Activists hold signs as they march from San Gabriel City Hall to Alhambra City Hall during an anti-Asian hate rally in California, in this March 26, 2021, file photo. Ethnic Koreans are among the main targets of apparent growing violence, harassment and other forms of hate against Asians living in the United States, according to a recent report. AFP-Yonhap

By Jung Min-ho

Ethnic Koreans are among the main targets of apparent growing violence, harassment and other forms of hate against Asians living in the United States, a report shows.

According to "Two Years and Thousands of Voices," a research document released last week by Stop AAPI Hate, 16 percent of the victims of 11,467 such incidents reported over the past two years are ethnic Koreans. Chinese account for the most cases with 43 percent, followed by Koreans, Filipinos (9 percent), Japanese (8 percent) and Vietnamese (8 percent).

The nonprofit organization started to collect data on March 19, 2020, a week after COVID-19 was declared a pandemic following the first case report from the Chinese city of Wuhan.

The document notes that 67 percent of reported incidents involved harassment, such as verbal or written hate speech and discriminatory gestures. Seventeen percent were reports of physical assault, while avoidance or shunning was the third most common form in 16 percent of cases.

According to one report from San Francisco, a man jumped in front of an Asian American and started "screaming racial slurs ('you Chinese b―h, f――g Asian,' 'Go back to your country') and then he pushed me to the street. The man was a stranger and was totally unprovoked."

In another incident reported from Columbia, South Carolina, a white woman at a restaurant said she "didn't want to eat next to people like them (my Filipino family) and she stated she lost her appetite. Then she requested the waiter box her family's food and then she dramatically stormed out of the restaurant."

Public settings (40 percent) and businesses (27 percent) account for the largest proportions of reported incidents, followed by private residences (10 percent) and online (10 percent).

A person who used an ID that could be identified as Asian reported that he was called a "bat eater" and a "c―k" multiple times by a stranger online.

However, most of the reported incidents, though harmful and traumatic, do not meet the legal definition of a hate crime and, therefore, require solutions beyond the criminal justice system, Stop AAPI Hate said.

The report also says 49 percent of the victims reported that they experienced depression or anxiety, and 72 percent named discrimination against them as their greatest source of stress, even ahead of their own health concerns during the pandemic.

"Sadly, two years later (since the beginning of the pandemic), AAPI (Asian American and Pacific Islander) community members across the country continue to experience hate at alarming levels," it says. "This number is just the tip of the iceberg. Our nationally representative survey conducted in partnership with Edelman Data & Intelligence found that one in five Asian Americans and one in five Pacific Islanders experienced a hate incident in 2020 or 2021."

In another study published earlier by the Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism, anti-Asian hate crimes increased by 339 percent last year compared to the year before, with New York, San Francisco, Los Angeles and other cities surpassing their records in 2020.