#NYC sex-workers advocates respond to Atlanta spa murders

Advocates for Queens sex workers condemned the killings of eight people, including six massage workers, in Georgia and insisted the victims “faced specific racialized gendered violence for being Asian women and massage workers.”

Red Canary Song — an organization founded following the death of Flushing masseuse Yang Song, who plunged to her death during a 2017 police raid of illegal massage parlors on notorious 40th Road — also called for decriminalization of sex work.

It “is the only way that sex workers, massage workers, sex trafficking survivors, and anyone criminalized for their survival and/or livelihood will ever be safe,” the organization wrote in a press release.

Flushing is known as an Ellis Island of sorts for Asian women who migrate to the US and end up in the illegal massage business. Many are coerced into the sex trade upon arrival, and fan out across the country to work in parlors, law enforcement has said.

It’s unclear if the six Asian women allegedly gunned down by 21-year-old Robert Aaron Long — who police say claimed to have a “sexual addiction” and was trying to kill “temptation” when he savagely murdered them at their workplaces on Tuesday — were engaged in illegal sex work. But the businesses had long been the targets of police investigations into illegal prostitution and the subject of seedy online sex ads.

Federal investigators have no found evidence yet for a Georgia hate crime charge, according to reports.

“Whether or not they were actually sex workers or self-identified under that label, we know that as massage workers, they were subjected to sexualized violence stemming from the hatred of sex workers, Asian women, working class people, and immigrants,” Red Canary Song wrote.

The organization also advocated for heightened vigilance at massage parlors following the shootings.

“Pay attention to the life and work safety of massage and salon employees! . . . The lives of Asian massage workers must not be lost in vain!” it wrote.