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If you see comments in violation of our community guidelines , please report them. She asked the Senate Judiciary Committee on Friday to change that. State laws governing prostitution appear to date back to and refer to sexual intercourse but not to masturbation, Assistant Attorney General John Treadwell told the committee. Donovan said investigators in that case had customers of the parlor tell them that they were exposed while receiving a massage, allowing prosecutors to define the acts as lewd, which are against the law.
Donovan conceded, however, that other similar parlors continue to operate. Typically the women who had been giving the massages disappear as soon as authorities swoop in, Donovan said. Those women are usually foreigners and prosecutors believe they are victims of human trafficking, he said, making a crackdown on the parlors a delicate balancing act. Rainville said it seemed clear that the massage parlors in Bennington were not providing traditional massage services, as all the clients were men, went in the back door and paid in cash only, but the owners carefully covered their tracks.
Rainville said her office and the FBI looked at the massage parlors for evidence of human trafficking, or forcing foreign women to work. They found the women working at the parlors were Korean and spoke virtually no English but could find no solid evidence they were forced to be there. The women had possession of their own passports, lived in reasonable accommodations and offered no indication to an interpreter trained in human trafficking that they were being held against their will, Rainville said.
