A Signal That the Days of Whack-a-Mole are Over

On January 13 Peter J. Nickles, the Attorney General for the District of Columbia, announced that his office successfully shut down a number of illegal brothels either based in residential homes or those posing as legitimate massage parlors.

As has often been described as a game of “whack-a-mole,” we know that the parlors often pop back up after temporary closures from law enforcement.  Sometimes, the persistence of the parlors to rebound repeatedly causes apathy among law enforcement because they feel like the parlors won’t ever go away.

The type of political will and enforcement action that Attorney General Nickles demonstrated and described last Wednesday signaled the mark of a new era in how the DC Office of the Attorney General (OAG) intends to handle cases of these types of businesses.

Essentially, he stated that in DC, the days of whack-a-mole are over.  Bravo!

Commendation and praise are in order for this Attorney General’s efforts, as well as the efforts of his dedicated staff, and the members of the DC Human Trafficking Task Force who have worked to combat these exploitative brothels for years.

The locations of the five businesses that permanently closed were highly relevant to Polaris Project’s work against human trafficking.  Many of us on staff have these locations committed to memory because we’ve frequently visited them over the last four years to offer services to the women after repeated police raids.  Both law enforcement and Polaris Project believe that potential victims of trafficking were located in the residential brothel and the three Asian Massage Parlors that were closed.

These cases are a good example of the importance of political will.  Let’s assume that 30 similar brothel locations were raided by law enforcement.  What made these particular five locations unique?  The answer is surely not unique behavior within these individual brothels.  In fact, we know that residential brothel and Asian massage parlor networks operate remarkably consistently all across the United States.  Just like Starbucks or McDonalds, an experience in one feels like a common experience in any of them.

The answer is political will – within the police department and the OAG to put continual pressure on the landlords and owners of the five properties until these characters eventually capitulated.  This could easily happen to any residential brothel or any Asian Massage Parlor (AMP) in DC and any other city around the country, if there were the requisite political will to do this type of follow-up work in the courts against landlords and owners.

This is where the importance of a highly motivated grassroots citizen movement against human trafficking can clearly be seen.  The grassroots advocacy of concerned community members often helps to create and sustain political will that fuels these types of enforcement actions in a mutually reinforcing cycle.

Another important facet of these closings is that they are an example of law enforcement changing strategies.  Instead of only arresting the women providing commercial sex in these locations, this time law enforcement went after the landlords and business owners.  Law enforcement went after the entrenched powerful interests, and won.

For all the other towns, suburbs, mid-sized and major cities nationwide who are still stuck in the quagmire of “whack-a-mole” mode, I hope they take note of what DC is beginning to do in regards to these brothels posing as massage parlors.

A concluding point: this work is not yet finished.  There are more residential brothel and Asian massage parlor locations operating in DC.

Let’s hope these five closings were just the beginning.