The $3 billion industry hiding in plain sight

Los Angeles Times

15-07-2025

Content Warning: The following includes mature topics.
I didn't know it at the time, but at 10 years old, I witnessed a crime in Flushing, Queens. I remember watching a middle-aged woman unlock the door to a dingy storefront, leading a man inside after quietly advertising 'massage services.' The view behind the windows and doors was hidden behind opaque decorative wrap, shutting out the street.
Only years later did I come to understand what I had seen: a likely case of sex trafficking, hidden in plain sight. Yet too often, the victims in these cases are treated as criminals, a societal response that not only deepens their dependence on traffickers, but also erases their suffering from public view.
In neighborhoods like Flushing, massage parlors are often used as fronts for human trafficking and prostitution. Many of the women working inside are undocumented immigrants, often of Chinese, South Korean, or Thai origin. Law enforcement officials estimate that there are 9,000 illicit massage parlors across the country , with an epicenter in Flushing. It's a lucrative underground sex industry generating around $3 billion a year.
As a child, I used to wonder why anyone would choose sex work. What seemed like a choice from the outside though, was, for many, a trap. Massage workers — typically mothers between the ages of 35-55 — are often deceived or severely misled about the work waiting for them in the U.S. These women arrive in America weighed down by heavy debts, speak little to no English, and have identification documents and finances tightly controlled by traffickers. Isolated in a foreign country with no safety net, sex work is often presented as the only option to pay back their debt — not a choice, but an ultimatum for survival.
To protect these women, allowing them to report sexual abuse without the fear of arrest is critical. Traffickers often threaten victims with arrest or deportation to deter them from seeking help. Because criminal arrests are traumatic experiences, these threats reinforce a sense of distrust in law enforcement while simultaneously strengthening the control held by traffickers. For women being trafficked, an arrest for prostitution can make it even harder for her to escape her situation. According to a report by the Trafficking Victims Advocacy Project (TVAP) of the Legal Aid Society of New York and the International Women's Human Rights Clinic at the City University of New York, criminal convictions make it more difficult for victims to gain access to legal documentation, safe housing, education, and legal employment. These barriers deepen victims' dependence on their exploiters.
The criminal justice system should not target the exploited. Instead, it must hold accountable those who enable and profit from exploitation — customers and traffickers. And the tide is slowly turning: prostitution arrests have dropped from 20,000 in 1985 to 100 in 2022 , while arrests for customers and traffickers have risen. But legal shifts can only go so far. Change must also happen in the way we think, talk, and care.
In the media, politics, and even research literature , sex workers are often described as 'hookers,' 'whores,' and 'prostitutes.' By referring to trafficking victims as 'prostitutes,' society often misrepresents them as the willing perpetrators of prostitution rather than its victims. We must unlearn the stigma that keeps exploited women invisible. We must speak up when sex work is equated with moral failure; when the sexual abuse of massage workers is dismissed with dangerous phrases such as 'she was asking for it'; when communities treat illicit massage parlors as a joke. None of that is harmless. All of it allows trafficking to persist.
Most of us are not lawmakers or law enforcement officers. But we are neighbors. These crimes don't happen in the shadows — they happen in plain sight. These storefronts don't survive in secrecy — they survive because we look away. We must refuse to accept human trafficking as part of the urban backdrop.
Consider supporting organizations like Red Canary Song , a Flushing-based collective advocating for the safety, rights, and dignity of migrant massage workers. They offer legal aid, language assistance, and community — things traffickers work hard to strip away.
I still think about the women I saw in Flushing. How they stood hidden in the shadows — exposed and vulnerable, yet unseen. How scared they must have been.
Now I understand the silence that allows this exploitation to endure. Related