The CityBeat is a nonprofit-funded position reporting on Winston-Salem and Greensboro city council and all city business. These pieces are free to be republished with attribution to Triad City Beat. Meanwhile, many illegal parlors are still up and running in plain sight in the city and beyond. And the industry reaps billions of dollars each year with thousands of these businesses spread across the country.
To protect public health, safety, welfare, and morals, the provisions and regulations of this chapter are ordained for the privilege of carrying on the businesses, trades, or professions wherein massage or other physical manipulation of the human body is carried on or practiced. In addition to operating out of strip malls or other business parks, illicit massage parlors are often run out of residential homes and neighborhoods.
A quick search on websites that offer sexual services show addresses in Winston-Salem that are associated with single-family homes. According to research by the Polaris Project , the organization that operates the US National Human Trafficking Hotline, almost all victims of massage-parlor trafficking in the United States recently arrived from China or South Korea, carry debts or are under extreme financial pressure, speak little to no English, have a high school education at maximum and are mothers in their mid thirties to late fifties.
Very often, the men who seek these services are not arrested and punished. Rather, the workers are. Sometimes these massage parlors pose as legitimate businesses, obtaining licenses and registering as LLCs. What is actually required depends on the jurisdiction. Ben Holder, a former reporter with the Carolina Peacemaker and an activist who has spent decades fighting against illicit massage parlors, talked to TCB for its story about how Greensboro Police Department officers were asking for workers for services and arresting them once they had agreed to or were in the process of performing them.
GPD updated their policies for investigating illicit massage parlors shortly after this was discovered. Holder argues that law enforcement should simply go to these businesses and ask for their licenses. Many of the illicit massage parlors attract customers by advertising services online. The business is also listed on SkipTheGames, a website that regularly posts ads for parlors with ages, locations and phone numbers.
