What You Need to Know About Massage Sexual Assaults After Ali Vincent's Experience -...

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Ali Vincent, winner of The Biggest Loser in 2008, recently shared, in a very personal interview, the trigger behind her subsequent weight gain: the trauma she experienced after being sexually assaulted during a massage.

“I was getting a massage and I fell asleep, which I often do with massages,” she recalled, tearing up, on an episode of Oprah: Where Are They Now? that aired on Oct. 8. “And I felt so safe in this place. I had no guards up. And I woke up to… I woke up to someone feeling in my vagina. And I was just, like, in shock, like, ‘What is going on? What’s happening?’ And then I just jumped up and ran out. It just hit, and I was just sitting there in a bog … shaking.”

Vincent went on to explain that after the incident she got engaged to her now-wife and kept herself busy with wedding preparations “because I didn’t want to deal with what was coming up for me.” After her wedding, she got caught in a “mindless cycle of eating and drinking.” She soon found herself back at the weight she’d been when she first went on the Biggest Loser show and joined Weight Watchers. The assault, Vincent added, remains “something that I’m working on.”

For anyone who has ever had a massage and knows that feeling of letting your guard down completely to find bliss and relaxation, the idea of that moment leading to sexual assault is terrifying. But such incidents are not exactly rare.

“I think it’s more common than people think — not necessarily rape, but inappropriate touching, inappropriate comments,” Ben Benjamin, founder of the Muscular Therapy Institute in Cambridge, Mass., and co-author of the book The Ethics of Touch, tells Yahoo Beauty. “There have been hundreds and hundreds of cases in the past five to 10 years that have occurred that are terrible.” Benjamin adds that while “98 percent of massage therapists are decent, tremendous, good people,” two percent of about 300,000 massage therapists in the U.S. “is still a lot of people. And in any population, there are sexual predators.”

To wit, recently reported cases include that of a male massage therapist at a Pennsylvania spa assaulting a woman at the start of a 20-minute treatment; a $5 million lawsuit against a high-end New York City spa where a woman says she was assaulted during her massage; a masseur who was charged with a felony count of sexual penetration during a massage at a Los Angeles gym; and multiple lawsuits against a national chain, Massage Envy Franchising, for several reports of sexual assault. A website dedicated to the issue, Rubbed the Wrong Way, archives details on many more.

While every type of sexual abuse is traumatic, there is a particular violation that occurs during a massage when you are so open and relaxed. “You’re doing something unusual to start with — you go into a room with your clothes off and someone touches your body,” Benjamin, a frequent expert witness for cases of sexual abuse in the healthcare and massage fields, explains. “And you are putting a huge amount of trust into this individual and into the institution they work for. A person usually assaults many times before they’re caught.” And for the victim, the fallout can be severe.

“When you wind up being sexually assaulted, it can trigger lots of things — if you have PTSD, you may take drugs, get depressed, eat,” Benjamin explains. “It makes sense if you are traumatized that you are going to do things that are not so good for you.”

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If you find yourself a victim of sexual assault, according to the support and education organization RAINN (Rape Abuse and Incest National Network), you will want to first get yourself out of the situation and to a safe place — and then understand that what happened was not your fault. If you’re not ready to involve police or even the management, you might consider starting with a call to the National Sexual Assault Hotline 800-656-HOPE (4673), which will connect you with a trained staff member who will be able to provide guidance and support.

Benjamin blames the rise of these incidents on the fact that the booming business of massage therapy has led to massage training schools becoming more corporate and thus having less oversight.

“The quality of training went way down, and ethics and sexuality have been taken out of the curriculum, so they’ve now become factories where they accept anyone who has the money,” he says. In the past, he adds, schools “would interview people extensively, and if there was any boundary crossing, they would be kicked out. That doesn’t happen anymore. So now we have a bunch of grads who don’t have boundaries.”


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