Below is a news article that has made me think twice before attempting a visit to any of the more hole-in-wall type massage places found in Chinese communities of Flushing, Queens/8th Ave, Brooklyn. Some of these places (according to their ads) promise they change the 2-6 girls weekly. Do suspect some of these girls may have been trafficked? . . . or in other words 'rotated' among different locations?

To assuage my conscious (and minimize risks), I try to look for true 141s in NYC, those who work for themselves.


Article Link :http://nypost.com/2017/06/12/nypd-using-nonprofits-to-save-sex-workers-in-suspected-brothels/

Article below : NYPD using nonprofits to save sex workers in suspected brothels

The NYPD has a new weapon in its battle against sex traffickers — brave civilian women armed only with open ears and hearts.

Female nonprofit workers are now going undercover into city massage parlors suspected of being brothels to talk with the mostly immigrant women who work there and try to get them help.

The sex workers “are being beaten, they’re being strangled, they’re being stabbed in some cases and frequently raped. And so when our staff are going in, a lot of the conversations have been, ‘Are you feeling safe?’” said Lori Cohen of the advocacy group Sanctuary for Families.

The initiative stems from a recent city push to bust more johns and traffickers and fewer prostitutes — helping sex workers into safety rather than throwing them behind bars.

But prostitutes are afraid of speaking to authorities after years of arrests. So Cohen’s group and two others began going out with NYPD vice teams to help win their trust.

“We tell them who we are and what we can do for them,’’ said Susan Liu, who works with the women’s advocacy group Garden of Hope.

When one of the 10-person teams of police and non-profit workers arrives at a business, the cops tell the managers that they’re there to do license inspections.

The officers then ask if they can talk to the predominantly Asian female workers as part of the inspection — escorting the women to a room so that the Mandarin-speaking nonprofit staffers can chat with them.

Cohen said her staffers are just trying to share information and contact details with the women and then stay in contact with them through an app called WeChat, which is popular in China.

“What they don’t do, they don’t go in and start interviewing them,’’ she said of her workers. “That’s not going to be helpful.”

She has spoken to workers who said their bosses took away their passports, then told them not to go outside because it was too dangerous.

“It’s just so complicated with how their minds are being messed up,” she said.

NYPD Vice Division Commanding Officer James Klein said the operation has already shut some brothels down.

“It’s a matter of building up trust with this population. There’s very little trust right now,’’ he said.