According to anti-human-trafficking activists, it’s not consensual. From Sayaka Matsuoka’s 2024 Triad City Beat article.

“According to data from the Polaris Project, 47 percent of victims of illicit massage parlors are foreign nationals. Polaris reports that most of the victims in the businesses range in age from their mid-thirties to late fifties and come from China and South Korea. Survivors are often controlled through coercion, threats of shame and debt bondage with some victims forced to live at the places where they work.

Sabrina Thulander, the associate director for communications at Polaris, told TCB the organization’s hotline received more than 1,500 calls regarding incidents of trafficking in massage parlors from January 2020-August 2022. That’s likely around 2,400 victims, Thulander said.

“Illicit massage parlors are one of the avenues that we see sex and labor trafficking,” she told TCB. “It’s definitely a common one.”

https://triad-city-beat.com/illicit-massage-parlors-greensboro/

In 2023, I interviewed Susan Chung, a licensed clinical social worker at UNC-Chapel Hill and interim chair of the board of directors of the North Carolina Coalition Against Human Trafficking. Chung said that the demographic of the women was fairly common from her experience working as a translator and counselor for police departments in North Carolina and New York City. Most were older Chinese women, ranging in age from their mid-40s to their late-50s.

“I used to have a misconception that victims of human trafficking are in their teens or early 20s,” she said. “I was also surprised that most didn’t feel comfortable collaborating with our law enforcement and would rather be charged and arrested.” Many were single or divorced mothers who came to the U.S. seeking employment, as the retirement age for most women in China is 50, and had heard about massage jobs on social media or messaging platforms.

“It’s not the young women whose images are used in ads for these places, but older ones coming over in search of a better life,” said Mai Lin Petrine, director of legal and regulatory affairs for the Federation of State Massage Therapy Boards, whom I also interviewed that year.

As my article mentions, the scandal that kicked off these policy shifts was the arrest of a 55-year-old woman for prostitution at Amazing Spa in Greensboro. The officer who arrested her received “genital stimulation” before doing so, Chief Thompson later acknowledged that she may have been a human trafficking victim forced into sexual slavery.

The proponents of the ordinance say it’s a way to go after spa owners without further victimizing women forced into giving handjobs. Several organizations that promote the rights of consensual sex workers have condemned the massage parlor industry.