"It started out for money and glamour," said Pranteau at a recent media event for a new program at Winnipeg's Ndinawe Youth Resource Centre, which will train former youth sex trade workers to support current ones.

"It was an isolation from reality. What kept me going was the substance abuse. I would go on binges that would last days. I did it for the next fix," said the 21-year-old former sex trade worker.

"It's sickening," said Pranteau. "It's been said, 'If you can do this to that 16-year-old girl standing on the corner, how do you know you won't do it to your own daughter?'"

"It certainly has been bad for a long time. When kids are selling their bodies to get food, what we call 'survival sex,' that shouldn't be happening here in Canada," said Jane Runner, head of Winnipeg's New Directions, which serves sexually exploited children. "People need to know it is happening and it is a form of child abuse."

An inquest into the suicide of 14-year-old Tracia Owen, who entered the sex trade just months before her death in 2005, recently cast a spotlight on the problem.

"It's really disheartening," said Holmes, who noted some kids in the sex trade are only eight years old. "We're hearing families are often involved in turning these kids out."

Child sex tourism, pornography and abuse are thriving in a corporate climate that ignores or fuels the problem, said Roz Prober, the Winnipeg president of Beyond Borders.

"There's nothing simpler than to profit from the sexualizing of children. Children by definition, in growing up, are crossing boundaries," said Prober.

Prober says sexy pictures of young teens, such as the scantily clad underwear ads issued by Calvin Klein in the 1990s, portray kids as sex objects, desensitizing the public along with potential predators.

"There are some industries in the private sector that are fully aware their products are used for the purpose of abusing children," agreed Mark Hecht, now writing a thesis on the issue in Ottawa.

Hecht said cellphone cameras, for example, were marketed with little thought about the new feature's ease in photographing kids without their knowledge.

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