413047-Underground-Commercial-Sex-Economy

eliminated from having to follow a lot of those rules, so a little money here, a little money
there. (San Diego Law Enforcement Official)
There are many different ways in which women find themselves working in an Asian massage parlor.
Some are smuggled in through Mexico or Canada, while others might enter on a legitimate visa (e.g. J-1 or
H2-B). They often incur a debt that they need to pay back to either a snakehead (Chinese migrant
smugglers) or sponsor. Many Asian women (“95 to 98 percent”) that one particular law enforcement
department encountered through their massage parlor investigations traveled from China to Las Vegas
and married an American man within three months of their arrival. Soon after, they traveled to Los
Angeles, registered at a massage school, and started working in a massage parlor. According to a law
enforcement officer, “Ninety percent of the identification they show us is a photocopy of their ID. They
don’t have their passports, they could have passports but they don’t have them, but they’ll have a
photocopy of wherever it came from. We will ask, ‘Where’s your real ID’ ‘Well, my husband’s got it.’ It’s
always, ‘My husband has it’ or ‘It’s at home.’”
There is some dissension within the various stakeholder agencies interviewed for this study as to whether
the women who work in the massage parlors are trafficked or voluntarily trading sex. The following are
the views expressed by two law enforcement agencies:
Interviewer: And as far as the Asian massage parlors
Respondent 1: Just that 99.9 percent of them are straight prostitution.
Respondent 2: The question becomes, the true human trafficking sort of case … those
are not as common or as out in the open as just straight up prostitution. A lot of the
prostitution cases and a lot of what we consider human trafficking are because it is an
underage girl. But in a lot of those cases the girls sort of find themselves in it because they
sort of willingly go into it. That is not true in all cases but it’s the culture or rather the
urban culture. (Federal Law Enforcement Official)
We didn’t as a task force, we didn’t do a lot of massage parlor work and the reasoning is
that it’s kinda weird when you think about it is that it comes down to funding. We had x
amount of dollars to go around and with the massage parlors, they’re almost all Asian
victims, many of which come from very remote areas in the Asian world and we couldn’t
even find translators that spoke the dialect from the village they were from. So without
being able to communicate, how can I really interview you and identify you as a victim
And so the details didn’t produce us anything other than just a prostitution arrest. That’s
really not what the goal of our task force was, it’s not a prostitution arrest, we’re after a)
rescuing a victim and b) getting the pimp … they were kind of worthless ops for us to do
because we couldn’t meet the objectives so we didn’t do a lot. (San Diego Law
Enforcement Officials)
Whereas the law enforcement officials above did not uncover trafficking in the massage parlors they also
did not make massage parlor investigations a priority. Other stakeholders in San Diego believed that sex
trafficking and labor trafficking occurred within the parlors. They shared that women worked 10 to 12
hours a day, received a small portion of the wages that they earned (mainly in the form of tips), and lived
in or above the parlor:
When we first hit the massage parlors, we went into it as a sex trafficking investigation.
The longer we did it though, after interviewing all these girls we realized that it’s more of
a labor trafficking game … They used to all live in the facility. They would always live in
the massage parlor, you walked in and there was food. Some of them still do it, but it’s
very rare now. But all their clothing, everything was in the place. We were using that as an
excuse to get in there under our muni code sections that they couldn’t live on the
property. They changed all that - they started getting apartments that were nearby the
business, within walking distance. (San Diego Law Enforcement Official)
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