Bawdy Work | A look at what goes on behind closed doors in Alberta’s massage parlours

Nearby business owners can complain but the hands of the law are largely tied

Sep 1, 2010  

by Mike Sadava

Police laid western Canada’s first charges last year under new criminal code sections on human trafficking, one of the biggest concerns surrounding massage parlours. Human trafficking involves far more than smuggling people into the country, but also using fraud, intimidation and coercion to force people to work. Three women found at Sachi Professional Massage Spa were permanent residents legally in Canada but had been lured to Edmonton after being promised jobs in the massage industry. Instead, they were allegedly forced into prostitution.

Staff Sgt. Colin Adair of the Calgary Police Service calls the prostitution laws a “Band-Aid” that works better for street prostitution than indoor prostitution. But 90 per cent of prostitutes in Calgary now work in indoor massage parlours, escort agencies and motel rooms, and many of them advertise their services through the Internet. “If you put it behind closed doors, it’s out of sight, out of mind, and people say: it doesn’t affect me anymore.”

Massage parlours are zoned under the category of personal services. Therein lies the, er, rub. A hairdresser could leave a bay in your neighbourhood strip mall and a massage parlour could move in – with no requirement for rezoning. Essentially, the city can’t say no.

Edmonton city councillor Ben Henderson raised the issue this winter, not with the intention of a major crackdown, but to get the city to deal honestly with the issue. “They are brothels – let’s call them brothels,” Henderson says. “What I’d like to do is have them called what they are, and then regulate them accordingly.”

A recent report from Edmonton city administrators says attempting to regulate sexual massage parlours through zoning could be challenged in court. “The legal implications of recognizing a ‘body rub’ use class may require a court challenge and a decision to distinguish between personal services and body rub services,” the report says. But city administration was directed by politicians to come up with another report by the end of the year on possible ways to regulate them.

Julia says the word on the street is that there will be a special licence class for sexual massage parlours. That could boost the cost of a licence considerably. In Edmonton, the annual escort agency fee is $5,123, and $1,922 for an individual running an independent escort agency.

Henderson says that by licensing massage parlours, at least the city can keep an eye on them to some degree. Anyone opening one of these businesses, including the masseuses, must go through a criminal record check and police can scrutinize their application. But criminals can find ways around the rules, he says. They can hire front men to operate them in order to hide the connection with organized crime, for instance. Or the landlord can charge exorbitant rent, in effect living off the avails of prostitution. Henderson says that people are most upset about location issues, but he doesn’t see a “magic wand” that will resolve the problem. Throwing these women back onto the street isn’t acceptable, and using police to enforce a zoning issue is expensive and potentially dangerous, he says.

In the past year, two Edmonton business revitalization zones have raised enough of a stink to stop massage parlours from opening in their area. Helen Nolan, executive director of the 124th Street and Area Business Revitalization Zone, says businesses were incensed when the word got out that a massage parlour was about to rent storefront space. This neighbourhood of art galleries, restaurants and small boutiques just west of downtown Edmonton, had spent millions – split between the city and a levy on the business community – to beautify and upgrade with decorative lights, benches and trees in order to become a vibrant little area with a strong sense of community. “They [the massage parlour owners] wanted a storefront – over my dead body,” Nolan says. “If people say ‘What’s the difference,’ I say, ‘Let’s put it next door to your house.’”

After all that effort to rid the area of undesirable elements, including a drug-infested apartment complex that was converted to condominiums, the community felt that the storefront massage parlour could attract other undesirable elements such as low-end businesses and street prostitutes. “Life is perception: that’s what scares me. If you get one negative thing coming into this area, it can scare people away.”

The business community warned the landlord that it would picket the building if she rented to the massage parlour. She said she did not know what the intended use of the renters was, and didn’t rent to the massage business. A high-end clothing store has moved into that space. Nolan says municipal hands are tied by the federal laws, despite calls for changes in prostitution laws. “If you can send a man to the moon, you can certainly get rid of massage parlours.”

Nobody would like to see the term “massage” taken out of the sexual parlours more than registered massage therapists. “If you’re a massage therapist, you always take pains that the right perception is there, that your client understands you’re there for a procedure with a therapeutic outcome,” says Marty Way, a Calgary massage therapist. Way served as president of a group of therapists that pushed the province for regulation under the Health Professions Act.

Way says there used to be a lot of confusion between legitimate massage therapists and those providing sex, but public perception has been moving away from that, and regulation should move it even further. John Lowman, a criminology professor at Simon Fraser University who has written extensively on prostitution in Canada, says that 80 per cent of sex transactions are done behind closed doors rather than on the street. Closing down massage parlours and escort services would send these women back to the violence of the streets.

The victims of serial killers like Robert Pickton have been street prostitutes, not those working out of massage parlours, he says. “You do get some violence in indoor prostitution, but it’s like saying that because there’s some violence in marriage, then it should be made illegal.” One of Lowman’s grad students, Tamara O’Doherty, did a study of indoor sex workers around Vancouver and found little evidence of violence. She is currently extending her work to a cross-Canada study.

Police generally react to complaints, and the vast majority of complaints and charges are over street prostitution, not indoor sex workers, Lowman says. While there are concerns about human trafficking and underaged girls working in these places, a crackdown on 12 massage parlours in the Vancouver area resulted in no arrests on either count. “If you’re dealing with human trafficking, it’s better to have clear regulation of these places so you could check that.”

While both radical feminists and conservative moralists say there can be no such thing as consent among sex workers, Lowman says it is wrong to lump them all in the same category. Some do it purely for survival, which is common to most street hookers. But some make a conscious decision to go into it to get out of lower wage jobs and have more control over their time. A third category is “opportunistic,” doing it for a short time to make extra money and then getting out again. It makes more sense to address the problems that can cause a woman to resort to prostitution, such as poverty and challenges facing aboriginals, than turn them into criminals.

Police agree that going after the root causes would reduce massage parlour prostitution, and that it is safer than street prostitution, but deny that it is a victimless crime. Crosby says a lot of the young women who work in massage parlours initially get into it to make some quick money, possibly to pay off debts. But they get addicted to the money and continue to sell sex to strangers. “There’s a lot of money to be made, but a heavy price to pay.”

Julia has no regrets about the choice she made seven years ago. “As long as you’re doing it safely and you’re not hurting anybody, I don’t see anything wrong with it,” she says. She has never been assaulted or contracted a disease from her work, although she did have a stalker who got a little too attached to her. “If you got rid of the studios, it would be back to the ’80s and ’90s, when they were on the street. What’s the point of that?”

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