In the past 18 months, a team of undercover police officers, along with city
fire, building and environmental health inspectors, has been conducting
surprise inspections of suspected erotic massage parlors.
The 17 Asian massage parlors were closed after incurring at least three health
and safety violations within a year. Four others were fined, suspended and
allowed to reopen after a temporary closure. Two others closed voluntarily.
But a handful of parlors shut by the city have since reopened illegally, and
one has applied for a new permit as an acupuncture clinic with massage.
"Enforcement has not been as effective as we had hoped, but we are making a
dent," said Johnson Ojo, San Francisco's principal environmental health
inspector.
"It's much harder to open a massage parlor in San Francisco now because we are
taking a hard look at an owner's past history, and denying permits if they have
been involved in prostitution before."
Enforcement has been difficult, but Mayor Gavin Newsom said the task force is
making headway into a problem that until now has gone largely undetected.
"There is momentum and a commitment to resolve this," Newsom said. "We are
moving away from looking at this issue as harmless prostitution to a criminal
act against human dignity and human rights."
San Francisco is a major hub for the $8 billion global sex trafficking
industry, and is home to more than 100 erotic massage parlors listed online and
in Asian-language newspapers.
Traffickers abroad charge women tens of thousands of dollars to smuggle them
into the city, and then force them to work off their debts in erotic massage
parlors, sometimes servicing more than a dozen men a day. Sometimes the women
are lied to about the type of work they will be doing in the United States.
Often the women are forced to live in the same parlors where they work, and are
watched on surveillance cameras and kept inside by metal security doors.
Newsom convened the massage parlor task force after federal agents
investigating a South Korean sex trafficking ring raided 10 San Francisco
massage parlors in summer 2005.
After a sex trafficking investigation by The Chronicle, Newsom increased
surprise inspections last fall from once to twice a month, and the Board of
Supervisors passed a law requiring public hearings of all proposed massage
parlors. The city and nonprofit agencies placed human trafficking posters with
hot line numbers in bus shelters.
Ojo has issued cease and desist orders to the parlors that have illegally
reopened after their permits were revoked, and he is working with the city
attorney to get court warrants allowing him to send sheriff's deputies to shut
the places.
On Wednesday, the inspection team returned for a second visit to CEO Health
Club, on the sixth floor of an office building on Sansome Street.
Inside the club, six women were cited for wearing inappropriate attire --
lingerie and clear plastic heels -- and one of them was cited for working
without a massage practitioner's license. The business was also cited for
employing an unlicensed masseuse.
One woman, in tears, said she left a dying father in China and that she didn't
like working in the massage parlor. She said she wants to teach piano to
children.
The new citations at CEO Health Club, and similar violations recorded in
August, are enough to revoke the club's permit, Ojo said.
"We have to build up a case against each one, and while it takes a long time
and uses a lot of city resources, it is starting to show results," he said.
Newsom said he plans to begin enforcing a rarely used 1913 "red light"
abatement law that allows authorities to fine and jail California landlords who
let massage parlors operate as brothels in their buildings. He will also
deliver a speech on human trafficking at the US Conference of Mayors in Los
Angeles in June.
