Abolition Ohio reported the venue makes up the majority of Ohio's calls to the national human trafficking hotline. Now anti-trafficking experts and victim advocates say pandemic stressors and anti-Asian sentiments further exacerbate the crisis. Tony Talbott, director of Abolition Ohio, an anti-trafficking organization with the University of Dayton, published a sweeping report showing illicit massage parlors are likely the most interconnected criminal enterprise in the world.
A lot are women from rural China. There are networks of criminals in China that work with networks of Chinese criminals in the United States. The report estimates that parlors are actively enslaving immigrants in Ohio. Traffickers do this by luring impoverished women here with false promises of stable work and the American dream, but instead, they confiscate their documents and force them to have sex with clients. Talbott explained they lure them in primarily using websites like WeChat to advertise positions and get them to the U.
So, there are network criminal enterprises that actually profit off of the debt that these women accrue in doing this. Our task forces have done a good job of shutting these down, and a lot of them have moved out of the county. Ables said illicit massage parlors often take root in busy strip malls with blacked-out windows and excessive security measures. He brought us to a location in Dayton he recently shut down.
Most of the time, it's just a makeshift bedroom. Ables added when they execute search warrants for local parlors, they find a lot of paperwork that contains Flushing, NY, and Chicago, IL. He said Flushing is one of the larger human trafficking smuggling ports where Ohio victims come from. So it's things like that to where people were being shipped all over the United States. The establishment of the victim-informed Miami Valley Human Trafficking Taskforce is putting a dent in the issue by working with county and federal partners to find new ways to track the complex networks.
The Shelby County Sheriff said the evidence seized will be examined as soon as they find someone to translate it from Chinese to English. McConnel said that three years ago, they began training Asian Services In Action, an organization based out of Cleveland.
