Sex crimes against Asian women in the United States

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In spite of its lower rate of occurrence compared to that of other racial minorities, sex crimes against Asian women in the United States have become the subject of political controversy over the influence of stereotypes of Asians on the motivations for these crimes. Some Asian Americans point to the fetishizing of Asian women as a driving force behind sex crimes targeting them.

According to the findings of the US Department of Justice, from 1993 to 1998, victimization rate of Asian American women in cases of sexual assault was about the same as that of white American women, and lower than that of Native American women and African American women[1]. However, in an article in Yale Daily News [2], Sallie Kim and Shannon Stockdale, co-chairs of the Yale chapter of the National Asian Pacific American Women's Forum, assert that Asian American women rape victims are far more numerous than reported statistics would indicate:

“

Not only are Asian women disproportionately targeted in sex crimes, but they are also the least likely to report such incidents. Sex crimes are already grossly underreported, with only an estimated 26 percent of rape victims coming forward, but the percentage of Asian women who do so is even lower, at a mere 8 percent. Police hope that the Asian women will come forward about their harassment in the Princeton incident; however, the statistics tell us that it is not likely.

”

1 Sex crime psychology
2 Asian fetish theory
3 Instances of sex crimes against Asian women
4 References
5 See also
6 External links

[edit] Sex crime psychology

According to the State of California's Office of the Attorney General, most sexual assaults are committed by someone of the same race as the victim, with the exception of Native American victims.^[1] One study concludes that many Asian Americans have misperceptions about sexual assault such as viewing sex as the primary motivation for rape or that most rapes are caused by strangers, and are in need of education and outreach about the real causes and motivations of rape.^[3]

[edit] Asian fetish theory

Sex crimes targeting Asian American women are often attributed by some Asian American advocacy groups to the existence of an Asian fetish in the perpetrators of the crimes. Yin Ling Leung, organizational director of the National Asian Pacific American Women’s Forum claims that sex crimes targeting Asian American women is a hate crime and a distorted form of racist love:^[2]

“

"It is a form of hate crime," Leung said. "There’s racist hate and racist love — this is a distorted form of racist love."

”

Asian American woman author Helen Zia claims that the stereotypes surrounding Asian women have much to do with why Asian American women are targeted for sex crimes.^[2] According to Zia:

“

"It’s happened on an epidemic proportion. It's this image of Asian American women being exotic and passive and won't fight back and speak up. Predators think they have free rein with Asian American women."

”

[edit] Instances of sex crimes against Asian women

The Asian American community has shown particular and intense concern about the following 5 non-Asian criminals who committed crimes against Asians:

In 2000, two female Japanese college students in Spokane, WA, were abducted, raped, videotaped and told that if they told anybody what had happened, the videotapes would be sent to their fathers. The offenders, leaders of an S&M group, admitted targeting these Japanese women because they believed that their submissiveness and the general stigma and Japanese cultural shame from being sexually assaulted would prevent the women from reporting the assaults ^[4].

On October 12, 2002, Lili Wang, a 31-year-old computer science graduate student at North Carolina State University, was murdered by her former tennis partner, Richard Borrelli Anderson, who then committed suicide. Even though she was already married to 30-year old Yufei Qian, a Chinese American man, Anderson had become infatuated with her, according to a suicide note found at the scene. ^[5].

On March 30, 2005, former third-year Princeton University Ph.D. student Michael Lohman confessed to Princeton Borough Police that since 2002, he had targeted Asian women by cutting their hair without their knowledge, and by filling small plastic bottles with his urine or semen, in order to spray on women or to pour into their beverages, in almost fifty cases. On June 22, 2005, Lohman reached an agreement with the prosecutor's office to seek psychiatric treatment in a pretrial intervention program involving, which would leave him with no criminal record ^[6].

On July 29, 2005, Los Angeles police arrested Tyreese Lamar Reed, an electronics technician from the Koreatown area of Los Angeles, in connection with a series of sexual assaults and robberies in the area. The district attorney’s office alleges that Reed committed a series of 18 counts of sexual assault and robbery between August 24, 2004 and June 15, 2005. According to the LAPD, all of the sexual assaults involved Asian women, between the ages of 17 and 47 ^[7].

On August 24, 2005, former Oakland police officer Richard Valerga was charged with two counts of false imprisonment and five counts of interference with civil rights, for making illegal traffic stops on Asian women, and then trying to kiss and caress them. The incidents, which were targeted mainly toward immigrant Asians, occurred between January and April 2005. Valerga later resigned from the police force and pleaded no contest to four misdemeanor counts, and was sentenced to six months in jail

Each year, 5200-7600 Asian women and girls are kidnapped, tricked or sold into prostitution in Asia and smuggled into the United States. 33% of all women and 23% of all girls under 18 who are smuggled across the border are raped and forced to work as prostitutes. See Trafficking in human beings, ^[8] For example, in 1999 20/20 and ABC news exposed that in the U.S. Territory of Saipan, there are approximately 11,000 Chinese workers who are forced to get abortions if they get pregnant in order to keep their jobs. (See Jack Abramoff section on Lobbying) The estimated 30,000 Asian mostly female workers there are subject to frequent battery, rape, and forced prostitution. (Source: Clarren, Rebecca. "Paradise Lost: Greed, Sex Slavery, Forced Abortions and Right-Wing Moralists", Ms. Magazine, (spring 2006).)

Notable trafficking cases usually involve Asians trafficking Asian women:

- US v. Kwon (1998) "From on or about June 1995 until on or about January 1998, the Kwon family recruited and transported Chinese-Korean women from China to the Commonwealth of the Northern Mariana Islands for the purpose of exploiting and abusing them for profit. They were promised legitimate waitressing jobs but then forced to work at a karaoke club and submit to customers' sexual demands. Some of the women also complained of physical and sexual abuse by their bosses. The women were held at a barracks apartment. The defendants took their passports, visas, and airline tickets. The women were only allowed to leave the barracks apartment with permission and an escort. The women were threatened with violence, including death, if they left or attempted to leave without paying their debt."
- US v. Zheng Qiaochhai, Zheng Qioyu, and Lin Xiao (1998) "The defendants recruited women in China for jobs as waitresses in the Commonwealth of the Northern Marianas Islands in the District of Guam. Shortly after the women arrived and started working in the bar, they were pressed into service as prostitutes."
- US v. Wattanasiri (1995) "In conjunction with Thai traffickers, Ludwig Janak, a German national who operated a tour guide service in Thailand, recruited Thai women to come to the United States to work. Several of the women were told they would have good jobs working in restaurants. Once in the US, Thai traffickers and a Korean madam forced the women into prostitution. The women were held against their will at a brothel house and forced to work as prostitutes until their $35,000 smuggling debt was paid off. The women were kept in the underground brothel by bars on the windows and 24-hour surveillance. The defendants required that each woman sleep with four to five hundred customers to pay off the smuggling fee."
- In one Dallas brothel, Thai nationals were locked up and forced to work as prostitutes. They were treated like animals in that if they did not do as they were told, they would not receive any food.
- "The NGO the Little Tokyo Service Center reports that in 1998 in northern California, a Hmong gang kidnapped, raped, and forced into prostitution Hmong girls. There were roughly 15 girls, ages 13 to 15, whom were trafficked to other cities and forced to submit to sexual slavery for members of their own ethnic community. Even more recently... four teenage Hmong girls were lured to Detroit by Hmong men and boys where they were allegedly gang raped, assaulted, and threatened with death if they tried to escape."
- "In August 1999, an organized crime task force in Atlanta, indicted 13 members of an Asian smuggling ring for trafficking up to 1,000 Asian women and girls, between the ages of 13 and 25, to Atlanta and other US cities for prostitution. The women and girls were held in bondage until their $30,000 to $40,000 contracts were paid off. One brothel was described by law enforcement as a “prison compound” with barbed wire, fences, chained dogs, and gang members who served as guards." (See Booth, William, “13 Charged in Gang Importing Prostitutes,” The Washington Post, August 21, 1999.)
- "In Los Angeles, traffickers kidnapped a Chinese woman, raped her, forced her into prostitution, posted guards to control her movements, and burned her with cigarettes." Asian street gangs such as Black Dragons and Koolboyz have provided protection to brothels where trafficked women are forcibly held.
- Source: O'Neill-Richard, Amy, International Trafficking of Women to the United States (1999).

In a study done in 1994, Urquiza and Goodlin-Jones found that 21.1% of Asian American women were victims of childhood sexual abuse, but unlike other ethnic groups, this childhood victimization did not correlate with higher rates of rape of these women in adulthood. ^[9]

In one study of South Asian American women, 40% of the participants revealed that they had been sexually or physically abused by their current male partners. ^[10]

Asian American gangs in Los Angeles frequently target Asian American girls from 11-15 to rape and sometimes also tattoo gang symbols into the girls' bodies. ^[11] Rapes and consequent transmission of STDs has also been reported in Minnesota amongst Hmong girls in their teens and Hmong girl gangs by other Hmong gangs.^[12] ^[13]

^[14].