clipped from www.infoshop.org

Korean massage parlors are a common presence in most major U.S. cities – so much that those in the know refer to them with the acronym of KMPs. It is also widely known that these venues offer more than a massage – they function essentially as brothels, where South Korean women work as prostitutes controlled by a wide-reaching, shadowy and highly profitable network of traffickers and pimps.

The U.S. government estimates that about 17,500 foreigners are trafficked into the U.S. annually, though some NGOs put the number much higher. Sex trafficking is considered to make up about 80 percent of cases, with trafficking for domestic, agricultural, food service and other types of labor making up the rest.

South Korea ranks third as the point of origin for trafficking cases

at least 10,000 Korean women are doing sex work in the U.S.

Polaris Project co-coordinator Kaitlyn Lim attributed this to a web of factors, including Americans’ demand for “exotic” Asian women