The Real Motive Behind The Atlanta Spa Shootings
Long targeted a vulnerable, marginalized group - just not the one everyone wants to talk about
On March 17th, Robert Aaron Long went on a shooting spree at three Atlanta area massage parlors, killing eight people and wounding one. Six of the victims were Asian women, which was enough to kick off a wave of speculation that this act of violence was tied to a rise of anti-Asian hate in the wake of the COVID pandemic,
Problem is, none of the statements Long has provided back up that speculation. According to him, he targeted the spas because they were “a temptation for him that he wanted to eliminate” and that he blamed them for “for providing an outlet for his addiction to sex.” Long also stated that the killings were not racially motivated and that he had been a client at two of the spas. After Long was arrested, he confessed that he was en route to Florida to target another business associated with the pornography industry.
(Side note -- we do not know what sort of services Long received at the massage parlors, and Atlanta Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms has gone on record stating that there was no indication that the parlors in question were allowing sex work on their premises)
Since the shooting, we’ve learned much more about Long and his past. Tyler Bayliss, a former roommate of Long’s at a halfway house in Atlanta, described Long as someone who has deep struggles with what he views as sex addiction. From the New York Time’s reporting on Long
“It is unclear what led Mr. Long to seek treatment for sexual addiction at the halfway house, where others were working through drug and alcohol addictions. Mr. Bayless, the former roommate, said Mr. Long always discussed his visits to massage businesses for sex in the context of his relationship with God and his parents.
In early 2020, Mr. Long moved from the halfway house for more intensive treatment at HopeQuest, a Christian addiction center, and the two men fell out of touch, Mr. Bayless said.
‘I think he just felt like he could not be trusted out there alone,’ Mr. Bayless added, referring to Mr. Long’s inability to stop visiting the spas.”
Long is also a member of Crabapple First Baptist Church, which promotes the concept of purity culture. In addition to promoting “traditional” gender roles, purity culture promotes ultra-strict views on sex and sexuality. The bylaws for the church specifically condemn “adultery, fornication, homosexuality, bisexual conduct, bestiality, incest, polygamy, pedophilia, pornography, or any attempt to change one’s sex.”
From all of this, we start to get a better idea of what Long’s motives were; he was identifying his targets not as Asians, but as sex workers. And while I grant that Long may have been assuming what sorts of activities were taking place at those parlors -- again, he says he was a client at two of the spas but there is no confirmation he received any sort of sexual services while there -- it’s clear he was motivated by his sexual issues and not specifically anti-Asian hatred.
Yet the narrative that this attack was solely the result of anti-Asian animus keeps on gaining steam. President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris visited Atlanta to meet with Bottoms and leaders of the Asian-American community, several lawmakers have condemned this attack as an example of anti-Asian violence and specifically blamed Trump for creating this atmosphere, and scores of social media influencers have accepted and pushed the narrative that this is solely a hate crime against Asians.
And why wouldn’t they? Race has become the dominant talking point that events must revolve around, no matter how much contortion has to happen to make it so. It’s trendy to view everything through the prism of race, to post that you stand in solidarity with this or that race, to start a hashtag campaign to #StopAAPIHate.
What hurts about this false narrative is that it completely ignores the vulnerable, marginalized group of people who were the real target of violence; sex workers. This is a group of people who have for decades been calling attention to the violence they face as a result of their profession -- where’s their #StopHateAgainstSexWorkers hashtag campaign, their solidarity movement? Why is there not a movement rising up to demand the decriminalization of sex work to protect sex workers? Are sex workers not worthy of the same level of outrage and sympathy as Asians?
As depressing as I find the erasure of sex workers from the current discussion of the Atlanta shooting I’m not surprised -- to acknowledge that these women may have been sex workers not only destroys the trendy narrative, it forces people to look at sex workers as actual human beings who face violence as a result of their job choice. That acknowledgment would have to come with a reckoning of how we view and treat sex work in the US, and how change has to be implemented to keep sex workers safer. Doing all of that would entail doing the one thing that the media and influences avoid doing at all costs -- actually talking to sex workers.
We don’t know if the women who were killed were sex workers, and on a certain level, it doesn’t matter. All of them were humans, with lives outside of whatever they may have done for a living, and none of them deserved to be killed. I’m not comfortable setting aside Long’s motivations for what he did however; I feel like doing that distracts from a very important conversation about sex work and attitudes about sex in general that should be central to the conversation about this tragedy.