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Maylissa Luby was 15 years old when she answered an ad in Le Journal de Québec seeking women to work as escorts.

She wasn’t really sure what that meant, but what followed was years of working for a “businessman” who recruited girls for a network of clandestine “full service” strip clubs.

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“I didn’t even bat an eye because I was so abused as a child I just thought, well, at least I can make money from it,” she said.

Today, Luby is 36, has been married for 16 years and is a mother of three. She works as an intervention counsellor for La Sortie/The Way Out, an organization based in the West Island that runs the only safe house in Quebec for women trying to break free of the sex industry. She not only strives to help other survivors turn their lives around, but to disabuse the general public of widely held notions, myths and misconceptions about sex work.

“I always say: It took me two hours to get into the sex industry and 10 years to get out,” Luby said. “We’ve glorified an industry that ruins lives. … It’s not what society thinks it is.”