It’s a Saturday evening in early January, around 8 p.m., when Quang Paasch is waiting in front of an apartment block in Berlin’s Neukölln district. Children play in the snow, people pass by with shopping bags. Paasch arranged to meet on a dating app and is still texting his supposed date. He says he’ll be coming down soon. Then two young men approach, Paasch estimates them to be in their early 20s. They are the reason why Paasch doesn’t end up on a date, but ends up in the police station a short time later.
The men punched and kicked him, sprayed pepper spray and tried to cover his mouth. Shortly afterwards two more men arrived. Paasch immediately fell to the ground, protected his head and screamed for help. “I was lying there and immediately realized: Okay, something is happening to me that I’ve heard about many times,” says the 24-year-old. The attack only lasts a few minutes, but Paasch will have a long time to recover from the consequences.
It was clear to Paasch early on that this was a hate crime with an anti-queer motive. Because he was only there because of the appointment, he was specifically lured here. The perpetrators did not search him, did not reach into his pockets, and only took his cell phone, which had fallen next to him. Paasch later located it just a few hundred meters away. He ran after one of the perpetrators and asked for it back. “I felt the pain straight away and didn’t see anything, but the pepper spray didn’t really burn until a little later. Probably because of the shock,” says Paasch in a telephone conversation with the taz. He went to the nearby police station with a person who heard his screams. He sat there for three hours and told openly what had happened. It is difficult for him to say that he is based on an anti-queer motive. “My first thought was: Can I tell the police the truth? Will I be taken seriously?”
The 24-year-old is not alone with these doubts. A dark field study by the European Agency for Fundamental Rights from 2020 showsthat 96 percent of the LGBTIQ* people surveyed did not report hate speech and 87 percent did not report physical or sexual assault. The reasons they gave included that the crimes were “too minor/not serious enough” (33 percent) or that they were afraid of homophobic or transphobic reactions from the police (23 percent).
Targeted attacks on online dates
The attack follows a pattern that investigative authorities and advice centers have been observing for a long time: targeted attacks on online dates. At the beginning of 2025, a corresponding series of violence became known in the Main-Taunus district. According to Hesse police, five young people are said to have contacted at least eight people via dating apps, lured them to meeting points and attacked them there together. Such cases also occur again and again in Berlin. The Berlin police told the taz that the actions ranged from theft and robbery to sexual crimes. What is unusual in Paasch’s case is that the attack took place in a busy residential area – those affected are often lured to remote places.
For queer people, this form of planned violence means that even public spaces become danger zones. According to the Federal Criminal Police Office, a total of 17,007 cases of hate crime were recorded in 2023t, 1,785 of which were directed against LGBTIQ* – significantly more than in the previous year. The number of crimes in the areas of “sexual orientation” and “gender diversity” have increased almost tenfold since 2010.
At the same time, advice centers are reporting a massive increase in demand. They met in the Bremen Advice and Action Center The board estimated in a taz discussion at the end of 2025 that consultations on anti-queer violence would increase four to five times within two years. The consequences: more fear, less visibility, more withdrawal.
Organized groups
Easter knows anti-queer violence since his childhood. But today, he says, you encounter them differently. “It’s no longer just the one man who hits drunk at night.” Today they are groups, organized and determined. What milieu the perpetrators belong to is of secondary importance to him. “Whether Islamists, fundamental Christians, Nazis – at the forefront there were violent men.” This is also shown by a monitoring report from the Berlin Senate Department for Equality from 2024: “The suspects identified by the police are almost exclusively male, especially in the case of violent crimes.”
For Paasch, the fact that such men openly act violently in a busy area on a Saturday evening is the real problem. In order to fight against it, he decides on the night of the crime to make public what happened to him posts a video on Instagram. “I have a certain reach and therefore responsibility,” says Paasch. He wants to warn, not about online dating itself, but about the real danger. “Right now we are more vulnerable. And it can affect everyone.”
Almost two weeks after the attack, Paasch suffers from fear and panic when he leaves the house. His mother is very worried. “She lived through the racist baseball bat years of the 1990s.” And now a worsening of the social climate again? “That’s not what I came to Germany for,” she said to me.
Paasch still doesn’t want to be restricted and doesn’t want to think about which train he gets on or whether he leaves the house. “These are my neighborhoods too.”
Police are investigating
It is important to combat the social normalization of anti-queer sentiment. He hopes that the investigation will continue: witness interviews, evaluation of digital traces. The profile and chat on the dating app have been deleted, but the police can query the operators and determine IP addresses.
Above all, Paasch hopes that his case will not be treated as an isolated case. But as a symptom of a development that has long since begun. The fact that four young men would rather beat someone up on a Saturday evening than go to the cinema or a bar is an expression of violence that is learned, shared and socially enabled. “We have to arm ourselves and organize against it,” says Paasch.