Respect Equality

Horrifying total of more than 9,000 anti-Asian attacks since pandemic began

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Story at a glance

  • Reported incidents targeting Asian Americans reached more than 9,000 since the beginning of the coronavirus pandemic.
  • Nearly 64 percent of incidents reported were labeled as instances of verbal harassment, while 8.3 percent of the incidents occurred online.
  • Close to 14 percent of all reports were a physical assault.

Reported incidents targeting Asian Americans reached more than 9,000 since the beginning of the coronavirus pandemic, according to a new report

Stop AAPI Hate received 9,081 reports between March 2020 and June 2021, with nearly 2,500 incidents reported between April and June. Types of reports ranged from verbal and online harassment to physical assault.

Nearly 64 percent of incidents reported were labeled as instances of verbal harassment, and 8.3 percent of the incidents occurred online. Close to 14 percent of the incidents were physical assault, and 8.5 percent of cases a victim was “coughed at or spat on.” A majority of incidents happened in public, according to the report. 

Women submitted more than 63 percent of the reports.


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“When you encourage hate, it’s not like a genie in a bottle where you can pull it out and push it back in whenever you want,” Manjusha Kulkarni, co-founder of Stop AAPI Hate and executive director of the Asian Pacific Policy and Planning Council, told The Associated Press. “There’s too much perpetuating these belief systems to make them go away.”

President Biden signed legislation in May designed to curtail hate against the Asian American and Pacific Islander community. The law was designed to make it easier to report hate crimes at the local level, while installing a point person at the Department of Justice to review COVID-19 related hate crime incidents. 


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Stop AAPI Hate said in a statement following the signing that the bill could miss harmful acts of bigotry because it is focused on hate crimes, instead of other wide ranging acts of hate. 

“Because the act centers criminal law enforcement agencies in its solutions, it will not address the overwhelming majority of incidents reported to our site which are not hate crimes, but serious hate incidents,” the statement read, according to The Guardian


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