Dozens of Sacramento massage parlors profit from sexual services. A crackdown may be coming
They are in nearly every corner of Sacramento, hiding in full view.
Bars cover the windows. Signage blocks the view inside. Neon lights draw customers inside, often well into the night.
From Little Saigon to North Natomas, Curtis Park to East Sacramento, massage parlors have become prolific in the capital city, spreading into every enclave with speed. Behind the darkened doors in some of these places, women – often immigrants from Asia and speaking very little English – are trafficked and forced into sexual labor, activists and city officials say.
There are roughly 200 massage businesses in the city of Sacramento. At a minimum, at least a third of them are profiting from illegal sexual conduct between massage workers and customers, according to a Sacramento Bee review of a well-trafficked website that solicits reviews of massage parlors.
Even as the coronavirus pandemic has shut down much of society, many massage parlors continue to operate in Sacramento, including some that are fronts for human trafficking and prostitution, said city officials and advocates for the women’s’ safety.
“Frankly, it’s indentured servitude,” Sacramento City Councilman Eric Guerra said. “It’s modern-day slavery. The people who are wrapped up into it can’t get out.”
City officials have found beds, clothing and refrigerators stocked with food inside massage parlors, signs that women being trafficked are living there. Bowls of condoms have been seen on counters inside the businesses.
In response to growing concern about the breadth of the problem, the Sacramento City Council will soon consider an ordinance that would strengthen the power of code inspectors to cite and shut down massage parlors suspected of offering sexual services and victimizing the workers in them.
The ordinance would require massage businesses to have well-lit signage, close their doors overnight, and prohibit people from living in the establishments. It would also prohibit condoms inside the businesses and would ban employees from wearing attire that is see-through, swimsuits or clothing that “exposes the chest, buttocks, pubic areas or genitals.”
For now, city officials are only able to close massage parlors suspected of prostitution or human trafficking with a lawsuit filed by the city attorney – an often lengthy process, said Tessa St. John, a program manager in the city’s finance department who has been working on the new regulations.
Like in the rest of the country, Sacramento is home to many legitimate massage businesses that follow the rules and don’t offer sexual services. Their work is considered vital to many who suffer from muscle ailments, fatigue, stress, and chronic pain.
But a significant number of massage parlors in Sacramento and surrounding areas appear to be operated as modern-day brothels. The Bee reviewed hundreds of listings and reviews on a website, Rubmaps, that bills itself as a digital destination “where fantasy meets reality.”
Reviewers on the site describe, in lurid detail, which women at which businesses across the country provide sex for money. The illegal activity is out in the open on the site, and features massage parlors stretching from Roseville to Elk Grove, and West Sacramento to Folsom.
In Sacramento, someone claiming to be a male customer wrote a review on Aug. 12, telling others that a parlor two blocks from Sacramento Police Headquarters was still open amid the pandemic and “CFS” — lingo for covered full sex — is available. The reviewer reported that he paid $80 to the parlor and $140 to his “provider.” However, he noted, “communication was hard.”
The site is user-generated, much like Yelp, with users adding new massage parlors as they open, and writing reviews with daily regularity. It’s a resource for other “mongers,” as they call themselves, for finding women who will provide illicit services and their going rates. Women are rated on breast size, and reviewers give details on their age, breast size and pubic hair.
At another massage business near the Capital City Freeway, someone purporting to be a male customer wrote of his Sept. 2 visit in which he went to “check out the new girls.” This business is visited and reviewed so often, that users encourage others to stop writing reviews so as to not attract attention from law enforcement.
Like the ones above, other Sacramento massage businesses continue to operate during the pandemic, despite a COVID-19 shutdown order. A Bee visual journalist recently visited outside eight massage businesses in Sacramento, and two of them showed signs of activity despite being marked as closed.
In 2018, Sacramento police investigated 50 massage businesses and arrested more than 30 people, according to a city staff report published last year.
While the department has received fewer complaints about illicit massage businesses during the coronavirus pandemic, “some new investigations have been opened and have resulted in arrests for prostitution-related activity,” said Officer Karl Chan, a police department spokesman. Chan did not respond to questions on details about the arrests.
Local nonprofits that assist victims of human trafficking and domestic violence generally support the proposed ordinance, but they want police and city officials to involve them early when they target a massage business for enforcement to get the victims the help they need to escape a cycle of abuse.
How many sex workers were arrested is unclear. Nonprofit leaders said a more effective – and humane – way to address the issue would be to treat the women like survivors, not criminals.
“Incarcerating women for prostitution does not solve reasons many women are involved in prostitution,” said Terri Galvan, executive director of Community Against Sexual Harm (CASH), a Sacramento organization that helps women who have been commercially sexually exploited.
Need for victim services
Nilda Valmores said she is disheartened when she drives around Sacramento and sees “sketchy” looking massage parlors with bars on the windows and parking lots full of cars.
“Law enforcement (in Sacramento) has not been as pressing about the issue of massage parlors as other jurisdictions have been,” said Valmores, executive director of My Sister’s House. “We have helped other jurisdictions with their victims more than we have Sacramento.”
My Sister’s House is one of only a handful of nonprofits in the state that focus on serving sexual violence victims in the Asian American and Pacific Islander communities, Valmores said. In recent years, though, the nonprofit has received more victims from massage parlors in Contra Costa County than Sacramento.
Sacramento nonprofits WEAVE and Community Against Sexual Harm also have not helped many women who had been in massage parlors, according to the leaders of those nonprofits, which serve victims of sexual violence.
“It makes me really think that we are not finding them because law enforcement is not busting the massage parlors and then viewing the workers as the victims that they are,” said Beth Hassett, executive director of WEAVE.
Last year, the city shut down three massage parlors: one in South Land Park, one in the Parkway neighborhood of south Sacramento, and another in College/Glen.
Valmores worries about the dozens of others still operating. “The fact that those doors are open means that new women can be trafficked and abused,” she said.
Women who are arrested on suspicion of prostitution can have the charges dropped if they choose to take an eight-week class with CASH, Galvan said. The program connects them with resources for housing, workforce training, domestic violence, and gives them a mentor, Galvan said.
When police and city officials first visit massage parlors where illicit activity could be happening, they should involve service providers from the beginning, bringing advocates on-site immediately, Valmores, Hassett and Galvan agreed. That way, professionals could begin working with the victims right away to get them out of that life – including finding them a new place to live.
“As advocates, we need to be involved as soon as possible,” Valmores said.
That’s especially important for victims who do not speak English, Valmores said. Many of the women found being trafficked in recent years in massage parlors only speak Mandarin, Councilman Guerra said.
“In the last couple years, the stings (found) predominantly Mandarin-speaking women who had no family connection,” Guerra said. “They were just here.”
Valmores said the nonprofits can help those women, but they need police or city officials to bring them in immediately to have the best chance of success. Many of the women are skeptical of police, Valmores said.
“We have volunteers that are bilingual and bicultural and so that’s how and why we feel we are able to serve women that are from another culture,” Valmore said. “What happens is, typically, if they have too many others intervening and not seeing someone who can share in the language or share in the culture and looks sympathetic and understanding.”
The new ordinance would not prohibit the police department from still doing stings or from charging women suspected of prostitution, St. John said.
Some localities, such as King County, Washington, which includes Seattle, have stopped charging women for prostitution. Instead, the women are offered victim-support services even as the owners and operators are arrested and criminally charged. For the women victims, the threat of prosecution is not held over their heads. Hassett said the city should adopt such a program.
“They should not be treated as the villains in this situation, they should be treated as the victims they are,” Hassett said. “I think treating them like criminals is not the way to move their lives forward.”
What works to combat exploitation
Sacramento County already has an ordinance similar to the one the city is considering. Created 18 years ago, it has been strengthened four times.
But the county ordinance only applies to the unincorporated areas of the county — not cities within the county, including Sacramento.
Since Jan. 1, 2019, the county has revoked one permit from a massage parlor for illicit activity, said Laura Jacobson, a county spokeswoman. It was called Spa 4 People, off Folsom Boulevard in La Riviera, just north of Rosemont. The revocation was effective in March 2020.
The county has about 175 massage establishments in unincorporated areas. With so many reputed illicit establishments in the city, some wonder if illegal behavior is occurring inside many businesses in the county, despite the ordinance.
County staffing levels are one barrier to increased enforcement, Jacobson said.
“The massage license enforcement process is extremely time-consuming,” Jacobson said in an email. “There are application requirements and multiple inspections are necessary, sometimes with undercover operations. The businesses tend to change hands often and when that happens, the process starts all over. If there are language barriers, that can delay the process because we need to use a translator service.”
St. John said she hopes the city’s ordinance, if passed, will shut down more than a handful.
“My hope would be in the first couple years, it’s pretty aggressive and we’re able to shut some of the big problem locations now,” St. John said. “Then as the years progress, we have less and less because we have shut them down.”
Accurate trafficking statistics are hard to come by since many victims don’t identify as or report being trafficked. But cities along California’s Interstate 80 corridor have long been considered trafficking hubs, and Sacramento produced the fifth-most National Human Trafficking Hotline calls per capita from 2007-2016.
Although data is hard to find, from Hassett’s experience, most women who are participating in prostitution are being trafficked or coerced in some way, even if it’s not part of a big underground ring, she said.
Other regions have already taken some of the steps the city is considering. In 2013, the San Francisco Board of Supervisors unanimously approved an ordinance with similar restrictions on clothing and lighting. The ordinance also required all massage parlors to post trafficking hotline numbers in English, Spanish, Vietnamese and Cantonese, and have photo IDs of all workers in plain sight.
It’s an issue across the state. There are more than 3,300 massage parlors that are acting as fronts for sex trafficking, according to a 2018 report, the San Francisco Chronicle reported.
Shutting down businesses where women are being forced into sexual labor is difficult, officials say.
“To actually get at the profiteer, the businessman, that’s been much more difficult,” Guerra said.
He hopes the ordinance will help do that. The council’s Law and Legislation Committee recommended it earlier this month. It’s expected to go to council for consideration by the end of the year, city spokesman Tim Swanson said.
As a California Department of Justice prosecutor from 2005-2018, including the last seven years as the lead on human trafficking, Maggy Krell frequently charged parlor facilitators with pimping, tax evasion or workplace violations but rarely trafficking.
The higher charge requires cooperation from trafficking victims after a bust, which was nearly impossible given the women’s distrust of law enforcement, frequent rotation through different cities and language barriers, Krell said.
Krell busted sex trafficking rings but also massage parlors where women were forced to do nonsexual work for up to 20 hours a day and couldn’t leave the premises, she said. Now special counsel to Planned Parenthood Affiliates of California, she said council members and law enforcement should view exploitation, not sex, as the sin being peddled in illicit parlors.
“(T)he focus of both the policy and law enforcement’s limited resources should be protecting people from exploitation, whether that be sex trafficking, labor trafficking or forms of wage theft and unsafe working conditions,” Krell wrote in an email.
Krell raised issues with the piece of the proposed city ordinance that would prohibit condoms in massage parlors.
“The prohibition of condoms could be dangerous for victims who are already in a very vulnerable situation,” Krell wrote. “From a public health standpoint, the city should not be making condoms illegal.”
St. John said she and other city officials have heard the concerns about condoms, but decided to leave it in the current version of the ordinance as a way to identify businesses where sexual activity is happening. She has seen photos from massage parlors in the city with bowls of unwrapped condoms sitting on the counter, she said.
”The goal is to address illicit businesses at the administrative level,” St. John said, “so it was important to us to identify behaviors and circumstances that are signs that illicit behavior is happening and be able to address it that way instead of a (police) sting.”
This story was originally published October 1, 2020 at 5:00 AM.
