When state Rep. Vincent Pedone stepped up to State House podium in to call for the regulation of massage therapy, he was quickly met by laughter and catcalls that filled the chamber and cut him short.
Pedone walked away from the podium. The chairman pounded his gavel. And there was yet more laughter, according to a State House News Service transcript. The bill that passed that day — despite lawmakers' laughter — created strict rules for massage parlor operators in Massachusetts for the first time, but 13 years later advocates say they sense that policymakers and society still don't take massage, and the human traffickers who increasingly hide behind it, seriously.
The state agency that regulates massage in Massachusetts has just two investigators assigned to the state's nearly 1, massage businesses, and the law itself remains weakened by a long-known loophole that makes it easy for illicit spa operators to avoid regulatory oversight altogether. In the absence of strong regulation and enforcement, advocates say, sex-trafficking networks have increasingly turned to massage and related fields as a front for illicit businesses that operate in plain sight out of storefronts, office buildings and homes, serving thousands of men who write with impunity in online forums about their experiences buying sex.
Police, prosecutors and lawmakers say they're trying to crack down on the illicit spas, which now number in the hundreds in Massachusetts, but key efforts to combat them have remained stalled for years.
Mark Montigny, a New Bedford Democrat who has fought for more than a decade to pass a variety of bills related to human trafficking. The arrest last month of New England Patriots owner Robert Kraft in a sting at a Florida spa has thrust spa-based human trafficking into the national spotlight while also shining a light on the public's perception of it, evidenced by the dozens of selfies taken by gawkers outside the Florida spa where police say Kraft and dozens of other men regularly bought sex from trafficked women.
