Massage therapist Julie Onofrio, LMT, is on a mission to disentangle the reputation of professional massage therapy from the terminology used by brothels masquerading as massage practices.
A massage therapist of 35 years and an author of three books on massage, Onofrio is a founding member and past secretary of the Washington State Massage Therapy Association. She also runs
Look Before You Book a Massage, a website and social media presence dedicated to that disentangling, under which she has launched an initiative called Hands Off Our Name, which helps massage therapists educate local law enforcement, landlords and the media.
Onofrio’s work is not about combatting human trafficking, the scourge that populates so many brothels with women pretending to be massage therapists. Instead, Hands Off Our Name’s focus is on extricating the word “massage” from words related to the practice of prostitution—a conflation that has resulted in massage therapists throughout the U.S. being harassed by potential johns and bound by laws created to regulate the sex trade.
Those laws include having to submit to background checks and fingerprinting, and having to hang posters about human trafficking within their practices.
“Everybody’s focused on the human trafficking part of this, which is an awful thing—[but] none of these [prostitution] places are anything to do with massage,” Onofrio told MASSAGE Magazine. “They’re sex workers, they’re sex parlors. They’re brothels disguised as massage businesses so they should be called brothels.”
According to Polaris Project, which tracks the number of trafficking victims in the U.S., people trafficked into brothels posing as massage businesses is the third-most-common trafficking scenario, after escort services and pornography.
Because the terminology used to describe brothels is intertwined with terminology used to describe massage therapy business, professional massage therapists are forced to consistently field inappropriate requests and behaviors.
In “Perpetuating Victimization with Efforts to Reduce Human Trafficking: A Call to Action for Massage Therapist Protection,” an article published in the March edition of the International Journal of Massage & Bodywork, authors Mica Rosenow, LMT, and Niki Munk, PhD, LMT, wrote, “Sex trafficking is a public health crisis, and perpetrators solicit massage therapists to provide these sexual acts.Authorities and those within the massage field become desensitized to the detrimental effects of solicitation by ignoring, minimizing and normalizing the inappropriate sexualized behaviors supporting illicit massage business success.
“Subsequently, sexual solicitation within the work environment has forced many licensed massage therapists to defend their education, professionalism and treatment approaches in the face of socially accepted stigma.”
Onofrio said she also wants massage therapists to educate city, county and state trafficking task forces to use the term “brothels” rather than “illicit massage businesses” or “massage parlors.”
To get involved in the Hands Off Our Name initiative, download these toolkits, which contain guides and sample letters to educate law enforcement, landlords and the media that the term massage should never be used to describe prostitution, including when the word “illicit” is used before “massage.” Or visit Look Before You Book and click on Toolkits in the menu bar to download.
About the Author
Karen Menehan is MASSAGE Magazine’s editor-in-chief for print and digital. Her articles for this publication include “Massage Therapist Jobs: The Employed Practitioner,” published in the Sept. 2022 issue of MASSAGE Magazine, a first-place winner of a 2023 FOLIO: Eddie Award for magazine editorial excellence, full issue; and “This is How Diversity, Equity & Inclusion Practices Make Business Better,” published in in the August 2021 issue of MASSAGE Magazine, a first-place winner of a 2022 FOLIO: Eddie Award for editorial excellence, full issue.