How to End Sex Trafficking in Massage Parlors in Your Community

This is part two of an interview with Jessica Dickinson Goodman, a student activist at Carnegie Mellon University who is doing research on anti-trafficking issues and helping rally support for a proposal that would help end sex trafficking in Pittsburgh massage parlors. Here, Dickinson Goodman outlines how you can get a similar ordinance passed in your own community. To read part one, click here.

1) Investigate. Read through the johns’ boards; see how many massage parlors are in your area. Making a map helps; ours was color-coded by city council district to make it easy for people to see how close these places are to our homes and schools. Be warned: these boards can be extremely graphic and disturbing.

2) Identify. Look for the best person or office to introduce the ordinance. Perhaps your county has more investigative powers than your city; maybe your state house is the best place to look. Ending human trafficking is a non-partisan issue, so feel free to look for supporters from outside of your own experience. We have received wonderful support from the religious community in Pittsburgh, including Sister Jeanette Bussen, a local nun and anti-trafficking activist who I would never have met without this work.

3) Instigate. Start drumming up community support. Ask to talk for 15 minutes at the ends of college clubs' meetings, present to church groups and contact local fraternal organizations. Ask local massage therapists if they know where illegitimate establishments are located; because johns sometimes confuse good businesses with places to buy sex, some massage therapists have been sexually harassed by them. These places are deeply embedded in our communities -- in Pittsburgh, not one of the 15 brothels posing as massage parlors is more than a few blocks from a church, synagogue or mosque. It is an issue on everyone's plate, whether we know it or not.

Once you have the knowledge, the institutional and the community support, you may need to address the concerns of local business owners, consult law enforcemen and make sure that your case is as solid as possible. And ask for help -- the Project to End Human Trafficking and I are committed to getting this passed in Pittsburgh and elsewhere. If you live in Pittsburgh, please consider volunteering for or donating to the Project to End Human Trafficking or handwriting a letter of support to Mayor Ravenstahl.

I am a bit of a policy wonk, so my first reaction to a new issue is to do research. For me, reading through all of the materials put out by the National Human Trafficking Resource Center, calling the National Human Trafficking Hotline at 1-888-373-7888 for information on anti-trafficking organizations in my area and reading the U.S. State Department's Trafficking in Persons report gave me enough of a foundation to form an opinion about how to best combat trafficking in Pittsburgh.

If you are better with counseling than I am, volunteer to work with survivors. It can be satisfying work, if not always fun. If you only have a little time, consider writing a paper on trafficking. I bet you $10 donated to your favorite anti-trafficking organization, I can take any term-paper topic and find a way to make it about ending trafficking. Seriously. Email me.

The most important thing any student can do is to learn the signs of human trafficking. Confinement, abuse, debt-bondage, threats, minors in commercial sex, adults in jobs they can't leave -- these are things anyone can see anytime and report to the National Human Trafficking Hotline (1-888-373-7888). The call specialists keep track of all of the tips they receive and pass them on to law enforcement. Together, we can end sex trafficking in our communities.