The county sued to shut down JC Spa after Houston police made dozens of arrests at the Hillcroft hotspot and a series of related illicit massage parlors. Houston hosts hundreds of massage parlors described in sleazy online sex forums like RubMaps. Erotic pseudo spas both here and in other U. State Department reports, federal court cases and other studies. Houston has long been considered a hub for human trafficking - a form of human slavery - and Bouche's study, which employs a unique method to gauge the economic power of the growing network of rogue businesses, underscores how lucrative fake massage parlors can be.
Bouche mined internet sex forum reviews to identify Houston-area massage parlors that appeared to be both illicit and blatantly open for erotic business. She then picked 32 massage parlors to study in-depth, placing hidden cameras on public streets near entrances and collecting hour surveillance videos in December Most of the so-called illicit massage parlors - IMPs - are in suburban strip malls and were busiest between noon and 4 p.
Reach the National Human Trafficking Hotline at The study underscores that these businesses are common, lucrative and incredibly easy to detect, and yet spa operators have been very difficult to stop even in Houston, where state and federal authorities have active anti-human trafficking task forces and use civil lawsuits to sue landlords and criminal front companies.
For more than a decade, Houston-based state and federal agents have busted large multinational rings that kidnapped and sold Mexican and Central American women and teens out of cantinas near the Port of Houston. They also have successfully gone after U.
Related: Notorious brothel madam gets life in sex-trafficking case. But locally and nationwide, federal prosecutors have made only a handful of criminal cases against the owners of erotic massage parlors who prey on mostly Asian immigrant victims, said Bouche, who also maintains a database of human trafficking prosecutions.
