Houston Republic

Massage parlors, which generate an estimated $107 million a year in gross revenue in Houston, are increasingly drawing attention from scholars and others as fronts for sex trafficking, according to a 2017 study by the Journal of Human Trafficking.

Women have been recruited in South Korea, Canada and China and brought to the United States to work in massage parlors, the study said. Some massage parlors use “debt bondage” to force overseas workers to remain in the trade, the report said.

“The brokers secure passports and visas for the women, mostly using fraudulent means,” it said. “The women are charged for the documents, the transportation costs and the smuggling fee, which they are unable to pay.”

The brokers takes the women to massage parlors in the United States and the owners pay off the debt, at which point the women become "bonded laborers of the owner,” according to the study. 

In addition, massage parlors are frequently engaging in other crimes including money laundering, tax evasion, workplace safety violations and zoning violations, the study said. The businesses generate high cash volumes, the researchers said, citing a 2016 raid in Houston where police found $24,000 in cash.

It recounts the owner of a massage parlor who franchised the business to pimps, ending with up with $1.5 million in assets.

“Collectively, this evidence suggests that IMBs (Illicit Massage Businesses) are big business fueled by demand for commercial sex,” the study concluded.

Houston’s “geography, economy and diversity all contribute to sex trafficking,” the researchers said.

They set up surveillance videos on public property outside sample massage parlors and used the data to tabulate average revenue for the city's 292 massage parlors.

“This report suggests that [massage parlors] constitute an extremely profitable criminal enterprise with annual gross revenues of roughly $107 million in Houston,” the study concluded. “In order to combat this, law enforcement must invest considerable resources—both human and capital—into monitoring, investigating and prosecuting massage parlors.”

The problem is ultimately "one of public health and human rights," the report said.

"Some of the workers are victims who are recruited from abroad, held as bonded laborers, forced to work long hours, contract [sexually transmitted diseases] endure the abuse of multiple customers per day, and live at the establishment under conditions of linguistic and social isolation."

The women are often arrested for prostitution, "effectively used as scapegoats while the owners and the buyers of sex operate with relative impunity," the study reported.

Federal, state and local governments and the public at large should "engage more actively to drive these criminal enterprises out of business," the researchers recommended.