SEX FOR RENT
Sex in exchange for free or discounted rent is illegal, but the amount of rogue landlords offering these types of arrangements is growing. With a cost-of-living crisis pushing more people into financial insecurity, questions are being raised over how effective the current laws are in protecting society’s most vulnerable. There is no specific law that criminalises ‘sex for rent’, and only one person has ever been prosecuted with the crime.
The Home Secretary, Suella Braverman, has launched a 10-week call for evidence, known as a ‘probe’, to look at the scale of the issue and whether the allegations of a growing problem are true. She’s asking charities, victims, and activists to come forward with their accounts. At the end of the 10-week period, the government will assess whether a specific offence needs to be created to wipe out the market.
We asked voices speaking out against the murky sex for rent trade what they think: what’s caused it, how can it be fixed, and will a new law actually do anything?
JOEL
Joel is a victim of sex for rent, many times over. He left Nigeria for the UK in 2019 as an asylum seeker, after being persecuted for being the face of Nigeria’s first month-long LGBTQ+ Pride protest. Once in the UK’s asylum system, he moved through detention centres, into temporary accommodation and finally private rentals. In each place, he experienced homophobic attacks and sexual assault. Persecuted once again, this time by those he lived with, he found himself in a vulnerable and desperate position.
As a student, as a queer asylum seeker, as someone with no right to work and limited financial resources, Joel struggled to find anywhere he could afford to live. People like Joel are particularly vulnerable to being exploited, and landlords took advantage of this. He told us horror stories about property owners who would offer discounted rent paid for with sexual acts, and messages which asked him his favourite sexual positions. Joel would often visit properties, only to find that the 'room ads' were really just looking for 'transactional sex'.
There was one particular landlord he remembers in detail:
“He told me there would be threesomes, and that he would even want to see me perform right there and then, so that he could see how good I was”.
I asked him how he felt.
“It’s widespread and rampant and right under our noses. But the government is doing nothing.”
“It shows how powerless, to a point, I am in Britain as I know it.”
"WE NEED TO STOP YOUNG PEOPLE FROM BEING SO DESPERATE"
Alicia Walker, from the homelessness charity Centrepoint, sees the sex for rent crisis as a symptom of wider, more pervasive crises in Britain. Namely, the cost of living crisis and the housing crisis.
Sitting in her office in East London, Alicia explains to me the reasons that drive sex for rent.
“Sex for rent isn’t about sex for rent. It’s part of a much wider social system that we’ve found ourselves in. So we’re not gonna move on from this unless we deal with issues that are glaringly obvious, like the housing crisis which has been with us for decades.”
“Yes, we need to make it harder for predators to be predators, yes we need regulation”, she acquiesces, “but we need to stop young people from being so desperate in the first place. We can’t live in a country where 1/50 young people are homeless - we need to improve services for young people so that they’re not so desperate that they need to choose between paying the rent, eating that night, or thinking about sex for rent.”
“We need more genuinely affordable purpose-built social homes, we need people to start accepting universal credit.”
“But mainly, we need an attitude change towards people who are just trying to move on with their lives - we need people to say ‘ok, we’ll help you’.”
UNDERCOVER
From what I’ve seen, sex for rent arrangements are happening in two ways. Either, a victim already lives in a property, and during the tenancy the landlord starts displaying predatory behaviour or asking for sex when the tenant can’t pay. Or, arrangements are being explicitly advertised online.
The main culprit - Craigslist.
In the months I’ve spent researching this documentary, I check the housing pages on Craigslists most mornings. Each day, I’d find more sex for rent ads. Either explicit or euphemistic, it doesn’t take a trained eye to see what the ads are implying.
“Free rent for female company”
“Looking for friendly attractive open minded female 24 to 40 years old”
“Share a bed with 45 year old divorced man”
“Muslim women girl students preferred”
“Rent could be free if willing to help”
“Room share with an older man”
“Required: sex a few times a night”
“Double room offered for twink lad”
“57 year old male nudist with double room to rent”
“Cosy room for single female (no time wasters)”
I wanted to see the scale of it myself, and how easy it would be to find and set up an arrangement. Within 30 minutes, I had a landlord on the phone. I’d replied to his posting using a fake name, and we exchanged some emails. After two emails it became sexual, and he told me he was looking for a “fuck buddy” to have sex with “a few times a night”.
On the phone, he told me I could stay for free as he was “well off” and didn’t need rent money. He wanted us to “get to know” one another, to ensure we had a connection before I could live in his Fulham property for free.
The call was sobering.
It took me half an hour to find, set up, and confirm an arrangement. All with a man who was knowingly, or unknowingly, committing a crime. But if it’s this easy to come across these predators, then how has only one person ever been prosecuted for the crime?
THE LAW
Sex for rent is a crime, but there is no specific offence for it.
There are some parts of the Sexual Offences Act (2003) that can be used to address sex for rent, but the offences weren’t originally designed for it.
Section 52 says it’s illegal for a person to push someone else into prostitution for the first person’s gain.
And Section 53 says it’s a crime for one person to control or force another person’s prostitution for gain.
These crimes can see up to seven years in prison.
53-year-old Christopher Cox was convicted in the first sex-for-rent prosecution in 2022. The court heard that he targeted young vulnerable women via Craiglist who needed somewhere to stay, including one woman who was homeless, “unwell and desperate”.
His actions were filmed by undercover reporters for ITV’s The Kyle Files, who passed the footage over to the police.
Tilly Smith, from the private renters campaign group Generation Rent, explained to me the oddity within the law.
“Under Section 52 and 53, you need to be legally understood as a sex worker, which most people don’t feel themselves to be.”
“If you look at the law as it’s written, most people would never think that this is a law that could apply to them or that they could use.”
THE NUMBERS
Generation Rent commissioned research to look into the extent of predatory landlords.
They found:
4% of people they surveyed said they’d been offered discounted rent in exchange for sexual acts
And 3% said they’d been offered free rent for sexual acts.
This translates to around 250,000 ‘Sex for Rent’ victims
1 in 10 people who responded to the survey with a household income below £20,000 said that they’d been propositioned.
This means those on lower incomes are those more likely to be targeted by rogue landlords.
Some victims said that they had reported predatory behaviour or assault to the police, but had not received the support they needed.
THE ENGLISH COLLECTIVE OF PROSTITUTES
Whilst most groups I spoke to want a new law to be created, there’s one particular group opposing the creation of a specific offence.
The English Collective of Prostitutes are campaigning against outlawing sex for rent.
Niki Adams spoke to me at the Crossroads Women’s Centre.
“We’re opposing a sex for rent law as it interferes in people’s private lives. If a woman wants to enter a kind of relationship like that, she should be able to, and if the landlord is abusive or threatening then he should be prosecuted under the existing criminal law.”
Niki sees it as an issue of consent, and doesn’t want a law that criminalises an option that women without other options have found to keep a roof over their head.
“It strips women of one of the options that we’ve found to survive, or to get housing at all. It’s not going to address the housing crisis that people are facing, because that’s founded somewhere else.”
“It needs rent controls, it needs more tenant rights. It needs more social housing. Those are the things that need to be addressed if you want to deal with abusive landlords.”
SICKNESS OR SYMPTOM?
I reached out to The Home Office, to speak about whether a change in the law would be enough to stamp out predatory landlords.
After some conversations, they decided not to speak to me.
They did send me a statement saying that they hope the call for evidence will:
“Bring [us] closer to ending this deeply harmful trend and better protect victims” and is “another example of how this Government will not stop in [our] efforts to bring more sexual and domestic abusers to justice”.
The solution for sex for rent isn't clear. Some want the government to create a new law, others think the issue lies more around consent. But sex for rent seems not to be the sickness - it’s a symptom of the housing crisis. And as long as that crisis still exists, people may continue to be exploited.
I contacted Craigslist for comment multiple times, but they didn’t respond.