Massage Ordinance Hearing, April 19, 6pm @ City Hall
Here are some commonly held, but misleading arguments made against our common sense ordinance and in defense of the criminal sex industry in Macon.
There are more important issues than sex spas in Macon, like homicide and drugs, so we shouldn’t be wasting time on spa ordinances.
First, human trafficking is one of the most serious crimes imaginable: this ordinance aims to reduce the ease with which sex traffickers operate in Macon. Second, our city council does not confine itself solely to fighting homicide and drugs. It conducts other business to see that Macon is a safe and attractive place to live. Recently, the council has passed laws regulating advertising in convenience store windows, curtailing inhumane euthanizing of stray animals, ordering more garbage pails for citizens, and leasing sixty golf carts for $32,000 a year. Here's an example: Councilman James Timley has argued that the “council has bigger problems to deal with” than addressing the spiraling criminal sex industry in town and the real possibility of human trafficking inside them. But Timley, an avid golfer, was convinced earlier in the same month of the pressing and urgent need for golf carts, arguing that the council should address the problem, even in the face of homicide and drug use. “We have only one golf cart that will go 18 holes,” Timley protested, “It’s embarrassing.” We think having twenty sex spas advertised on 22 billboards entering our city is more embarrassing than a lack of golf carts, and we think it’s worth the council’s attention. That these spas have been fronts for sex trafficking both state-wide and nationally makes the ordinance yet more urgent.
The ordinance takes focus and resources away from the police department.
The reverse is true. Here’s a question: which police department currently spends more resources on fighting the criminal sex industry—Macon or Centerville and Warner Robins combined? Here’s a hint: it’s the city without a massage ordinance. When a city lacks a massage parlor/spa ordinance, police raids are the only means of cracking down on criminal sex enterprises. While raids are important ways of rescuing potential trafficking victims, they are relatively costly. Cities with ordinances in place rely primarily on two mechanisms to crack down on criminal enterprises masquerading as body massage establishments: first, they use much less expensive inspections to shut down criminal activity; second, they provide deterrence at no cost at all to the city. Warner Robins passed an ordinance in 1977 in the midst of an explosion of the criminal sex industry in town, and they haven’t had a similar infestation since. No sex spas, no raids, no money. Centerville passed its ordinance in 2001 and, though they’re just a few miles from Macon, they have had no new criminal businesses operating in the guise of massage parlors since they passed their law. 122 counties and cities in Georgia have passed this law because it saves money and it’s effective.
Prostitution is the world’s oldest crime. You’ll never get rid of it, so we shouldn’t try.
Though we’ve heard it many times in the last few weeks, we find this an odd argument. In America, the relative antiquity of a crime doesn’t determine whether we should take it seriously. Murder may be the world’s oldest crime, and we’ll probably never get rid of it. Pedophilia has been around for thousands of years. Selling drugs has been around for a long, long time. That doesn’t give pedophiles, or drug-pushers, or pimps, or traffickers immunity from the law. We understand that these crimes will never vanish completely, but we fight to reduce their occurrence, and we try to prevent them from harming other victims.
The ordinance will be an undue burden on legitimate massage therapists.
State licensed massage therapists are exempt from the ordinance. This is the case with most of the Georgia ordinances enacted since 1974, and their passage has not hindered the growth of legitimate massage therapists in the state. Massage therapists in all of the major cities in Georgia are doing just fine even with ordinances on the book.
Nobody has found human trafficking inside of these spas, so nothing should be done about them.
The chains that bind these women are not actual iron chains in most cases—the chains lie in debt slavery, coercion, and fraud. The chains are harder to find, and they’re harder to break. In America, only one percent of trafficking cases are solved because victims fear their traffickers. But that doesn’t mean they’re not there. It takes a long time to go from raid to conviction, and it takes tremendous courage and enormous trust on the trafficking victim's part. While it’s true that nobody has been convicted for human trafficking in Macon’s spas, it isn’t true that human trafficking has been absent from the police raids. Here’s what we know: anyone prostituted in this nation under the age of eighteen is a trafficking victim under the law. A 17-year-old was being prostituted at one of Macon’s massage parlors. So we have had at least one victim. MG ALERT believes there may have been other victims, and investigations are ongoing. But there has been crime found on every raid, and there have been guilty pleas. Workers at the parlors have been found guilty of everything from masturbation for hire to operating a house of prostitution to impersonating police officers. That criminal activity should be enough to warrant action.
This is just another example of the law coming into people’s bedrooms.
MG ALERT’s mission is not to fight sexual perversity. It’s to fight human rights abuses. We are not arguing that Club Sinsations should be criminalized, for instance, even though most of us think the business exploits women. Nude dancing is legal. Adultery is legal. Premarital sex is legal. But pimping a woman or a child’s body for sex is a crime, and human trafficking is a crime. Until those who want to legalize prostitution bring the issue for a state-wide vote, prostituting a human being is a crime in Georgia. We cannot carve out a lawless space in Middle Georgia where a criminal industry drops down roots and spreads like Kudzu. We are not concerned with what citizens do in their bedrooms. We’re concerned when citizens sell other human beings for sex.
This is a victimless crime. Nobody gets hurt, so why should we enforce the laws on prostitution?
It goes without saying that sex trafficking is not victimless: there is a victim, and she is repeatedly raped for profit. But we should also remember that the life of a prostituted woman is one of exploitation and violence. The average age of entry into prostitution in this country is between the ages of 12 and 15: most prostituted women, in other words, began as trafficking victims as defined by state and federal law. Most prostituted women come from homes where they have been sexually abused, and many are runaways. The leading cause of death for prostituted women is homicide. Purchasing a prostituted woman is only a victimless crime in the fantasies of the men who violate the law by renting women’s bodies from pimps and traffickers for their personal consumption.
Human Trafficking & You
It happens on the streets of Atlanta, Macon, and cities and towns across Georgia every day.
It happens more than 350 times a month when underage girls in Georgia are sold for sex on streets, in hotels, and on the internet.
It happens when women are lured to America under false pretense and sold for sex sixteen hours a day under the neon lights of “Asian spas” and “massage parlors.”
It happens in businesses and on farms across America when men, women, and children become debt-slaves to employers who coerce or threaten them into perpetual servitude.
It happens any place and any time fraud, force, or coercion is used to hold another human being against their will, and any time a minor is prostituted in America.
It is called human trafficking: it is the fastest growing form of international crime in the world today. Human trafficking happens in every nation on earth, and it happens here in Middle Georgia.
You may have passed by a trafficking victim on your way to work this week, you may have eaten vegetables picked by their hands, and you may have unknowingly purchased services from them.
These are your neighbors. They need your help.