Lament-Driven preaching for a 戀 (Yeon) community

Covid-19 exacerbated the xenophobia and hate crime associated with racism in North America, which triggered a race-based trauma. However, studies are rare that focus specifically on the suffering that Asian Americans have endured. How might a faith community envision a wholesome community while holding and honoring the experience of Asian American pain? This study suggests a form of lament-driven preaching for a 戀 (Yeon) community that has interconnective suffering narratives, that pursues justice in a faith community and envisions what we can do about race-based trauma. The article focuses on a relational way to rebuild a community that has been wounded by xenophobia and hate crimes. Lament as remembering and reconnecting contributes to our consideration of how to respond to the suffering from the injustice of Asian hate crime beyond merely articulating and complaining about the experience. This study deals with the rhetoric of lament based on the Book of Lamentations and suggests how to use Psalm 137 in preaching as a way of lamenting the hate crime against Asian Americans in the Atlanta shooting tragedy. © Contact Pastoral Trust 2022.

Online extremism and Islamophobic language and sentiment when discussing the COVID-19 pandemic and misinformation on Twitter

This paper looks at the profiles of those who engaged in Islamophobic language/extremist behaviour on Twitter during the COVID-19 pandemic. This two-part analysis takes into account factors such as anonymity, membership length and postage frequency on language use, and the differences in sentiment expressed between pro-social and anti-social tweets. Analysis includes comparisons between low, moderate and high levels of anonymity, postage frequency and membership length, allowing for differences in keyword use to be explored. Our findings suggest that increased anonymity is not associated with an increase in Islamophobic language and misinformation. The sentiment analysis indicated that emotions such as anger, disgust, fear, sadness and trust were significantly more associated with pro-social Twitter users whereas sentiments such as anticipation, joy and surprise were significantly more associated with anti-social Twitter users. In some cases, evidence for joy in the suffering of others as a result of the pandemic was expressed.

The COVID-19 Outbreak as a Trigger Event for Sinophobic Hate Crimes in the United Kingdom

We assessed whether the COVID-19 outbreak in the United Kingdom was associated with a rise in sinophobic hate crimes as well as the temporal distribution of victimization rates. A victimization survey (N = 393) showed that following the first known case of COVID-19 in the United Kingdom, Chinese/East Asian persons had a higher likelihood of being hate crime or incident victims than members of other ethnic minority groups. Specifically, victimization reported by Chinese/East Asian participants reached its highest level in March 2020 (before lockdown);it then dropped significantly after an initial relaxation of restrictions in May 2020. Overall, we documented a temporary, potentially slightly delayed hate crime trigger effect of the COVID-19 outbreak. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR] Copyright of British Journal of Criminology is the property of Oxford University Press / USA and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Violent Assault on a Chinese Man: COVID-19 Psychosocial Resource Loss Diminishes Right Wing Authoritarianism Variability in Societal Reactions.

We examined whether prejudice-related personality characteristics (i.e., right wing authoritarianism [RWA]) and COVID-19-driven psychological resource loss might predict perpetrator-directed punitive responding (i.e., support for criminal charges) to a COVID-19-related attack on a Chinese victim by a White male. Across two studies, participants completed an RWA measure and reported the extent they had experienced COVID-19-related psychosocial resource loss. They then read a passage describing the COVID-19-related physical assault. For both studies, at low resource loss levels, low RWA participants reported greater punitive responding toward the perpetrator than high RWA participants. This RWA-punitive responding association was mediated by greater victim-directed suffering sensitivity (i.e., empathy) for Study 1 and greater anti-perpetrator reactions (i.e., hate crime perceptions) for Study 2. The RWA association with the relevant outcome variables (i.e., suffering sensitivity, anti-perpetrator bias, and punitive responding) was eliminated at high psychological resource loss levels. Specifically, low and high RWA participants reported similar reactions. While previous research has demonstrated that high RWA individuals tend to report greater outgroup-directed prejudicial responses due to COVID-19-driven perceptions of threat, our findings demonstrate that the COVID-19 pandemic can also elicit feelings of resource loss that can diminish the egalitarian reactions typically reported by low RWA individuals. In sum, we demonstrate that experiencing difficult life circumstances such as COVID-19 psychosocial resource loss can diminish supportive reactions toward victimized minority group members even among low RWA participants who are typically expected to be more sensitive to the struggles of those who are disadvantaged.

Anti-Asian Hate Crime in U.S. National News: A Content Analysis of Coverage and Narratives from 2010–2021

Research on the media's portrayal of Asian American crime victims has largely entailed content analyses of specific high-profile cases, partly because Asian Americans have been largely ignored in the media. The current study examines national news coverage (2010–2021) of both specific anti-Asian hate crime incidents as well as articles that discuss the rise in hate crime against the Asian American community. We also include anti-Hispanic hate crime articles over the same time period as a comparison group. In doing so, we examine the extent of coverage, portrayals of victims and perpetrators, including stereotypes of Asian Americans, and how the incidents are situated in a larger context of violence against racial minorities. While there were similarities between the groups in the media narratives, such as the offender's race rarely being mentioned, there were notable differences as well. For example, articles on Asian Americans were more likely to portray hate crime as a new phenomenon, but also more likely to include quotes from victims and/or their families. The findings have implications for the media's role in shaping the social consequences of pandemics. © The Author(s) 2022.

Anti-Asian Discourse in Quora: Comparison of Before and During the COVID-19 Pandemic with Machine- and Deep-Learning Approaches

The current study attempts to compare anti-Asian discourse before and during the COVID-19 pandemic by analyzing big data on Quora, one of the most frequently used community-driven knowledge sites. We created two datasets regarding "Asians” and "anti-Asians” from Quora questions and answers between 2010 and 2021. A total of 1,477 questions and 5,346 answers were analyzed, and the datasets were divided into two time periods: before and during the COVID-19 pandemic. We conducted machine-learning-based topic modeling and deep-learning-based word embedding (Word2Vec). Before the pandemic, the topics of physical difference and racism were prevalent, whereas, after the pandemic, the topics of hate crime, the need to stop Asian hate crimes, and the need for the Asian solidarity movement emerged. Above all, the semantic similarity between Asian and Black people became closer, while the similarity between Asian people and other racial/ethnic groups was diminished. The emergence of negative and radical language, which increased saliently after the outbreak of the pandemic, and the considerably wider semantic distance between Asian and White people indicates that the relationship between the two races has been weakened. The findings suggest a long-term campaign or education system to reduce racial tensions during the pandemic. © The Author(s) 2022.

Locked Down, Lashing Out: COVID-19 Effects on Asian Hate Crimes in Italy

COVID-19 caused a major health crisis and an economic crisis, conditions identified as conducive to stigmatization and hostility against minority groups. It is however unclear whether the threat of infection triggers hate crimes in addition to stigmatization and whether such a reaction can happen at the onset of an unexpected economic shock, before social hierarchies can be disrupted. Leveraging variation across Italian municipalities, we show that (i) hate crimes against Asians increased substantially at the pandemic onset and that (ii) the increase was concentrated in cities with higher expected unemployment but not higher excess mortality. We then examine individual, local, and national mobilization as potential mechanisms and find evidence suggesting that (iii) a xenophobic national discourse and local far-right institutions motivate hate crimes, while we find no strong support for the role of individual prejudice. Our study identifies new conditions triggering hateful behavior, advancing our understanding of factors hindering migrant integration.

Anti-Asian American Hate Crimes Spike During the Early Stages of the COVID-19 Pandemic.

The recent high-profile cases of hate crimes in the U.S., especially those targeting Asian Americans, have raised concerns about their risk of victimization. Following the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, intimations-and even accusations-that the novel coronavirus is an "Asian" or "Chinese" virus have been linked to anti-Asian American hate crime, potentially leaving members of this group not only fearful of being victimized but also at risk for victimization. According to the Stop AAPI Hate Center, nearly 1900 hate crimes against Asian Americans were reported by victims, and around 69% of cases were related to verbal harassment, including being called the "Chinese Coronavirus." Yet, most of the evidence martialed on spikes in anti-Asian American hate crime during the COVID-19 pandemic has been descriptive. Using data from four U.S. cities that have large Asian American populations (New York, San Francisco, Seattle, and Washington D.C.), this study finds that hate crime against Asian Americans increased considerably in 2020 compared with that of 2019. Specifically, hate crime against Asian Americans temporarily surged after March 16, 2020, when the blaming labels including "Kung flu" or "Chinese Virus" were used publicly. However, the significant spike after March 16, 2020, in anti-Asian American hate crime was not sustained over the follow-up time period available for analysis.

Hate in the time of the Covid-19 pandemic: dehumanisation as a side effect; re-humanisation as a remedy.

This article is about denouncing the dehumanisation process that took place in the time of Covid-19. It recognises that governments have a vital role to play in setting national directions to tackle racist violence and that the value of having hate crime laws should not be underestimated. However, it argues that a broader approach is needed to embark upon a re-humanisation initiative and effectively combat racist violence. It emphasises that, to get people truly devoted to a course of action, they must develop a greater understanding of the sources of the problem. Accordingly, this article suggests that academia has a key role to play in shedding light on the occurrence of de-humanisation and the potential for re-humanisation.

Performing race and remaking identity: Chinese visual artists in New York during the COVID-19 pandemic

The mass shooting in Atlanta that killed eight people including six Asian women in March 2021 marked the new peak of the unceasing waves of anti-Asian violence since the outbreak of COVID-19 in the United States. In this context, this article examines how a group of Chinese visual artists in New York perform and remake their Asian identity on social media in response to a surge in hatred towards and violence against Asians in the United States following the outbreak of COVID-19. Based on my analysis of their visual rhetoric and media activism, I identify three approaches that this group of Chinese visual artists use to perform and remake their Asian identity. First, they performed their Asian identity by developing vari-ous visual rhetorics to combat and denounce anti-Asian discourse and hate crime. Second, their Asian identity emerged when they created new visual rhetoric to reimagine what it meant to be Asian in the United States. The new visual rhetoric enriched the understanding of Asian-ness and diversified the experiences of being Asian in the United States by overtly or subtly challenging Asian stereotypes as a product of the western imagination. Lastly, they claimed their Asian identity through seeking racial justice in a larger social context in collaboration with other racial minority groups. © 2022 Intellect Ltd Article.

Asian hate speech detection on Twitter during COVID-19.

Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) started in Wuhan, China, in late 2019, and after being utterly contagious in Asian countries, it rapidly spread to other countries. This disease caused governments worldwide to declare a public health crisis with severe measures taken to reduce the speed of the spread of the disease. This pandemic affected the lives of millions of people. Many citizens that lost their loved ones and jobs experienced a wide range of emotions, such as disbelief, shock, concerns about health, fear about food supplies, anxiety, and panic. All of the aforementioned phenomena led to the spread of racism and hate against Asians in western countries, especially in the United States. An analysis of official preliminary police data by the Center for the Study of Hate & Extremism at California State University shows that Anti-Asian hate crime in 16 of America's largest cities increased by 149% in 2020. In this study, we first chose a baseline of Americans' hate crimes against Asians on Twitter. Then we present an approach to balance the biased dataset and consequently improve the performance of tweet classification. We also have downloaded 10 million tweets through the Twitter API V-2. In this study, we have used a small portion of that, and we will use the entire dataset in the future study. In this article, three thousand tweets from our collected corpus are annotated by four annotators, including three Asian and one Asian-American. Using this data, we built predictive models of hate speech using various machine learning and deep learning methods. Our machine learning methods include Random Forest, K-nearest neighbors (KNN), Support Vector Machine (SVM), Extreme Gradient Boosting (XGBoost), Logistic Regression, Decision Tree, and Naive Bayes. Our Deep Learning models include Basic Long-Term Short-Term Memory (LSTM), Bidirectional LSTM, Bidirectional LSTM with Drop out, Convolution, and Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers (BERT). We also adjusted our dataset by filtering tweets that were ambiguous to the annotators based on low Fleiss Kappa agreement between annotators. Our final result showed that Logistic Regression achieved the best statistical machine learning performance with an F1 score of 0.72, while BERT achieved the best performance of the deep learning models, with an F1-Score of 0.85.

Anti-Asian Hate Crime in U.S. National News: A Content Analysis of Coverage and Narratives from 2010-2021

Research on the media's portrayal of Asian American crime victims has largely entailed content analyses of specific high-profile cases, partly because Asian Americans have been largely ignored in the media. The current study examines national news coverage (2010-2021) of both specific anti-Asian hate crime incidents as well as articles that discuss the rise in hate crime against the Asian American community. We also include anti-Hispanic hate crime articles over the same time period as a comparison group. In doing so, we examine the extent of coverage, portrayals of victims and perpetrators, including stereotypes of Asian Americans, and how the incidents are situated in a larger context of violence against racial minorities. While there were similarities between the groups in the media narratives, such as the offender's race rarely being mentioned, there were notable differences as well. For example, articles on Asian Americans were more likely to portray hate crime as a new phenomenon, but also more likely to include quotes from victims and/or their families. The findings have implications for the media's role in shaping the social consequences of pandemics.

Evaluating hate crime third party reporting services: perspectives from voluntary advisors

Purpose>Third party reporting (TPR) services provide a route for victims of hate crime to report their experiences to an organisation other than the police. There is repeated evidence of under-reporting of hate crimes within the UK, and many victims of hate crime are unaware of the existence of TPR mechanisms. Little research attention has been given to understanding of the merits of TPR, beyond evaluating how often they are used. This study aims to explore the delivery of TPR from an advisor perspective.Design/methodology/approach>The research evaluated a small TPR centre based within a charitable organisation. The research, part of an undergraduate study, analysed the experiences of volunteer advisors working on the service through a semi-structured questionnaire.Findings>Results were mixed. Findings indicated the service contributed to an enhanced awareness of hate crimes in the community;however, greater promotion of the TPR centre was advocated. The results also indicated a significant lack of understanding and knowledge by trained volunteer advisors about hate crimes.Social implications>A lack of informed awareness of what hate crimes are could result in victims of hate crime not being recognised or supported as such.Originality/value>Most hate crime research is victim centred, and this study is innovative in looking at those receiving hate crime reports. There is limited evidence on TPR service provision in the UK, particularly on service delivery staff, and this research contributes to the gap in knowledge.

LGBTQIA plus People Access to Social Services during the Pandemic in Turkey

LGBTQIA+ people are often subjected to prejudice, discrimination, and violence in many societies. This sets a barrier for LGBTQIA+ people access to social services. This study was conducted to investigate LGBTQIA+ people access to social services during the COVID-19 pandemic. Study findings using convenience sampling and exploration design with participants who identify themselves as LGBTQIA+ (N = 856) show that vast majority of LGBTQIA+ people living in Turkey faced serious problems with accessing social services like housing, social assistance, psycho-social support, and post-violence support mechanisms. Future studies which will investigate experiences of LGBTQIA+ people access to social services will help to make the needs and the problems of the LGBTQIA+ community visible and once awareness is made efforts can be made that contribute to the solution.

How racial animus forms and spreads: Evidence from the coronavirus pandemic.

This paper studies the formation and the spread of crisis-driven racial animus during the coronavirus pandemic. Exploiting plausibly exogenous variation in the timing of the first COVID-19 diagnosis across US areas, we find that the first local case leads to an immediate increase in local anti-Asian animus, as measured by Google searches and Twitter posts that include a commonly used derogatory racial epithet. This rise in animus specifically targets Asians and mainly comes from users who use the epithet for the first time. These first-time ch-word users are more likely to have expressed animosity against non-Asian minorities in the past, and their interaction with other anti-Asian individuals predicts the timing of their first ch-word tweets. Moreover, online animosity and offline hate incidents against Asians both increase with the salience of the connection between China and COVID-19; while the increase in racial animus is not associated with the local economic impact of the pandemic. Finally, the pandemic-driven racial animus we documented may persist beyond the duration of the pandemic, as most racist tweets do not explicitly mention the virus.

The COVID-19 outbreak as a trigger event for sinophobic hate crimes in the United Kingdom

We assessed whether the COVID-19 outbreak in the United Kingdom was associated with a rise in sinophobic hate crimes as well as the temporal distribution of victimization rates. A victimization survey (N = 393) showed that following the first known case of COVID-19 in the United Kingdom, Chinese/East Asian persons had a higher likelihood of being hate crime or incident victims than members of other ethnic minority groups. Specifically, victimization reported by Chinese/East Asian participants reached its highest level in March 2020 (before lockdown);it then dropped significantly after an initial relaxation of restrictions in May 2020. Overall, we documented a temporary, potentially slightly delayed hate crime trigger effect of the COVID-19 outbreak.

Predicting the Variations of Anti-Asian Attack across U.S. during the COVID-19 Pandemic with Socio-structural and Cultural Factors

With the outbreaks of the COVID-19 pandemic, anti-Asian attacks and hate crimes have burgeoned in many areas of the United States. It is obvious that the emerging of anti-Asian attacks was not geographically evenly distributed. To elucidate the underlying causes of hate crimes against American Asians, we utilized the archival and pandemic data to establish the model to predict the variations in anti-Asian attacks across the 50 U.S. states. Several indicators, i.e., real GDP per capita, unpredictable environment, unemployment rates of African-Americans and Latinos, honor culture, and COVID-19 severity, together predicted the statewide differences in anti-Asian attacks of U.S. with the explanatory power of 96.8%. Finally, the implications of findings are discussed. © 2021 IEEE

Race-based hate crime in aotearoa

Recent years have been extraordinary for race issues in Aotearoa. The Christchurch mosque shootings in March 2019 shattered long-held illusions of New Zealand exceptionalism;Islamophobia increased following the attacks;an increase in racialised abuse of Asian people followed the outbreak of COVID-19;the Black Lives Matter movement in the United States provided a platform for discussing anti-Black racism and white supremacy in Aotearoa;and in last year’s general election, many political parties campaigned on border security or restricting immigration. This status report explores race-based offending in Aotearoa in light of these critical social contexts and ongoing settler colonial structural racism against Māori, and offers recommendations to address racial discrimination. We suggest that despite the clear need to protect communities of colour from discrimination, current legislative approaches for addressing hate crime and hate speech are inadequate. Discrimination must be understood by the justice sector as a driver of crime, and community organisations must be resourced to provide education, advocacy, monitoring and support for racialised communities. © 2021, Nga Pae o te Maramatanga. All rights reserved.

Anti-Asian Hate Crime During the COVID-19 Pandemic: Exploring the Reproduction of Inequality.

Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) is believed to have emerged in Wuhan, China in late December 2019 and began rapidly spreading around the globe throughout the spring months of 2020. As COVID-19 proliferated across the United States, Asian Americans reported a surge in racially motivated hate crimes involving physical violence and harassment. Throughout history, pandemic-related health crises have been associated with the stigmatization and "othering" of people of Asian descent. Asian Americans have experienced verbal and physical violence motivated by individual-level racism and xenophobia from the time they arrived in America in the late 1700s up until the present day. At the institutional level, the state has often implicitly reinforced, encouraged, and perpetuated this violence through bigoted rhetoric and exclusionary policies. COVID-19 has enabled the spread of racism and created national insecurity, fear of foreigners, and general xenophobia, which may be related to the increase in anti-Asian hate crimes during the pandemic. We examine how these crimes - situated in historically entrenched and intersecting individual-level and institutional-level racism and xenophobia - have operated to "other" Asian Americans and reproduce inequality.

The Anxiety of Being Asian American: Hate Crimes and Negative Biases During the COVID-19 Pandemic.

In this essay, we review how the COVID-19 (coronavirus) pandemic that began in the United States in early 2020 has elevated the risks of Asian Americans to hate crimes and Asian American businesses to vandalism. During the COVID-19 pandemic, the incidents of negative bias and microaggressions against Asian Americans have also increased. COVID-19 is directly linked to China, not just in terms of the origins of the disease, but also in the coverage of it. Because Asian Americans have historically been viewed as perpetually foreign no matter how long they have lived in the United States, we posit that it has been relatively easy for people to treat Chinese or Asian Americans as the physical embodiment of foreignness and disease. We examine the historical antecedents that link Asian Americans to infectious diseases. Finally, we contemplate the possibility that these experiences will lead to a reinvigoration of a panethnic Asian American identity and social movement.