As many as 9,000 illegal massage parlors operate in more than 1,000 cities in the U.S., fueling a more than $3 billion industry, according to the Polaris Project, a nonprofit that runs the National Human Trafficking Hotline.
Jasmine Grace Marino, of Nashua, N.H., a former massage parlor prostitute, stands for a photograph, in Somerville, Mass., Wednesday, Feb. 27, 2019. Marino says she was forced to work at sites in Connecticut and Maine for five years by her then-boyfriend as she struggled with drugs and alcohol in her 20s. She's since written a book about her experience and runs Bags of Hope, a Boston-based nonprofit that helps women who have been trafficked or dealing with addiction and homelessness.
“You’re fighting against a multibillion-dollar industry that’s very, very good at being strategic and keeping their business going,” said Stephanie Clark, executive director at Amirah, a nonprofit that runs a safe house for women escaping sex trafficking in Massachusetts, where illegal massage parlors have proliferated. “They are always 10 steps ahead.”
Authorities say the women averaged about 1,500 clients a year, were given no days off and were not allowed to leave the site, where many also lived. Palm Beach State Attorney Dave Aronberg described it as “modern-day slavery.” In one recent case, a 38-year-old woman was charged with running a lucrative human trafficking and money laundering operation across six Asian massage parlors in the suburbs north of Boston.
A silver lining is that arrests of sex workers have dropped nearly 50 percent while the arrest of johns has spiked nearly 200 percent, according to Muller. Authorities are also helping connect more women with groups like Restore NYC that can help get them on a path to citizenship and break the grip of traffickers, who oftentimes hold their passports and immigration documents as collateral, he said.
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