Amy points to the sign scrawled in black magic marker, Scotch-taped below an anatomical drawing of the human form. Amy, a year-old massage worker—her name, like that of others from the industry who appear in this story, has been changed to protect her identity—is clad in a not particularly seductive outfit: a canary yellow t-shirt and black leggings, a royal blue visor atop her head, black hair pulled back in a ponytail.
Ninety-five percent of New Yorkers charged with this felony from to were of Asian descent, according to an Urban Institute report. Hence the sign. Asian massage parlors reentered the national consciousness earlier this year, when New England Patriots owner and Donald Trump pal Robert Kraft was, according to police, caught receiving hand jobs at Orchids of Asia Day Spa in Jupiter, Florida. Many news reports presented women of Asian descent working at parlors as victims of human trafficking, spurred on by Palm Beach County State Attorney Dave Aronberg and Martin County Sheriff William Snyder, the public faces of the sting.
They were moved from location to location. They were averaging eight clients a day… with no days off. With court-ordered video surveillance in place, we found that the women selling sex acts in these strip mall brothels were virtual slaves. The case nevertheless raised the question of what sex work at Asian massage parlors really looks like nationally. The narrative presented by law enforcement and proliferated through media sources in the Kraft case was that massage workers were being transported by predatory bosses from Flushing across the country.
But how typical is coerced sex work in the contemporary United States? And are most masseuses who do sex work choosing to do so on their own volition, or because they are effectively indentured servants in debt to abusive bosses? Reliable data on trafficking in massage parlors is nonexistent. Law enforcement argue they are helping victims, while sex workers say police are the ones victimizing them. A massage parlor owner in Florida suggested that, to answer my questions, I had to go to Flushing, where many of the workers in the Florida massage parlor bust were from, and see for myself.
Massage parlors have long been tied to sex in the United States. Goodchild wrote in While the number of Chinese women working in these parlors was probably smaller then than it is today, immigrant prostitution flourished in San Francisco before the turn of the 20th century, and hysteria surrounded these sex workers. Echoes of these attitudes, which were not entirely baseless—trafficking was in fact significant—remain to this day.
