Massage Parlor Review by Women a Good Place for a Man?
This article is function three of a 5-part series titled "The Business of Illicit Massage." Parts one, ii, four and five are also available online.
FRAMINGHAM, MA — Police Detective Sergeant Timothy O'Toole points to the second flooring windows of a chocolate-brown box-shaped building in the middle of a busy residential mall. The drinking glass is tinted, the lights are off and a painted sign has been stripped away — nothing to bespeak that until recently this site was a so-called massage parlor selling "happy endings" to male clients.
"Y'all have restaurants, coffee shops, and now you take male parties coming and going for one purpose," O'Toole said recently. "Who would recall that they would open up up a place where sexual action is occurring for a fee at a location such every bit this?"
Meredith Nierman/WGBH News
Before the Greentree Health Spa was close downwardly last year, sexual practice buyers crowed almost the identify on an erotic online review site called Rubmaps, a digital forum that lists some 7,000 illicit massage-related businesses across the Us.
Nigh described in graphic terms the kind of sex they could buy at the Framingham spa. One reviewer wrote, "Jennifer embodied everything that I wanted, yet couldn't go out my wife." Some called her a sweetheart, others mentioned routine details similar the like shooting fish in a barrel parking. I man described how he dropped his married woman and kids off at a nearby park earlier heading in "to get some relief."
In that location are now seven active sites in Framingham, almost 200 across the state, according to data provided by the anti-trafficking group Praesidium Partners.
Indeed, on any on any given twenty-four hours in that location are about 9,000 online searches in the Boston surface area on Rubmaps and other cyberspace sites for places to purchase sex, co-ordinate to Need Abolition, an anti-homo trafficking organization based in Cambridge. Buyers represent every race, every color and every profession. Company executives, lawyers, police officers, teachers and politicians have been arrested in stings over recent years. A new study by the D.C.-based Polaris Project finds that the largest percentage of buyers are white men with post-graduate degrees making more $100,000 a year.
Meredith Nierman/WGBH News
I of them is a Boston-area resident who asked for anonymity to tell his story. We're calling him Tom.
"In that location were a few times I did it at piece of work, at lunch. I was definitely distracted," he said.
Tom says what at beginning was a distraction became an increasingly expensive obsession. Money he spent for erotic massage, he says, could accept gone to his children's music lessons, a family unit vacation or a charity of his pick. Tom is a former buyer who until a few years ago contributed to what has go a nearly $3 billion annual manufacture in the U.S., co-ordinate to a recent study by Texas Christian University.
"I spent anywhere from $100, which was probably the typical, to sometimes $200,'' Tom said. "I spent nearly $xx,000 over those four years."
Watertown psychologist Joel Ziff, a sex addiction therapist who has worked with hundreds of men, says illicit massage parlors are a gateway into other forms of commercial sex because they appear safer and are less pricey than other forms of prostitution. Nearly xi percent of sex buyers said their recent paid sex activity transactions were at a massage parlors, according to a contempo Demand Abolition report.
"The appeal of it is it's convenient. Often times people are driving past somewhere and then get in and it's tends to be less expensive than other forms of commercial sexual activity,'' he said. "It has kind of a veneer of legitimacy."
Meredith Nierman/WGBH News
While some men like Tom say they are sexual practice addicts now in recovery, others who shared their stories with WGBH and NECIR reporters say they have no regrets or apologies.
Take a human being nosotros call Jeff, an abet of legalizing erotic massage, who believes the industry is mainly a victimless activity.
The Boston-area professional person said he is divorced with little opportunity for intimacy. Instead, he spends his money at erotic massage parlors most his 4-bedroom abode in a wealthy suburb west of Boston. He argues that non everybody gets the job of their choice.
"I wouldn't want my daughter cleaning toilets. Simply, unfortunately, in order not everyone can be a vice president of a company or a lawyer or a doctor," he said. "Some people may choose this is how they can brand coin and may want to make money."
Indeed, Jeff compared a sex activity buyer'southward visit to an illicit massage parlor to the same type of guilty pleasance a woman feels when getting her nails done. "I've never had intercourse,'' he said. "It's but a massage, a massage of your personal parts, and that'due south all."
But a growing number of anti-trafficking specialists and law enforcement officials say women are being coerced into the business, manipulated by financial debts, fear and shame to stay quiet.
In many cases, traffickers will take their passports and money, according to Polaris. Federal prosecutors in Minnesota concluding twelvemonth filed charges confronting a ring of alleged traffickers claiming Thai women were forced to piece of work to pay off huge debts, with both the debt and the victims traded like stocks among operators. They described the women as "modern day sex slaves."
And increasingly, law enforcement and anti-trafficking specialists say focusing on shutting down need is key to disrupting the industry. Massachusetts Chaser General Maura Healey said her office last year arrested 29 buyers as part of the endeavour. "If we can break the dorsum of demand, if there are no buyers, at that place is no business concern," she said. Some of those cases are ongoing.
Meredith Nierman/WGBH News
But the reality is that simply nigh six percent of buyers are arrested for their part in fueling the commercial sex activity industry, co-ordinate to Demand Abolition. So, if men — for skillful reason — aren't deterred by the fearfulness of arrest, some who rails the industry say they should at least be concerned nigh their physical wellness.
Jeff, who visits erotic spas in the Newton-Watertown area, isn't worried. "So far, I've institute the place very, very clean," he said. "They change the sheets every single time. They wash their hands."
Framingham's Detective O'Toole said sex buyers would think differently if they could see what he's seen when he's gone into illicit massage parlors with state police forensic technicians and ultraviolent lights. Court records from a contempo bust of an alleged business in Hadley found "semen and sperm" on the walls, towels, blankets, doors and massage tables.
"I was personally shocked at the testify that was plant in these locations," O'Toole said. "You never know what you're going to contract when y'all're going into these locations and bringing them habitation."
Others buyers said they were more worried nearly getting caught – less past law than by their wives.
Phillip Martin is a senior reporter with WGBH News. Jenifer McKim is a reporter for the New England Center for Investigative Reporting, a nonprofit news partner of WGBH News.
Source: https://www.wgbh.org/news/2018/02/11/local-news/men-who-fuel-erotic-massage-industry
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