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MP condemns recruiting teens for porn, strip clubs as 'slave trade'

A Winnipeg MP is livid that the country’s porn industry is brazen enough talk about luring 18-year old girls off school grounds and shopping malls to star in skin flicks and in strip clubs.

If the Vancouver School Board won’t let the adult entertainment industry recruit strippers from within its high schools, industry reps say they’ll stand out on the street and hand out flyers, their spokesman Tim Lambrinos said in widely publicized comments first reported in the Vancouver Province.

"As far as recruiting 18-year-olds, that’s a market that has been untouched," Lambrinos, executive director of the Adult Entertainment Association of Canada was quoted saying. The comments flew across the country.

The brazen statement follows a Harper government decision Thursday to suspend temporary work visas for foreign strippers, the industry’s main source of labour.

Joy Smith, the Conservative MP from Kildonan-St. Paul, bluntly condemned the whole thing Friday as a modern-day slave trade.

Smith is best known for her campaign to outlaw human trafficking, a successful effort that won the support of MPs and agencies across the country. In Manitoba, that support focused on First Nations, the demographic group considered at highest risk for sexual predators.

A conviction now carries a five-year prison sentence.

"The war against human traffickers that prey on our youth is now out in the open," Smith said.

"Those profiting from the recruitment of Canadian women and girls into the sex trade have gone public through newspapers with their strategy of targeting Canadian high school students since they can no longer import young women from abroad to sexually exploit."

Smith urged Canadians to slap back at pimps and porn artists with a public message of their own: "Our children will not be bought or sold."

History

Updated on Friday, July 27, 2012 at 1:09 PM CDT: Corrects name.

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