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Asian Americans and Gender-Based Violence Timeline

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Asian Americans and Gender-Based Violence Timeline

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Created by: Lillian Guo, Chloe Law, and Jessica Liu, KAN-WIN Community Engagement Interns

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KAN-WIN acknowledges the legacy and lasting impact of Black, Latinx, and Indigenous activists, many of whom are women, trans, and/or non-binary, throughout history who have created the frameworks and contexts for doing transformative gender-based violence prevention and advocacy work. Without their contributions to the expansive history of the anti-violence movement(s), it would not be possible for many of the Asian American activists, politicians, and community organizations listed in this timeline to accomplish what they were able to. We thank the activists who worked tirelessly before us to shed light on the unique barriers faced by survivors of color and their ingenuity in crafting solutions that address the specific challenges faced by immigrants and people of color, and who fought to provide space for more diverse voices to be heard within the movements to end domestic and sexual violence.

KAN-WIN acknowledges that this timeline does not cover the full extent of Asian American contributions to anti gender-based violence activism; it is an intentional attempt to fill the gap in the archive of the anti-violence movement(s) which frequently leaves out the stories and narratives of communities of color, but we do not claim that this is a fully comprehensive overview of the role that Asian Americans have played within the movements to end domestic and sexual violence. We hope that this can serve as an important learning tool and a starting point for uncovering more of the stories and voices of Asian Americans in history.

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This timeline includes mentions and descriptions of sexual and domestic violence.

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1875: Page Act Discriminates Against First Asian Americans

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1875: Page Act Discriminates Against First Asian Americans

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Chinese women were the first victims of anti-immigration laws in the U.S. The Page Act of 1875 effectively prohibited East Asian, particularly Chinese women from entry. Chinese women were labeled prostitutes, although many of these claims were unsubstantiated, and the anti-Chinese movement claimed that exclusion was necessary to prevent the spread of disease and immorality to white men. NAPAWF writes that this is the first of many immigration laws used to perpetuate reproductive injustice. Even today, Asian women struggle with navigating America’s complicated and discriminatory immigration system, which impacts their access to resources and interactions with the state.

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The Gentlemen’s Agreement of 1907 sought to limit the number of Japanese laborers immigrating to the U.S. It also created a loophole that allowed for Japanese women to marry Japanese men by proxy and join them in the states. Men would send pictures back to their home countries, usually Japan or Korea, for women’s family members to find suitable matches. Many women came from poor families and left for economic reasons, others out of filial piety. Upon arrival, the women were shocked to find that the pictures of their husbands were outdated and deceptive, and that they had actually agreed to marry a poor laborer decades her senior. Although divorce rates were low, many women were trapped in unhappy marriages where they were forced to perform difficult manual labor, raise children, and perform housework. Some picture brides were abused by their husbands, but discriminatory immigration laws, cultural constraints, and poverty made it too difficult to return to their home country or escape. Those women who did leave their marriages were oftentimes targeted and shamed by ads in Japanese language newspapers.

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Between 1932 and 1945, the Japanese military coordinated the coercion, trickery, and brute force kidnapping of girls and women from Korea, China, the Philippines, and other occupied areas into brutal military brothels to serve as sex slaves for imperial Japan. The women were held in inhumane conditions and were repeatedly raped, beaten, and denied medical care. Hundreds of thousands of women were enslaved, and the UN estimates that 90 percent of the women had died by the end of the war, from causes of STI’s, violence, and suicide. While the Japanese government acknowledged the atrocities in 1993 after victims started to speak out, the issue remains divisive and political, with some recent Japanese officials questioning whether the women were truly forced. Various Asian American women activists have worked hard to support the redressive efforts of the Seoul-based Korean Council for the Women Drafted for Military Sexual Slavery by Japan, which was established in 1990. These efforts include public events with survivors, marches, film screenings, protests, conferences and protests.  In 2018, Osaka, Japan ended its sister relationship with San Francisco in protest of the latter’s erection of a “Comfort Women” statue.

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May Tsubouchi, 24, was held at the Poston Internment Camp and had recently broken up with a mess hall coworker, over 10 years her senior. In the two months following their breakup, he stalked and threatened her, until he eventually attacked her in her room. She soon succumbed to her injuries and died. Official camp reports refuse to hold the attacker accountable, instead shifting the blame to Tsubouchi, deeming her a “prostitute.” This is simply one case in a large history of sexual violence in Japanese internment camps: men would often sexually abuse underage girls and when reported, would simply be transferred to a different facility. Other times, victims’ stories would be co-opted and used to justify further state surveillance which further made the camps a threatening environment.

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Around World War II and the passage of the War Brides Act of 1945, more than 300,000 women, many of whom were from Asian countries, have come to the U.S. as “military brides” of American servicemen. Not only were they dependent on their spouses for citizenship and livelihood in the U.S., but also military families show greater rates and severity of domestic violence, creating a more vulnerable situation.

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According to Liza Anderson, "[S]exual violence...was a key aspect of the war." Sexual violence was commonly used by American soldiers as an interrogation technique and military tactic to "destroy the will of the enemy to fight back." Soldiers often targeted Vietnamese women as a form of retaliation in order to assert dominance during occupation. Sexist and racist hatred was ingrained in the culture of American military units, and leadership "either directly encouraged sexual violence or passively allowed it to exist."

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Patsy Takemoto Mink, a Democrat from Hawaii, was the first woman of color elected to Congress, and the first Asian American to seek the presidential nomination of the Democratic Party. She was also one of the principal authors of Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972, which barred sexual discrimination in institutions that received federal funding. Under Title IX, institutions must take immediate action to address issues of sexual harassment or sexual violence, provide services to survivors, establish procedures for handling complaints, use formal hearings, and not retaliate against those who report.

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1982: Everywomen's Shelter Founded by Nilda Rimonte

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1982: Everywomen's Shelter Founded by Nilda Rimonte

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Nilda Rimonte founded California’s Everywomen’s Shelter, the first U.S. domestic violence shelter for Asian women in 1981. It offered counseling, legal aid, and a place for survivors and their children to stay that takes into account language and cultural barriers.

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1982: Helen Zia Gains Attention for Vincent Chin Activism

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1982: Helen Zia Gains Attention for Vincent Chin Activism

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Helen Zia is a queer Chinese-American journalist and activist. Zia, a Princeton graduate and Fulbright scholar, was a former executive editor of Ms. Magazine as well as a founding member of NAPAWF.  She gained prominence in the Asian American community for bringing attention to the Vincent Chin case in 1982 after a Chinese American man was beaten to death with a baseball bat by two white men who did not face real punishment for the hate crime. In additional to her advocacy for marriage equality, As an award-winning journalist, she covered “date rape” when the concept was still new, which led to campus demonstrations and policy overhaul at the University of Michigan.

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In the late 80’s, a group of women’s advocates and social service providers came together to address the growing demand for domestic violence services in the Korean American community, which led to the formation of Korean American Women in Need (KAN-WIN). It is the first independent domestic violence organization for Korean American communities. The nonprofit specializes in helping Asian American and immigrant survivors of gender-based violence through free and confidential direct services and community organizing. Its vision is to create healthy communities free from violence and oppression. In 2013, the organization officially changed its name to KAN-WIN to recognize the growing diversity of its clientele.

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1991: Queer Asian Women & Transgender Support Services Program Created

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1991: Queer Asian Women & Transgender Support Services Program Created

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Asian Women’s Shelter in San Francisco creates the Queer Asian Women and Transgender Support (QAWTS) Program to address the specific needs of Asian Pacific Islander LGBTQ folks. To this day, it serves as one of the first and only programs of its kind to provide comprehensive services for queer survivors of intimate partner violence, but to also provide innovative programs and prevention strategies. The QAWTS Program aims to shift socio-cultural norms from those that justify or allow violent behavior between intimate partners to new norms that promote non-violent, healthy relationships. They emphasize doing work that serves immigrant and refugee LGBTQ API folks.

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1994: Violence Against Women Act Passed by Congress

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1994: Violence Against Women Act Passed by Congress

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VAWA is the first piece of U.S. federal legislation acknowledging domestic violence and sexual assault as crimes, and provides federal resources to encourage community-coordinated responses to combating violence. The act allotted over $1 billion toward investigation and prosecution of violent crimes against women, and for federal grants for programs that prevent domestic violence, sexual assault, dating violence and stalking, as well as shelters, and community programs. The Act is especially important to immigrant communities because it allowed spouses of U.S. citizens or permanent residents to self-petition for visas in cases of domestic violence.

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1994: Thai Community Development Center is Founded

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1994: Thai Community Development Center is Founded

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The Thai Community Development Center in Los Angeles opened and became the first organization to offer bilingual and bicultural services to serve the needs of the Thai immigrant community. Thai CDC provides a wide variety of services for the Thai community, one of the very important ones being empowerment and legal aid for low-income exploited workers and victims of human trafficking. In 1995, Thai CDC  started the Slavery Eradication and Rights Initiative (SERI, which means freedom in Thai) to raise awareness about human trafficking and modern-day slavery in the United States. Since then, SERI has grown so that Thai CDC has been able to work on many cases involving Thai trafficking victims, and today, they continue to provide comprehensive survivor support services/case management while also engaging in advocacy work to pass legislation to protect trafficked victims.

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2000: Founding of INCITE! Women, Gender Non-Conforming, and Trans POC Against Violence

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2000: Founding of INCITE! Women, Gender Non-Conforming, and Trans POC Against Violence

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INCITE! Founders organized the “The Color of Violence: Violence Against Women of Color” conference at UC Santa Cruz with the goals of ending violence that center on women of color, addressing violence against women of color in all forms (such as immigrant and Native American treaty rights), and to encourage the antiviolence movement to include more political organizing. The conference was attended by thousands of women of color who sought to empower survivors to speak the truth, fight against the mainstream social service-oriented agenda in the antiviolence movement, and address interpersonal and state violence simultaneously.  INCITE! has grown to numerous grassroots chapters and affiliates that have launched political projects, conferences, and anthologies.

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2003: Ny Nourn is Convicted of First-Degree Murder

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2003: Ny Nourn is Convicted of First-Degree Murder

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Ny Nourn, a Cambodian refugee born in a Thai refugee camp who later moved to San Diego, CA began dating a much older man named Ron Barker at the age of 17. The relationship quickly turned emotionally, verbally, and physically abusive; Nourn admitted to having slept with her boss which caused Barker to physically abuse and sexually assault her, and then went after Nourn’s boss to shoot and kill him. Nourn is then, in 2003, convicted of first-degree murder and sentenced to life in prison without parole for her role in the murder. Her sentence is reduced to 15 years to life after appealing and submitting reports stating that she suffered from Battered Women’s Syndrome. Later on, in 2017, after being granted parole, she was released immediately into the custody of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and driven to a new detention center where she faced threat of deportation under ICE’s Criminal Alien Program (the Criminal Alien Program gives immigration officials access to jails and prisons to search for immigrants who are deemed deportable for having committed crimes).

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2004: Founding of Creative Interventions

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2004: Founding of Creative Interventions

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Executive Director Mimi Kim (one of KAN-WIN’s co-founders) founded Creative Interventions as a space to imagine solutions to gender-based violence outside of traditional state intervention. They hope to create a world in which community-based, transformative justice and community accountability interventions are viable options to deal with issues of domestic violence and sexual assault.

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2007: Saru Jayaraman Founds Restaurant Opportunities United

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2007: Saru Jayaraman Founds Restaurant Opportunities United

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Jayaraman originally established ROC United to represent restaurant workers from the World Trade Center who were left jobless after 9/11. The organization has since evolved to become an organizing center for immigrant restaurant workers. It aims to establish a working wage and protect workers rights. Restaurant workers are uniquely vulnerable to sexual harassment. 70 percent of people living on the tipped minimum wage are women, and they suffer three times the poverty rate and highest rates of sexual harassment in any industry.

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2010: Ai-Jen Poo Appointed Executive Director of Domestic Workers' Alliance

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2010: Ai-Jen Poo Appointed Executive Director of Domestic Workers' Alliance

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Ai-Jen Poo is appointed as executive director of the National Domestic Workers Alliance, the nation’s leading voice for dignity and fairness for millions of domestic workers in the United States. Her work with NDWA also eventually leads to the passing of the nation’s first Domestic Worker’s Bill of Rights in 2010 which extends basic labor protections to over 200,000 domestic workers in New York State. Poo has stated that the women’s movement and the labor movement are inextricably linked, since a huge challenge for survivors of domestic violence is economic.

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2011: Kabzuag Vaj Awarded White House Champion of Change Award

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2011: Kabzuag Vaj Awarded White House Champion of Change Award

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Kabzuag Vaj is recognized as a White House Champion of Change award recipient for her work to end domestic violence. She arrived in the US as a child refugee from Laos, and has been a fierce advocate to end violence against women and girls since she was a teenager. She gained attention as a co-executive director of Freedom Inc., an organization that works to end domestic violence by engaging low-to-no income communities of color in Wisconsin. Vaj’s work is recognized for being focused on organizing around root causes of violence, advocating for systems change, and for building collective power among Hmong, Cambodian, Black and queer communities.

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2013: Aparna Bhattacharyya Awarded White House Champion of Change Award

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2013: Aparna Bhattacharyya Awarded White House Champion of Change Award

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Aparna Bhattacharyya is recognized as a White House Champion of Change award recipient for her work as an advocate for immigrant survivors of domestic and gender-based violence. In her role as Executive Director of Raksha Inc. in Atlanta, Bhattacharyya gained national attention while working to ensure that immigrant survivors receive culturally competent services. Bhattacharyya has also served on a number of advisory boards and committees at other institutions and organizations doing gender-based violence prevention and advocacy work.

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2013: Emma Sulkowicz Files a Complaint Against Columbia University

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2013: Emma Sulkowicz Files a Complaint Against Columbia University

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Columbia University visual arts student Emma Sulkowicz (they/them pronouns) gained media attention for their senior thesis Mattress Performance (Carry That Weight). Sulkowicz had filed a complaint with the university after another student raped them their sophomore year. The university inquiry found him not responsible. The performance piece, which involved carrying a 50 lb mattress around campus, is a protest against the way the university handled the case.

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Police raided Copper Tan and Spa on North Milwaukee on a suspicion of prostitution. During a verbal confrontation with manager Jessica Klyzek, a Chinese American woman, one cop hit her on the head while another threatened to ship her back to where she came from in a UPS box. Asian Americans Advancing Justice Chicago organized a town hall in opposition to the menial sentences given to the officers involved.

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2014: Arrest of Domestic Violence Survivor Nan-Hui Jo

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2014: Arrest of Domestic Violence Survivor Nan-Hui Jo

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Nan-Hui Jo was sentenced to 175 days in jail, three years probation, and lost custody of her daughter after being convicted of misdemeanor child abduction. She had taken her infant daughter from California to her home country of Korea back in 2009 after her abusive boyfriend refused to sponsor her green card. She was not informed of the options given to survivors of abuse by VAWA, and her attempt to bring her daughter to safety was criminalized as “child abduction.” After serving her sentence, she was immediately detained by ICE. She is currently released on bond.

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2016: Survived & Punished Collective Founded 

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2016: Survived & Punished Collective Founded 

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Members of the campaign to free Marissa Alexander (a Black mother facing up to 60 years in prison for defending herself against her abuser) and members of the Stand With Nan-Hui campaign convene with one another in 2015. In early 2016, the collective of organizers become the founders of the grassroots advocacy coalition known as Survived & Punished. This collective of organizers analyze the intersections of criminalization and surviving domestic and sexual violence. They are a prison abolition organization that focuses on organizing for criminalized survivors to raise awareness about the integrated relationship between systems of punishment and the pervasiveness of gender-based violence.

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Civil rights activist Tarana Burke began using the term “Me Too” in 2006 to draw attention to the pervasiveness of sexual abuse and assault. In 2017, Me Too developed into a broader movement after the Harvey Weinstein scandal. Asian American celebrities like Anna Akana, Janet Yang, Constance Wu and Jess Calder have spoken up about how sexual harassment for Asian women is compounded by racial fetish, and how the lack of representation in Hollywood makes it twice as hard for Asian women in the industry to report harassment. The Me Too movement has also sparked a follow-up movement in South Korea called With You, which focuses on expressing support for survivors.

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During a targeted police raid, Yang Song, a 38 year old sex worker, fell off her 4th floor balcony. She had come downstairs to greet a potential client, only to realize that he was an undercover NYPD cop. She quickly kicked him out of her apartment, but several other police had already entered the building, forcing her to fall from her balcony. A year before, an undercover cop raped her at gunpoint, threatening her with deportation and arrest unless she participated as an informant. This event highlighted the systematic abuse experienced by migrant sex workers at the hands of law enforcement.

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2019: Chanel Miller Goes Public with Her Identity

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2019: Chanel Miller Goes Public with Her Identity

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In January 2015, Miller was sexually assaulted while unconscious at a Stanford fraternity party. The court documents referred to her as “Emily Doe.” In August 2019, Miller went public with her identity during an interview and published her memoir Know My Name in September 2019. The case has sparked efforts to combat sexual violence on college campuses, and, since her identity became public, has illuminated the particular violence that Asian American women face. Her memoir discusses how as half-Chinese, she felt excluded from the narrative, reflecting the dehumanization and hypersexualization that Asian women have long faced.

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2019: Rowena Chiu Publicly Shares Her Story

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2019: Rowena Chiu Publicly Shares Her Story

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In 1998, Harvey Weinstein, Chiu's former boss, attempted to rape her during a business trip. Over 20 years later, Chiu broke the NDA she was forced to sign and went public with her story in September 2019, joining over 100 other women who had also publicly accused Weinstein of sexual violence. In her New York Times op-ed, Chiu describes the ways in which Weinstein "defined [her] in terms of sexual exoticism," such as when he told Chiu that "he liked Chinese girls." Chiu's story and the stories of other survivors have sparked efforts to combat sexual harassment in the workplace, as well as highlighted the racialized misogyny that Asian women experience.

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2021: Six Asian Women Killed in Atlanta Massage Parlor Shootings 

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2021: Six Asian Women Killed in Atlanta Massage Parlor Shootings 

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A white gunman killed 8 people, including 6 Asian women, across 3 massage parlors in the Atlanta area. The gunman allegedly wanted to  “eliminate” the sexual temptation these women offered, and while it is unclear whether these women were sex workers, what is clear is that the gunman perceived them as such, reflecting a long history of the violent hypersexualization of Asian women. Despite the victims being predominantly Asian, law enforcement has refused to deem this a “hate crime.” Amidst a wave of anti-Asian hate incidents across the country and frustrated by media coverage and government calls for increased policing, community activists pushed for accountability, action, and a recognition that this violence was not isolated from the ongoing racism, sexism, and “whorephobia” that Asian women and sex workers face.