I was elected a member of parliament in December 2019, just months before the Covid pandemic changed all of our lives. As Britain’s first MP of south-east Asian descent, I am well aware of the fact that, for members of east and south-east Asian (ESEA) communities, the pandemic marked a horrifying rise in racist hate crime directed towards us. This experience was not new and, four years on, it has not gone away.
During the pandemic, hate crime against the ESEA community rose by almost 70%, underpinned by a xenophobic framing of the virus’ origin. In 2021, the figures remained about 50% above those in 2019. But many of us know that these statistics do not paint the full picture, and the situation is graver than the data suggests.
A new UK-wide survey by the charity Protection Approaches and the University of Leicester’s Centre for Hate Studies paints a clearer – and more worrying – picture: 45% of ESEA community members have been subjected to a hate crime in the past year. With many enduring multiple incidents, this suggests there could be close to 1m incidents of racist abuse being directed towards ESEA people in the past year.
As so many other devastating reports on the impact of hate and racism have made clear, hateful people do not stay in their lane: 73% of hate crimes targeting ESEA women are perpetrated by men, and seven in 10 of all hate crimes committed across the UK involved a male offender. Racialised misogyny impacts thousands of women across the UK – targeted not only for their skin colour or religion, but also for being a woman.
Sadly, we know the harm that hate crime has on victims’ lives; it lasts far beyond the day or the week that the incident takes place. Many end up changing the way they live or dress, or the places they visit. This is an experience anyone who has faced hate will know, from the gay couple anxious to express their love in public, to the Muslim woman afraid to wear hijab, to the Jewish man worried about wearing a kippa.
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