Criminalizing Victims

October 19, 2018 2:24 PM

Last Thanksgiving, a Chinese woman named Song Yang fell to her death during a police raid of her apartment in Queens. This is her story. (Linked article discusses sexual assault, suicide and abuse.)

- Voices of New York (November 28, 2017): "Chinese Massage parlor worker dies in police raid."
- Medium (In Justice Today) (November 30, 2017): "After Deadly Vice Sting, Advocates Say End to Prostitution Arrests Is Long Overdue"
- Voices of New York (December 8, 2017): "Family Tells Story of Masseuse Who Died in Flushing"
- Queens Times Ledger (December 21, 2017): "Protesters rally at 109th Precinct after woman dies in police raid"
- Poynter (October 19, 2018): "An interview with Dan Barry, the writer of the NYT's 'The Case of Jane Doe Ponytail'"

"I had finished a long-form piece last November called “The Lost Children of Tuam,” and was looking for the next thing to do. A few days after Thanksgiving, I was reading the New York Daily News, and came across a very short story with the headline: “Prostie Death Jump As She Flees Police.”

I don’t know how else to put this except to say: This really pissed me off.

I didn’t like — or even know — the term “prostie,” and I really didn’t like how a woman’s life and death was summarized so crassly. At that point I felt almost obliged to tell the story of this woman, who wasn’t identified in the Daily News piece. I wanted to explain who she was, where she came from, what her massage-parlor world was like, and how, if possible she came to this tragic end.

It struck me that illicit massage parlors are ubiquitous but almost invisible, and that when women are arrested — and it is almost always the women who are arrested, rather than the patrons, the operators, the traffickers — many of us see names that are foreign, and so we make private assumptions and move on. I saw a faint chance to shed light on a world that is often ignored or not seen."

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posted by zarq (8 comments total)

It's very good reporting. I thought of posting it when it first appeared, but I was concerned about too many dark articles in a row.
posted by praemunire at 5:04 PM on October 19, 2018 [3 favorites]

I haven’t even clicked a link yet and I’m already pissed off. Thank you for sharing this woman’s story.
posted by MexicanYenta at 6:52 PM on October 19, 2018 [8 favorites]

Thank you so much for posting this.
posted by thegreatfleecircus at 8:04 PM on October 19, 2018 [1 favorite]

This is a CHRISTIAN nation.
Why would anyone expect us to be nice to prostitutes?
What would Jesus do?


Oh, wait...
posted by Goofyy at 3:51 AM on October 20, 2018 [5 favorites]

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posted by evidenceofabsence at 9:14 AM on October 20, 2018

.

I really appreciate you posting this. I read it earlier, and I was so moved that I wanted to share it, but I realized that I was missing a lot of knowledge and context for a better discussion on Metafilter, and you've provided that.

I'm disgusted that "prostie" is still around. I last saw that in a dirty joke book from the 1980s.
posted by Countess Elena at 9:56 AM on October 20, 2018

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posted by tronec at 11:55 AM on October 20, 2018

This was a difficult read, and a tragic story.
posted by SecretAgentSockpuppet at 1:51 PM on October 20, 2018