Manitoba: Hotels to watch for sex exploitation

Last Updated: Wednesday, March 10, 2010 | 6:05 PM CT

CBC News

The Manitoba government and the provincial hotel industry are teaming up in an effort to crack down on child sexual exploitation.

Wednesday, the province said staff at hotels will be trained to spot situations where a child might be at risk of being exploited by a guest and how to notify authorities of their suspicions.

‘There should be jail time. There should be huge penalties. There should be fines’—Rebecca, a former sex-trade worker

“We’re working with the hospitality industry and putting abusers on notice that people aren’t going to look the other way when they bring these young victims into hotels,” Gord Mackintosh, the provincial family services minister said.

Mommy does Dallas

Wednesday, July 8, 2009 14:09 PDT
From Salon’s Broadsheet

Here’s a knotty — and partly NSFW — saga from the city by the bay. Back in April, Matt Smith of the San Francisco Weekly revealed that California state government funding designed to make businesses more competitive had (long story short) gone to subsidize job training in multimedia technology — for the employees of Kink.com, a pornography business that runs BDSM and other fetish-related websites. “California’s government has been subsidizing torture-based pornography,” Smith wrote.

“I choose to do porn. But I meet people a lot who have seen my asshole before looking in my eyes, and the exposure of my name truly made me feel scared.”

But that’s not the story! Smith’s piece — an arguably not-so-rich blend of reporting and opinion, which actually lost Kink.com this funding — made a lot of people angry, including a Hollywood-based fetish and bondage model/dominatrix/actor/blogger known as Mz Berlin, who, along with her peers, took serious issue with Smith’s apparent conflation of consensual (if unconventional) sex with non-consensual abuse.