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LONDON - They're famous for their jam-making and homespun advice, but now members of the Women's Institute in England are being called on to combat sex trafficking.
The group's 200,000 members are being recruited in a government campaign to crack down on sleazy sex advertisements amid concerns that some advertisers are luring women to Britain and forcing them into prostitution.
Women's Minister and deputy Labour leader Harriet Harmen urged WI members to scour local newspapers for the ads and complain to editors about them.
"Local papers are important and should not be used to advertise this sleaze, exploitation and human misery," Harmen told a WI conference on London on Tuesday.
"Many are young women from Eastern Europe, from Africa or SE Asia, tricked and trafficked into this country and forced into prostitution.
"It might be called the `oldest profession in the world' but it's not a profession, it's the modern-day version of the slave trade."
About 4,000 females, including many in their teens, are believed to have been trafficked to the United Kingdom to work as prostitutes.
The WI, the country's largest voluntary women's organisation, hopes the sex ads campaign will raise awareness about sex trafficking and violence against women in general.
A spokeswoman said while it was hard to know which ads were offering the services of women forced into prostitution by sex traffickers, the WI hoped members would give editors "a nudge" to check the bona fides of advertisers.
"From the members I've spoken to today, many have said, `We've looked in the papers and we didn't realise there were so many of those ads,"' she said.
"So many of these ads are going unnoticed.
"But we're not saying ban all these ads.
"By asking editors to explain or check that services the ads are offering are kosher we can generate a lot more awareness of what's going on and about people who are being trafficked."
However some prostitutes fear if local newspapers refuse to publish their ads many sex workers could be forced to look for customers on the street where they risk being attacked.
"Local newspapers are one of the few ways women have to advertise," English Collective of Prostitutes spokeswoman Niki Adams told Sky News Online.
"This sort of thing will force them out on to the streets - is that what the WI wants?"
The Newspaper Society, which represents local papers, earlier this year toughened guidelines for advertisements selling sex, with some publishers agreeing to ban them.
- AAP