In another example, a woman recalls waiting at a bus stop when a man walked up to her and grabbed her bottom but everyone around her who had witnessed the incident remained silent. In yet another example, a woman recalls how a man sat directly opposite her on the train and touched himself and then got off the train on the next stop, as if nothing had happened.

The police officer arrested in London was held on suspicion of indecent exposure at a fast-food restaurant in a separate episode just days before Ms. Everard disappeared. The Metropolitan Police is now under investigation for how it handled that allegation.

"That's what we need to be doing better. We need to get better at sweating the small stuff," said Caroline Criado Perez, author of "Invisible Women: Exposing Data Bias in a World Designed for Men."

An example of "sweating the small stuff" would be training public transport staff to better handle harassment complaints since so much of the harassment that women face happens on public transport, Ms. Criado Perez said. Educating children on appropriate and healthy relationships would also help, she said.

There is plenty of evidence to suggest that misogyny and gender-based violence are also correlated with broader threats. They are among the most reliable indicators of terrorism and conflict, according to a 2015 United Nations report, because a spike in gender-based violence - particularly domestic violence - correlates with "rising levels of insecurity in society more broadly." A sudden disappearance of girls from schools, for example, could point to a rise of fundamentalist views. There is also a "robust symbiosis between misogyny and white supremacy," according to a report by the Anti-Defamation League, an organization that was founded in 1913 to combat anti-Semitism, and now fights a variety of threats of hate and extremism.

"There is enough data to know that men who kill women do not suddenly kill women, they work up to killing women," Ms. Criado Perez added. "If only we were to listen to women and pay attention to the misogyny and aggression and violence that they deal with on a daily basis."

Six of the eight victims of the shooting in Atlanta, Ga.

As pervasive as sexism, misogyny and gender-based violence are, none are inevitable and they can be countered, said Jackson Katz, educator and author of "The Macho Paradox: Why Some Men Hurt Women and How All Men Can Help."

The first step, he noted, is changing the language used to describe violence against women and characterizing it instead as male violence. (The vast majority of abuse is almost always at the hands of men, as the W.H.O. noted.) "The term 'violence against women' is a passive construction - there's no active agent, it's a bad thing that happens to women," he explained, but it's as if "nobody's doing it to them."

That kind of language, he said, "shifts the accountability off of men and the culture that produces them and puts it onto women."

The second step is recognizing that male aggression against women is a manifestation of a broader systemic problem. "There's this impulse to pathologize the individual perpetrators - that somehow the individual perpetrator is some monster who just kind of crawled out of the swamp," Mr. Katz said. "But if you accept the concept that it's systemic, then there are policy implications and political implications and introspection that can be uncomfortable."

Categorizing misogyny as a hate crime could possibly do both those things: refocus accountability and publicly stigmatize that behavior to encourage a broader cultural shift. "It is important for the message that it sends," said Steve Freeman, vice president of civil rights at the Anti-Defamation League. "And how that message plays in the community, how you talk about it, how you have police understand it."

But it would be so incredibly difficult to pin down what behavior is driven by misogyny, Mr. Freeman added. "Making misogyny a crime is like making racism a crime - it's unfortunate, it's ugly and we wish people wouldn't do it, but you can't punish somebody for saying something," he said.

When a crime is committed - if a man assaulted a woman, for example - then prosecutors would have to prove that the perpetrator was motivated by bias for it to be a hate crime, Mr. Freeman added. In other words, they'd have to show that the man assaulted her because she's a woman, which is a tough standard to meet.

In the United States, a crime motivated by gender bias is considered a hate crime at the federal level and in 35 states. But, out of the 7,314 hate crime incidents recorded in 2019 across the country, only 0.9 percent were categorized as being motivated by gender bias. And hate crimes, over all, rarely lead to successful convictions.

Reporting hate crimes also requires a police force that is trained to appropriately respond to those complaints. But that would only broaden the powers of law enforcement, which several women's rights groups argue wouldn't do much to prompt deeper cultural change.

Categorizing misogyny as a hate crime shouldn't be seen "as a silver bullet," said Ms. Bates, because "we're still asking women to trust the police with their stories."

In 2016, Nottinghamshire, a county in the United Kingdom, became the first to categorize misogyny as a hate crime. The program, established by Sue Fish, then police chief of Nottinghamshire, served as a model for the British government's recent national plan. In a survey evaluating the program two years later, women noted that they felt safer. "Some of the feedback we had was that women, for the first time, described themselves as walking taller and with their 'heads held high,'" Ms. Fish said in a recent interview with local news media.

But that didn't necessarily mean women reported instances of harassment more often. Many still felt, according to the survey, that incidents like name calling or groping seemed too normal for the police to take seriously.

"Countless times I've had this done to me before," one respondent noted. "So what's the point of me going to the police station and sitting there for two hours with a policeman who probably just thinks, 'Why are you wasting my time?'"

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Misogyny Fuels Violence Against Women. Should It Be a Hate Crime?

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Experts say the everyday harassment women have learned to put up with - the catcalling and lewd gestures - connects directly with more serious abuses. -Caroline Criado Perez, author of "Invisible Women: Exposing Data Bias in a World Designed for Men" [In Her Words is available as a newsletter.

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https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/18/nyregion/asian-hate-crimes.html

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President Biden urged Congress to pass a new one. But many are skeptical that the criminal justice system can offer a solution.

Credit... Illustration by The New York Times; photographs by Jutharat Pinyodoonyachet, Stefani Reynolds and Jeenah Moon for The New York Times

This article is part of the Debatable newsletter. You can sign up here to receive it on Tuesdays and Thursdays.
In his address about last week's spa shootings in Georgia that left eight people dead, including six women of Asian descent, President Biden had only one novel policy prescription for stemming the rising tide of anti-Asian violence in the United States: Whatever the shooter's motivation, he said, it was time for Congress to pass a new piece of hate crime legislation, the Covid-19 Hate Crimes Act, which had been introduced this month.

But like 46 other states, Georgia already has a hate crime law, which it enacted last year after the killing of Ahmaud Arbery, and it may very well come into play in this case. Which raises the question: What is the point of more hate crime laws, and are they really the best way to protect victims of violent bigotry? Here's a look at the debate.

In the eyes of the law, hate crimes are a fairly new category of criminal conduct: It wasn't until 1968 that Congress passed the first federal hate crimes statutes, which made it a crime to use or threaten to use force to interfere with housing rights on the basis of race, religion, sex or national origin. In 2009, Congress passed a bill that expanded the definition of hate crimes and added new protections against crimes based on disability, sexual orientation and gender identity.

Of the thousands of hate crimes reported every year, only a handful are referred to the federal government. Most are adjudicated at the state level, where protection is more uneven. For example, many states do not consider gender identity or sexual orientation protected qualities. But typically, the function of all state hate crime laws is to increase the penalty of a given crime, like assault or murder, when it is motivated by some form of bias.

More harm should lead to more punishment: Proponents of hate crime laws often argue that crimes inflict more harm when they are motivated by bias. That could be true for the victim, who may suffer "distinct emotional harms," as Supreme Court Justice William Rehnquist wrote in a landmark hate crimes case in 1993; and it could be true for other members of the victim's demographic, who may be left "feeling isolated, vulnerable, and unprotected by the law," as the Anti-Defamation League says.

"If someone assaults me because they want my money, it's going to affect me, it's going to affect my wife, it's going to affect my family," Toni Bisconti, a University of Akron professor who studies hate crimes, told Vox in 2017. "But if someone assaults me because they know I'm gay, then all of a sudden it's going to affect people that don't even know me. They have no idea who I am. I'm just the conduit to gay people."

Hatred deserves a higher burden of blame: A second legal function of penalty enhancement, as Janine Young Kim, a law professor, explained in the Nebraska Law Review in 2006, is to establish bias as a motive that confers greater moral culpability: Just as a person who kills out of sadistic pleasure may be said to deserve a harsher sentence than a parent who kills in retaliation for the murder of his or her child, so too may a person who kills out of misogyny or race hatred.

Prosecuting hate crimes prevents more hate crimes: "To effectively deter future bigots from acting on their worst impulses, the criminal justice system must not only prosecute the violent acts, but also the hateful intent behind them," Shan Wu, a former federal prosecutor, argued at CNN.

Hate crime laws are a statement of values: "Hate crime laws have important symbolic meaning," Jack Levin, an expert on hate crimes at Northeastern University, told Vox. "They send a message to two groups: They send it to the perpetrator, informing him that our community will not tolerate his intolerance. And then at the same time, they send a message to potential victims that they are welcome in our community."

Hate crime laws have never wanted for critics, particularly since their proliferation in the 1980s and '90s. Here are some of the forms their opposition takes.

Infringement of free speech: The constitutionality of hate crimes has been challenged on the grounds that meting out extra punishment for harboring certain values, rather than performing certain acts, violates the First Amendment. The Supreme Court ruled in 1993 that it does not, but as Sarah Lustbader writes in The Appeal, "it may strike some as strange that the difference between a hate crime and a normal crime can sometimes be found in constitutionally protected speech."

An individualistic legal remedy for a social ill: The philosopher Claudia Card has suggested that hate crime laws are popular because they allow the country to shirk responsibility for dismantling systems of oppression by more severely punishing only their most blatant and violent manifestations. "Perhaps we should ask whether penalty enhancement treats hate crime perpetrators as scapegoats," she wrote in a 2001 academic article, "making them pay the penalty for behavior that profits others, who often share (and may be a significant source of) their biased and bigoted attitudes but simply lack their taste or aptitude for violence."

The difficulty of prosecution: Proving a biased motive is often difficult, and especially so when it comes to hate crimes committed against people of Asian descent. "There's a recognizable prototype with anti-Black or anti-Semitic or anti-gay hate crime," Lu-in Wang, a law professor at the University of Pittsburgh, told The Times. "They're often more clear-cut."

The dubiousness of deterrence: As Briana Alongi wrote in a 2017 Pace Law Review article, "The idea that a hate crime perpetrator will really refrain from harming another person due to enhanced penalties is inconclusive because there is no substantial, reliable evidence to prove these theories."

The criminal justice system is a poor weapon against bigotry: As Bill Dobbs, a longtime gay activist and civil libertarian, wrote in The Times in 2012, "social problems cannot be solved with more prison time."

More prison time or harsher enforcement of hate crime laws could even make the problems they are intended to solve worse, some argue, because marginalized people are disproportionately and aggressively policed. "I've rarely seen people who are more socially privileged be the ones accused of hate crimes," Anne Oredeko, the supervising attorney with the racial justice unit at Legal Aid, told The Times. "Often what you end up seeing is people of color being accused of hate crimes."

Consider that in New York City, where several assaults of Asian victims have been reported to the police in the past month alone, only one person has been prosecuted for an anti-Asian hate crime this year: a Taiwanese man who was accused of writing anti-Chinese graffiti.

For many Asian-Americans, the idea of more police presence is unwelcome, especially for women who work in massage businesses like those that were attacked last week. "Here in New York, the N.Y.P.D. raids massage businesses and arrests people, regardless of whether or not those people engage in sex work," Yves Nguyen, an organizer for Red Canary Song, which describes itself as a grass-roots organization of Asian sex workers and allies, told Mother Jones. "It doesn't matter if they were doing sex work, they're going to be criminalized all the same - for being Asian women, for being migrants, for some of them being undocumented, and for doing labor that's often connected to sex work."

Introduced by Representative Grace Meng of New York and Senator Mazie Hirono of Hawaii, the Covid-19 Hate Crimes Act is a short bill with two main provisions:

It requires the attorney general to put a Justice Department official in charge of reviewing reports of Covid-19-related hate crimes for at least a year.

It requires the Justice Department to issue guidance to state and local law enforcement agencies on how to establish an online hate crime reporting system in multiple languages, expand public education campaigns to encourage reporting of cases and provide guidance on how to mitigate racially discriminatory language in descriptions of the pandemic.

The bill could go some way toward improving the country's unreliable system of tracking hate crimes, which has long been a source of consternation for victims and activists: While the F.B.I. is required to document hate crimes, it relies on local law enforcement agencies for data, many of which do not comply. Underreporting is also an issue: An estimated 250,000 hate crimes were committed each year between 2004 and 2015 in the United States, according to the Justice Department, but a majority were not reported to law enforcement.

"The first step in addressing hate violence is to know its full scope and magnitude," Jonathan A. Greenblatt, the national director of the Anti-Defamation League, wrote in a letter to The Times. "Our state legislatures and law enforcement agencies need to ensure that these crimes are being fully reported and taken seriously."

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Opinion | Are Hate Crime Laws Really the Answer to Anti-Asian Violence?

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President Biden urged Congress to pass a new one. But many are skeptical that the criminal justice system can offer a solution. This article is part of the Debatable newsletter. You can sign up here to receive it on Tuesdays and Thursdays.

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https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2021/03/26/stop-asian-hate-asian-americans-across-us-demand-reforms/6990150002/

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https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/asian-american-hate-crimes/2021/02/21/c28a8e04-72d9-11eb-b8a9-b9467510f0fe_story.html

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Protesters attend an End the Violence Towards Asians rally in Manhattan's Washington Square Park on Saturday. Since the start of the pandemic, violence targeting Asian Americans has risen dramatically. (Dia Dipasupil/Getty Images)

A spate of high-profile assaults on Asian Americans has renewed long-standing criticism from Democrats and civil rights groups that the U.S. government is vastly undercounting hate crimes, a problem that they say has grown more acute amid rising white nationalism and deepening racial strife.

The attacks - including several in Northern California over the past month that attracted national attention - followed months of warnings from advocates that anti-China rhetoric from former president Donald Trump over the coronavirus pandemic was contributing to a surge in anti-Asian slurs and violence.

Although President Biden last month signed an executive action banning the federal government from employing the sort of "inflammatory and xenophobic" language Trump used to describe the virus - such as "China plague" and "kung flu" - Asian American leaders said the recent attacks demonstrate a need for greater urgency in dealing with such threats.

Three Asian American medical providers on the front lines spoke with The Post about the racial discrimination they faced early in the pandemic. (Allie Caren/The Washington Post)

Among other incidents, Vicha Ratanapakdee, an 84-year-old San Francisco resident who had emigrated from Thailand, was killed in late January, in a brazen attack captured on a video that went viral on social media. Antoine Watson, a 19-year-old African American man, was charged in connection with Ratanapakdee's death and has pleaded not guilty.

Biden administration officials said they are working to address the problem, pointing to a section in the executive memo that instructed the Justice Department to expand its reporting, tracking and prosecutions of "hate incidents." Officials said those efforts could go beyond hate crimes to include episodes of harassment and discrimination.

During his Senate confirmation hearing Monday, Merrick Garland, Biden's nominee for attorney general, pledged to support such efforts.

"Hate crimes tear at the fabric of our society. They make our citizens worried about walking the streets and exercising even the most normal rights," Garland said. "The role of the [Justice Department's] Civil Rights Division is to prosecute those cases vigorously, and I can ensure you that it will if I am confirmed."

A 1990 federal law mandates that the FBI collect data specifically on hate crimes each year, but the effort has long been plagued by incomplete and inconsistent data provided by the nation's estimated 18,000 state, municipal and tribal law enforcement agencies.

The administration is in the early stages of identifying strategies to compel broader participation. Among the ideas advocates have pushed for is tying federal funding from the Justice Department's extensive grant programs to increased training and reporting on hate crimes.

In 2019, the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights issued a report recommending Congress adopt legislation to provide funding for incentives and calling on local police to establish dedicated hate-crime units. Catherine E. Lhamon, who chaired that commission, now serves as deputy director for racial justice and equity on the White House domestic policy council.

At a news conference last week, Rep. Judy Chu (D-Calif.), chair of the Asian Pacific American Caucus, said she is requesting a meeting with Justice Department leaders to discuss what she called a "crisis point" for the Asian American community in dealing with "an alarming surge of anti-Asian bigotry across the nation."

Chu added that the 1990 law on reporting of hate crime data "doesn't have any teeth" because it does not compel localities to comply or to do so in a consistent and thorough manner.

Last fall, the FBI reported 7,314 hate crimes nationwide in 2019, the most in a decade - but experts said the statistics were woefully inadequate because too few local law enforcement agencies fully participate in federal data collection efforts.

The FBI said that 15,588 law enforcement organizations participated in the 2019 hate crimes study, but just 2,172 agencies reported the total number of incidents contained in the report. Civil rights advocates called that scenario implausible, pointing out that the entire state of Alabama reported no hate crimes to the FBI in both 2018 and 2019.

"The FBI reports help us identify trends, but their data is so woefully inadequate that it can't be relied on for much," said civil rights lawyer Arjun Singh Sethi, author of "American Hate: Survivors Speak Out."

Some big-city law enforcement agencies have publicly reported an increase in bias attacks against Asian Americans. For example, New York City's hate crimes task force investigated 27 incidents in 2020, including 24 tied to the coronavirus, a ninefold increase from the previous year.

But experts said local police agencies lack training and funding to properly investigate hate crimes, and many treat it as a low priority. Some conservative Republicans have opposed more stringent reporting requirements to determine whether crimes are motivated by hate, arguing that such measures are redundant.

Yet advocates have pointed to a 2013 study from the Justice Department's Bureau of Justice Statistics that found an average of 259,700 violent and property-related hate crimes from 2003 through 2011 after assessing data from the annual National Crime Victimization Survey of American households.

In a statement, the FBI said participation in its data program is "voluntary." The agency added that it anticipates the reporting methods would improve in the coming years as a greater percentage of local police agencies transitions into the National Incident Based Reporting System, which requires more detailed and consistent data.

In a bipartisan vote last year, the House approved the Jabara-Heyer No Hate Act, which aimed to bolster federal aid to localities for hate-crime training and reporting. The GOP-controlled Senate refused to vote on it.

The legislation is named after Khalid Jabara, a man of Lebanese descent shot to death by a White neighbor in Oklahoma in 2016, and Heather Heyer, a counterprotester killed at a white-supremacist rally in Charlottesville in 2017. Neither of their killings was included in the FBI's hate crime reports.

With Democrats in control of both chambers, Chu said she hoped to revive the legislative effort. Rep. Ted Lieu (D-Calif.) said he expects to gain bipartisan support for a letter to the Justice Department's new leadership team similar to the one he sent last year with 150 co-signers from both parties asking then-Attorney General William P. Barr to "forcefully condemn anti-Asian bias." Barr did not respond to that letter, Lieu's office said.

Advocacy groups have sought to fill the breach through websites and hotlines that allow Asian Americans to self-report hate incidents, projects that share similarities to efforts from Muslim American groups to document bias crimes after the 9/11 terrorist attacks in 2001.

Stop AAPI Hate, a West Coast-based collective founded last spring in response to the pandemic, reported 2,808 "hate incidents" nationwide aimed at Asian Americans from March through December 2020. For months leading to the November election, Trump sought to deflect blame over his management of the pandemic response by blaming China and using xenophobic and racist language to describe the virus on social media, in televised interviews and at campaign rallies and White House coronavirus task force briefings.

The group said verbal harassment made up 71 percent of the incidents, while physical assaults made up about 9 percent. Organizers said the effort has helped raise media awareness and drawn celebrities to amplify the message, but some experts cautioned that the data is largely unvetted.

"It's incredibly important for organizations to provide those kinds of narratives about the impact of hate, but at the end of the day it's anecdotal and cannot displace the onus on our government to provide accurate data," said Maya Berry, executive director of the Arab American Institute, which helped draft early versions of the No Hate legislation.

John C. Yang, executive director of Asian Americans Advancing Justice-AAJC, which has collected self-reported incidents of anti-Asian bias since 2017, said his group also has tallied a spike in the past year. But he acknowledged that it is difficult for advocacy organizations to adequately analyze such information.

"Some recent incidents, whether they are anti-Asian or something else, is hard to tell," Yang said. "As the pandemic has worn on, the economic disparity has really played out and the physical and mental anxieties are playing out as well, and it's probably all contributing."

Updated September 16, 2021

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Attacks on Asian Americans during pandemic renew criticism that U.S. undercounts hate crimes

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A spate of high-profile assaults on Asian Americans has renewed long-standing criticism from Democrats and civil rights groups that the U.S. government is vastly undercounting hate crimes, a problem that they say has grown more acute amid rising white nationalism and deepening racial strife.

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A hate crime is a "criminal offense against a person or property motivated in whole or in part by an offender's bias against a race, religion, disability, sexual orientation, ethnicity, gender or gender identity." i

What Are the Effects of Hate Crimes?

People victimized by violent hate crimes are more likely to experience more psychological distress than victims of other violent crimes. ii Specifically, victims of crimes that are bias-motivated are more likely to experience post-traumatic stress, safety concerns, depression, anxiety and anger than victims of crimes that are not motivated by bias. iii,iv,v

Hate crimes send messages to members of the victim's group that they are unwelcome and unsafe in the community, victimizing the entire group and decreasing feelings of safety and security. vi,vii Furthermore, witnessing discrimination against one's own group can lead to psychological distress and lower self-esteem. viii

What Leads to Hate Crimes?

Hate crimes are an extreme form of prejudice, made more likely in the context of social and political change. Public and political discourse may devalue members of unfamiliar groups, ix and offenders may feel that their livelihood or way of life is threatened by demographic changes. x Offenders may not be motivated by hate, but rather by fear, ignorance or anger. These can lead to dehumanization of unfamiliar groups and to targeted aggression. xi,xii

How Prevalent Are Hate Crimes?

The FBI reported 7,145 hate crimes in 2017; xiii however, the majority of hate crimes are never reported, so these data underestimate the true pervasiveness. xiv

Reported hate crimes in 2017 were motivated by hostility based on race/ethnicity (58.1 percent), religion (22.0 percent), sexual orientation (15.9 percent), gender identity (.6 percent) and disability (1.6 percent). Hate crimes targeted Jewish, African-American and LGBT communities at high rates.

Psychological research has shown that prejudice, stereotyping and discrimination can have adverse effects on both the targets and the perpetrators.

-Antonio E. Puente, PhD, 2017 APA President

The American Psychological Association Condemns All Hate Crimes

APA supports the efforts of researchers, law enforcement, clinicians, teachers and policy-makers to reduce the prevalence of hate crimes and to alleviate their effects upon victims. xix We can address hate crimes through the following prevention and intervention policies and programs:

Support implementation of the Matthew Shepard and James Byrd, Jr. Hate Crimes Prevention Act and full funding for the Department of Justice's Civil Rights Division, Office for Victims of Crime and Community Relations Service.

Enact hate crime laws in states lacking legislation and strengthen laws in others, incorporating race, religion, ethnicity/national origin, sexual orientation, gender, gender identity and disability.xx

Follow law-enforcement and community guidelines outlined by campaigns such as 'Building Stronger, Safer Communities' and 'Not in Our Town.'

Recent APA Actions and Resources

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Interpersonal Violence Prevention

APA takes a public health approach to violence prevention advocacy, using psychological research to inform policies and programs.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
A hate crime is a "criminal offense against a person or property motivated in whole or in part by an offender's bias against a race, religion, disability, sexual orientation, ethnicity, gender or gender identity." i People victimized by violent hate crimes are more likely to experience more psychological distress than victims of other violent crimes.