“For example, the bust of the Florida massage parlor Kraft was caught in was called a trafficking bust but it eventually came out none of the women had really been trafficked.”
Interesting how all these only Chinese women not fluent in English made their way to a ring of massage parlors in Florida!
II. THE SEX RING
On February 19, after staging dramatic raids on nearly a dozen massage parlors in South Florida, Sheriff William Snyder held a press conference. Local officers, he announced, working alongside Immigration and Customs Enforcement and the Department of Homeland Security, had busted a $20 million sex trafficking ring with tentacular reach to New York and China. Many of the women, he said, had been tricked into coming to the United States and had been working to pay off debts to traffickers before being rescued. “I don’t believe they were told they were going to work in massage parlors seven days a week, having unprotected sex with up to 1,000 men a year,” Snyder said.
Sex trafficking, under law, involves recruiting and transporting women by force or fraud, and coercing them to work as prostitutes. The traffickers, Snyder continued, had covered their tracks by moving the women every 10 to 20 days to different spas, where they were forced to sleep on massage tables and cook on hot plates. Some were unable to leave, the sheriff said, because the traffickers confiscated their money and passports.
Now, trafficking does happen and it's not just sex work. But I think by conflating two different activities and offenses LE will erode their credibility on fighting actual trafficking, which is a very serious crime.