Residential brothels are typically informal underground businesses operating out of residential and non-commercial areas. Residential brothels may be located in homes, apartment complexes, condos or trailers.
They are located in urban, suburban and rural settings. Victims are regularly moved to new brothel locations to avoid detection by community members and ensure victims remain unfamiliar with their surroundings.
Residential brothels are generally decentralized systems run by criminal trafficking groups and operate transnationally. Most residential brothels are closed networks, in that they target victim populations and customer bases which share the same cultural or ethnic backgrounds.
The traffickers in these networks are from Central America and Mexico and have connections with the families or are from the same hometowns the victims.
Residential brothels rely on the support of additional individuals who take on specific roles. These facilitators are connected the traffickers who run operations and may have various levels of knowledge about the day-to-day operations of the trafficking network. Residential brothels rely on support for transportation, recruitment, and surveillance. Business cards and printed advertisements are frequently veiled under the mask of an alternative business, using code language to indicate how to access commercial sex through this network.
