413047-Underground-Commercial-Sex-Economy

Chapter 4
Stakeholder Perspectives on the
Underground Commercial Sex Economy
Introduction
The US underground commercial sex economy comprises a multitude of venues and activities. These
venues and activities include street and online sex work, escort services, massage parlors, and brothels.
The UCSE has changed significantly over time—it used to mainly consist of street prostitution, whereas
over the last decade, a majority of the business takes place on the Internet. Although there are sex
workers 44 who work independently and voluntarily within the UCSE, there are a growing number of
facilitators who operate underground commercial sex businesses in the United States and who represent a
number of different ethnicities and nationalities. These facilitators, who are commonly referred to as
pimps and traffickers, are known to use force, threats, and manipulation to recruit and control their
employees. In many cases, they network with one another in order to maximize their profits and minimize
their risk of being detected by law enforcement.
This chapter is based on interviews with 119 stakeholders who represent various law enforcement
departments and government agencies in the eight study sites. We document the perspectives and
observations of these stakeholders around the underground commercial economy in their jurisdiction.
More specifically, we discuss changes in the UCSE over the last five to ten years; income generated in this
economy; facilitator and sex worker characteristics; networks between facilitators; and lastly, connections
between the underground weapons, drugs, and sex economies.
In addition to documenting the perspectives of the stakeholders, this chapter also provides maps of erotic
massage parlor locations in each of the eight study sites for the years 2011 and 2013. The massage parlor
locations were downloaded from the website www.eroticmp.com which provides the addresses of massage
parlors, in addition to client reviews of the women that work in them. 45 Although we do not attempt to
provide reasons as to why there is displacement or a change in the number of massage parlors in each of
the cities, we did want to show a visual representation of just how prevalent they are (and in some cases
are not) in the study sites. As shown in figure 4.1, the number of erotic massage parlors is increasing in
the United States (from 4,197 in 2011 to 4,790 in 2013), and they are proliferating beyond the West and
East coasts where the majority of them are clustered.
44 Please see chapter 2 for a discussion on terminology
45 Although there was no way for us to know the legitimacy of the postings on this website, the individuals that post on
eroticmp.com state that they closely monitor the site to ensure that the information posted is valid and legitimate.
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