Ethereal
10-26-2017, 01:23 PM
Feds Crack Down on New National Security Threat: Unlicensed Massages (http://reason.com/blog/2017/10/26/illegal-massage)
Massage-parlor panic is crushing small businesses, civil liberties, and people's lives. Here are eight examples from October.
Elizabeth Nolan Brown | Oct. 26, 2017 1:14 pm
American police are currently obsessed with enforcing exactly which body parts can be massaged and by whom.
Every week, headlines from across the country announce undercover operations, often months long, dedicated to catching and punishing people for offering erotic massages. And the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) are increasingly involved in the crackdown. "Happy endings" have apparently become a matter of national security.
Often these stings don't even turn up prostitution, let alone the "human trafficking" they're ostensibly concerned with stopping. But massage-parlor owners and employees wind up punished anyway, for things like minor building-code violations or employing people without state massage licenses. And the raids tend to hit immigrant entrepreneurs and workers the hardest, as they're most likely to be faced with barriers in obtaining local training and licenses, and to suffer from stereotypes about sex work and sex-trafficking.
This alliance of local cops, federal immigration agents, and federal detectives is nothing new, of course. As I explained in a Reason feature on "Operation Cross Country," they've been teaming up to monitor and round-up immigrant sex workers since the turn of the 20th century. It has waxed and waned in urgency over the decades since. But the Bush/Obama panic over prostitution has combined with Donald Trump's war on undocumented immigrants to intensify the efforts.
[...]
I'll rest easier at night knowing our brave law enforcement community - including federal law enforcement - is dealing with the dire threat of people giving massages without licenses. Taxpayer money well spent.
Massage-parlor panic is crushing small businesses, civil liberties, and people's lives. Here are eight examples from October.
Elizabeth Nolan Brown | Oct. 26, 2017 1:14 pm
American police are currently obsessed with enforcing exactly which body parts can be massaged and by whom.
Every week, headlines from across the country announce undercover operations, often months long, dedicated to catching and punishing people for offering erotic massages. And the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) are increasingly involved in the crackdown. "Happy endings" have apparently become a matter of national security.
Often these stings don't even turn up prostitution, let alone the "human trafficking" they're ostensibly concerned with stopping. But massage-parlor owners and employees wind up punished anyway, for things like minor building-code violations or employing people without state massage licenses. And the raids tend to hit immigrant entrepreneurs and workers the hardest, as they're most likely to be faced with barriers in obtaining local training and licenses, and to suffer from stereotypes about sex work and sex-trafficking.
This alliance of local cops, federal immigration agents, and federal detectives is nothing new, of course. As I explained in a Reason feature on "Operation Cross Country," they've been teaming up to monitor and round-up immigrant sex workers since the turn of the 20th century. It has waxed and waned in urgency over the decades since. But the Bush/Obama panic over prostitution has combined with Donald Trump's war on undocumented immigrants to intensify the efforts.
[...]
I'll rest easier at night knowing our brave law enforcement community - including federal law enforcement - is dealing with the dire threat of people giving massages without licenses. Taxpayer money well spent.