MASSAGE PARLOR PANIC
THE WEBSITE RUBMAPS describes itself as being devoted to “erotic massage parlor reviews & happy endings.” Users who pay for membership can write and read reviews of massage parlors. Some reviews are predictably racy, and some are, perhaps surprisingly, more PG-rated. The site lets clients know what to expect from massage parlors—and also what not to expect, offering clarity about which services are on offer and guidance about how to behave.
Increasingly, however, it also serves another purpose. Police have begun monitoring the site on the theory that, as a 2016 article in the magazine Prosecutor’s Brief asserted, a good Rubmaps review “indicates that the location is a brothel.” And when police and prosecutors take an interest, so do politicians.
Rubmaps entered the Congressional Record in March 2015, when Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D–Calif.) was speaking about the Justice for Victims of Trafficking Act. Feinstein cited Rubmaps as one of 19 sites that supposedly “act[ed] as purveyors of child sex trafficking in this country.” Those sites, she said, “ought to be ashamed of themselves.”
It was Feinstein who should have been ashamed. During her extensive remarks, she offered no solid evidence that these sites were in fact facilitating child sex trafficking. Yet her push to shutter them played directly into a social panic that has been building into a legal crusade against sex work and the web plat-forms that enable it. Within a few years, Rubmaps—then one of the lesser-known sites Feinstein mentioned—would become a key target in this dubious fight, aided by America’s long history of discriminatory opposition to massage businesses operated and staffed primarily by Asian immigrants.
People who coerce or force others into prostitution do exist, and violence against those involved in prostitution happens. Law enforcement should absolutely take these horrors seriously—especially if minors are involved. Yet government estimates of the prevalence of sex trafficking have tended to be wildly inflated and plagued with “methodological weaknesses, gaps in data, and numerical discrepancies,” as the Government Accountability Office put it. Known cases in the United States remain incredibly rare.
In 2015, for instance, U.S. attorneys received information on about 750 people suspected of either “peonage, slavery, forced labor or sex trafficking,” according to the Bureau of Justice Statistics. Yet they ultimately filed charges in just 395 of these cases.
Perhaps because of the scarcity of bona fide trafficking cases and disproportionate public interest in the topic, law enforcement agencies frequently go on fishing expeditions, searching for needles in a haystack and then arresting anyone in the vicinity of the barn.
The Wall Street Journal reported in September that agencies including the Department of Homeland Security and the Justice Department are investigating Rubmaps and two similar websites. Opponents argue these sites facilitate the sexual exploitation of girls and women. But authorities rarely turn up the horrific crimes they say they’re rooting out. Instead, the people most harmed by the attention from law enforcement are the ones cops and advocates claim they’re out to save.
Rubmaps’ emergence as a digital boogeyman corresponds with a nationwide legal assault on Asian massage parlors and the women who work at or own them. Recent high-profile examples—including the Palm Beach, Florida, investigation that ensnared New England Patriots owner Robert Kraft and the Queens, New York, raid that led to the death of Chinese immigrant Yang Song—highlight a wider phenomenon that plays out around the country on a weekly basis, a carceral charade in which the twisted “help” offered to “exploited” women includes jail, seized assets, and deportation.
These raids, which often overlap with America’s
