Slavery, Prostitution Ring in ‘Massage Parlors’ across Four Counties in Florida Busted
February 28, 2019
Bad news, and good news: As you’ll have heard, there is still slavery in the world, and there is still (or again) slavery in America, operating in the shadows. The good-news story is that some of the human traffickers have been busted.
A local sheriff, on the investigation he led:
Well, that’s one of the reasons why this sex trafficking continues at such a pace. Invariably, our methodology has been up until we did this here — send a couple of undercover detectives in. They’ll be solicited for sex, will arrest the workers and shut the place down. And the problem goes away, but not really goes away.
And so when this came in, I made the decision that we would treat this differently and that we would go after the traffickers and the men, the end users. And that’s why we were so successful, and we have over 300 arrest warrants.
. . . In this case, when you have women that are held under coercion and forced to have repeated sexual encounters with men throughout the day, for a man to go in there — and I believe in my heart of hearts that they know these women are trafficked — I think they are the monsters.
The prosecutor, on the cases he is now bringing against these “johns”:
The police investigation into the spa was aimed at stopping human trafficking, which [State Attorney Dave Aronberg] equated to “modern day slavery” and called an “evil in our midst.”
. . . He also said all of the cases will be handled in the same way.
“No one gets any special justice in Palm Beach County,” Aronberg said.
Incidentally, this is one of the reasons we need to keep laws against prostitution. We can all agree that slavery or human trafficking should be illegal; some people think that nominally voluntary* prostitution, by contrast, should be legalized, but it’s much more difficult to catch human trafficking if police and prosecutors don’t also have a law against prostitution as a hook for their investigation.
(* In practice it’s almost always more complicated than that.)
Enjoyment and Contemplation 
June 7, 2019 at 11:50 PM
When criminalized goods or services are legalized, they can be regulated; we don’t need to worry about rotgut methanol because legal alcohol means no bathtub gin; same with whores, surely. Regulation means lights get shone into dark corners and cockroaches scurry away. I know the idea of legalizing sex work, like legalizing weed, repulses cultural conservatives, but pragmatism demands it; nothing will get rid of human trafficking quicker than allowing people who want to sell themselves to be able to do so; there won’t be a market for coerced Asian illegals…
P.S. Hope your long silence just means you’re living real life more fully.
Cheers.
July 9, 2019 at 4:24 PM
It is indeed true that being busy with life, for better and for worse, tends to correspond with a weaker presence of our shadow selves in this digital plane. I hope all is well for you too, cheers.
July 9, 2019 at 5:09 PM
Thanks Chill, I’m doing ok.
Glad to hear you’re busy with the real world, that’s where real life is lived anyway. Oh, to be a normie… 😉