Are police the biggest threat to massage parlor workers’ safety?
An undercover New York City police officer enters an Asian massage parlor in plain clothes; he looks like any other client. He’ll request a massage and, when they are alone, he’ll ask his masseuse if she can perform sexual services. The masseuse may not speak English very well, so she may agree – or seem to – without understanding what she’s being asked.
If she refuses, the police officer might then try to coax her into performing a sex act by touching her leg or groping her. In some cases, he may receive the services he requested, or demand them in exchange for her evading arrest. In other cases, no sexual services will be agreed to at all, but the worker’s body language may be misinterpreted to argue otherwise.
The massage worker will probably be arrested on the spot by the undercover officer, who may also be accompanied by Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents or federal investigators. (Ice agents may also show up later on, when she appears in court.) She’ll be charged with some combination of prostitution-related offenses and providing unlicensed massage, should she lack the proper certification, and face additional legal troubles related to her immigration status as a result.
This is what may transpire when an Asian massage business comes under investigation by law enforcement, as described by massage worker advocates, sex worker rights groups, public defenders and massage workers themselves. The women who work at these establishments aren’t all sex workers. Some provide non-sexual massages, some cook, clean or do laundry at the parlors, others answer the phones. Most are undocumented immigrants and many of them have chosen massage work over low-wage work in other industries as a way of earning a living and taking care of their families. Whatever their situation, massage workers know to fear the police when they go to work.
Though law enforcement sometimes frame their investigations as combatting sex trafficking, massage workers – many of whom have chosen this work – often see the police as the biggest threat to their safety. If massage workers are abused or robbed by a client, calling the police isn’t an option, since sex work is against the law and carries harsh criminal penalties. Doing so would mean risking arrest, and an arrest means having a criminal record and potential deportation. Advocates say the inability for massage workers to go to the police for help – coupled with the stigma that comes with their work being criminalized in the first place – makes them vulnerable to violence, including an event like the Atlanta spa shootings in March.
“Historically the fear of arrest for massage workers almost always supersedes fear of both robbery and assault from clients or passersby,” said Esther Kao, a co-director of Red Canary Song, a coalition of Asian and migrant sex workers and their allies.
After a rise in sting operations in massage parlors between 2012 and 2016, the number of Asian-identified people arrested in New York for prostitution or unlicensed massage increased by 2,700%.
The police attributed their crackdown on the parlors to community complaints, which they often cited as the reason why officers were investigating a massage business. Leigh Latimer, head of the Exploitation Intervention Project (EIP) at the Legal Aid Society, felt there may have been other motivations as well: “I would ask a prosecutor why a particular massage parlor, why was this type of policing, and it was always about community complaints,” she said. “I was unsatisfied with that answer, let me put it that way.”
In recent years Latimer’s office has seen significantly fewer arrests, partly as a result of the city’s growing decriminalization movement, which has pushed public officials, local district attorneys, and the NYPD to reduce the policing of sex workers. In a statement to the Guardian, a spokesperson for the NYPD’s Office of the Deputy Commissioner, Public Information said that investigation efforts were shifted to focus “less on sex workers and more on those who would exploit them.”
On Wednesday, Manhattan district attorney Cyrus Vance announced his office would no longer prosecute people charged with prostitution and unlicensed massage, a move the Legal Aid Society applauded before going on to warn that the new policy doesn’t mean the NYPD will stop making arrests.
And indeed raids are still happening in New York, advocates say, and massage workers in legal trouble continue to make their way to Latimer’s team of lawyers, who represent them in court, help them vacate their records, and connect them to other local organizations that provide resources to people criminalized for their work in the sex trade.
“From the outside, it looks like the district attorney’s office and different judges have made these great statements of support, saying they don’t want to be policing and arresting [sex workers],” said Cate Carbonaro, the
Queens staff attorney at EIP. “But right now, as we speak, I’m still getting new cases of Asian women arrested in massage businesses.”
Some of them are even being charged with more severe offenses than they might have before. Since city officials have pledged to stop arresting sex workers, Carbonaro has seen instances where massage parlor workers are charged with promoting prostitution because the person is suspected of running the business – and therefore facilitating sexual activities there – simply because they appear older than the other workers, or because they happen to open the door to a room for an undercover officer.
“It feels to me that in those cases the police feel they can say, ‘We’re getting to the root of the problem, the traffickers!’” Carbonaro said. “But that’s not what’s happening.”
“I think it requires a slightly more sophisticated amount of work to get to the people who own the business,” her colleague, Sabrina Talukder, another staff attorney at EIP said. “Our clients are low-hanging fruit for officers.”
Although the sting may no longer be the police’s primary investigative strategy, massage workers’ lives are routinely upended by law enforcement’s scrutiny of their workplaces. When authorities shut down massage parlors, for example – a tactic intended to target the businesses rather than the people who work in them – massage workers there are often made more vulnerable to trafficking, the exact thing police claim they want to avoid.
“For many workers in parlors they can work with more people, it’s less isolated, they know more workers, and they can screen their clients,” said Elene Lam, the executive director of Butterfly, a support network based in Toronto for Asian and migrant sex workers. “When police take away the work, they lose that way of making a living, that way of connecting to people, and they’re pushed underground into more dangerous situations.”
The more sex work is pushed underground, the less people who are victims of trafficking and exploitation can access the help they need. One form of exploitation attorneys at the Legal Aid Society sometimes encounter when representing massage workers involves bosses withholding their wages or taking a cut of their pay. If massage work were treated like any other kind of job, these workers could file wage and hour claims with the Department of Labor, and invoke the same labor protections other workers are afforded. (These sorts of labor violations, after all, aren’t specific to the massage industry.)
Instead, the stigma against massage parlors and the criminalization of sex work makes it nearly impossible for massage workers to do anything more than try to survive in the conditions as they exist right now and organize for a better future.
“The problem is really that sex work and massage work are seen as social evils,” Lam said. “When [police] say they want to eliminate massage parlors they are really saying they want to eliminate the women who work there. They think they have the power to take away someone’s life. But women will continue to say, ‘This is my job and I want to keep it.’”
When police take away the work, they lose that way of making a living, and they’re pushed into more dangerous situations
Elene Lam