Covid 19 Pandemic Causes Increase In Hate Crime Against South Asian People

It has been revealed that the Covid 19 Pandemic which began in Wuhan, China has led to an increase in incidents of hate crime against people of East Asian and South East Asian descent. Hot spots for such incidents have been formed in Asia, Europe and the Americas. There has also been an increase in Islamophobia, homophobia, transphobia and anti-Semitism.

In New York last month, there were 23 hate crimes against victim’s whose protected category is classified as “other” so far this year — a 475-percent increase from the 4 reported over the same period last year.

There have been no purely “anti-Asian” or “anti-disability” hate crimes reported in 2020, the NYPD says.

To date, the NYPD investigated 11 incidents where the victims of the hate crimes were Asian and were targets for coronavirus discrimination, and seven people have been arrested and charged in connection to those hate-crimes ranging from aggravated harassment to assault.

In the UK, figures show that there have been 267 incidents of hate crime recorded against people in the Chinese community.

The hate crime figures were published after Sky News sent a Freedom of Information request to the UK’s 45 territorial police forces and British Transport Police (BTP). Most forces revealed details of hate crimes recorded against Chinese victims only, while some provided details of offences against people of South East Asian origin. Forces revealed 267 offences were recorded in the first three months of 2020, compared to 375 hate crimes throughout the whole of 2019 and 360 offences in 2018. Offences include assaults, harassment and criminal damage. In some areas, there were more hate crimes against Chinese people in the first three months of 2020 than throughout the whole of last year, such as Essex and Cumbria.

Hate crime directed at South and East Asian communities has gone up by 21 percent during the Coronavirus crisis. There has been an increase in incidents of revenge porn – the sharing of private, sexual material of another person with out their consent either online or offline.

Susan Williams, the Home Office minister for countering extremism, told the committee that extremism generally had not increased, but there had been a rise in specific types of hate crime.

She said: “I’ve been speaking to our hate crime lead, and there’s been a 21% uptick in hate incidents against the IC4 and IC5 community.”

Governments around the world have been urged to take urgent steps to prevent racist, xenophobic violence and discrimination linked to the Covid 19 pandemic. while prosecuting racial attacks against Asians and people of Asian descent, Human Rights Watch said today. On May 8, 2020, United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres said that “the pandemic continues to unleash a tsunami of hate and xenophobia, scapegoating and scare-mongering” and urged governments to “act now to strengthen the immunity of our societies against the virus of hate.”

Racist and physical attacks on Asians have spread through out the world with the Covid 19 pandemic. More needs to be done to protect those who may be vulnerable of being attacked because of their skin colour or the country they come from. There should be harsher punishments to deter those people who may be thinking of attacking someone because they mistakenly think they are indirectly responsible for causing the pandemic and the problems it caused around the world.

Certain governments around the world have imposed stricter lock down measures in an effort to prevent further attacks. There also has to be harsher punishments for those who are caught after perpetrating such incidents. There should be a stronger sense of equality in the world to ensure that there are fewer acts of prejudice or discrimination.