Orange County Seeks Happy Ending to Massage Parlor Ads

The Orange County Human Trafficking Task Force can't get a decent massage. Maybe that's because the pages of their newspaper, and newspapers nationwide including the Washington Post, are full of ads for "massage parlors" featuring partially clothed, unlicensed female "masseuses." It's one of the most transparent fronts for prostitution and human trafficking still legally advertised, and people are increasingly calling for an end to the ads.

One of the beautiful parts of the American justice system is that people are presumed innocent until proven guilty beyond a reasonable doubt. The same holds true for business activities -- they are presumed legal until they are proven illegal. It's legal to post an add promising massages by women in fishnets who just turned 18. It's legal to cover these ads with non-nude sexual imagery aimed at an exclusively male audience. But it's not legal (in most of the U.S.) to run a brothel and it's not legal to sell trafficked women anywhere. So how do you know which massage business are legal and which are illegal? Enter, law enforcement. It's their job to determine if a seemingly-legal business is actually a front for something illegal. A favorite tool of law enforcement to accomplish this is conducting raids in massage parlors they find suspicious, with results varying from ecstatic thanks from newly freed trafficking victims to deportations of undocumented women voluntarily in prostitution to significant abuse by the police. It is certainly a flawed system, but one which does achieve its aims much of the time.

There is one element which I often find missing when we talk about the connection between massage parlors, prostitution, and human trafficking: common sense. Let's face it -- many of these ads are painfully obvious as covers for illegal commercial sex. I think we often get so caught up in legal definitions, we forget to use our common sense as a test for what's legitimate and what's not. Legitimate massage ads tend to focus on their licensed therapists, spa services, relaxing atmosphere, hygiene standards, and quality of service. Illegitimate massage ads tend to focus on the age or race of their masseuses, the "eroticness" of the massage, and men as a target audience. Sure, some of these ads are more nuanced and deceptive, but many of them look and feel obviously illegitimate. If the common sense test comes out with a score of sketchy, then the trickier question becomes whether a massage parlor is an illegal brothel full of trafficking victims and/or children or women who have voluntarily entered prostitution.

It's important to approach this intersection between massage parlors, prostitution, and human trafficking with a solid knowledge of legal codes and a strategic plan to work with law enforcement. But it's also important for activists to use their common sense about what is being advertised in their newspapers and speak out about it. Police can raid only so many massage parlor brothels. But when newspapers have gotten enough complaints from readers about running these ads in the past, they've stopped. And no advertising means less business for pimps and less incentive for traffickers.

Photo credit: thomaswanhoff