Government urged to urgently outlaw sex for rent exploitation
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The Government is being urged to tackle outlawing sex for rent exploitation as a matter of urgency before the general election by the National Women’s Council.
The council is holding a briefing today at Leinster House, almost three years after the Government pledged to tackle the area as a priority following an investigation into sex for rent practices by the in December 2021.
However, no legislation has yet been introduced to outlaw the practice, and online advertisements regularly appear on a number of websites offering reduced or no rent in return for sex.
NWC director Orla O’Connor said that women in precarious housing situations “are being forced to choose between sexual exploitation and homelessness”.
She said: “This dire situation is facing women across the country, rural and urban, yet despite repeated promises from government, there is still no legislation in place to tackle this abhorrent form of exploitation.
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"The impact that this has on women cannot be overstated, making the very place they should feel safest — their home — a place of sexual exploitation.”
In May, the NWC published a report on sex for rent in Ireland, which called on the government to ensure that sex-for-rent proposals should be viewed as a sexual offence apart and removed from sex purchase laws to avoid the stigmatisation and low reporting encountered in other jurisdictions where pursuing convictions requires the victim to identify as a ‘prostitute’.
An amendment outlawing sex for rent arrangements in the rental sector had been scheduled to be included in the Criminal Law (Sexual Offences and Human Trafficking) Bill 2023 which finalised its passage through the Oireachtas before the summer recess. However, work on the amendment was not completed on time to meet the bill’s deadline and work is continuing, Minister for Justice Helen McEntee said in response to a parliamentary question last month.
Attempts to legislate against the practice include the Ban on Sex for Rent Bill introduced by the Social Democrats two years ago, and the Residential Tenancies (Amendment) (Sex for Rent) Bill 2023, introduced in the Dáil by Sinn Féin earlier this year. The Social Democrats legislation failed to pass pre-legislative scrutiny.
Ms O’Connor said: “Government has been on notice about this issue for years now, and legislation to tackle it was due to be included in the Sexual Offences and Trafficking Bill. That Bill has now come and gone, and still there is no solution for these women. Budget 2025 provided little reassurance that the housing crisis will be tackled in any meaningful way, and this is the underlying context in which sex for rent exploitation can happen. Even with legislation, until the housing and homelessness crisis is tackled, women will still be sexually exploited by unscrupulous landlords.”
Feargha Ní Bhroin, NWC’s Violence Against Women Officer and author of the report published in May, said the research had found that students and migrant women are particularly vulnerable to sex for rent offers, “because of their specific difficulties in accessing suitable accommodation”.
She added: “Renters who rent a room from a live-in landlord are also especially vulnerable, and lack the legal protections of other tenancies. As students return to university this autumn, there is an urgent need to ensure all women are protected from this kind of exploitation.”
Ann-Marie O’Reilly, National Advocacy Manager at Threshold, will also speak at today’s briefing in Leinster House. She said that limited housing options can “put some of the most vulnerable at risk of exploitation by unscrupulous actors”.
While she acknowledged that legislation has a role to play in protecting people from exploitation, she said: “Ensuring access to secure, good quality and affordable housing for all members of society is the only sure way of protecting the most vulnerable.”
Denise Charlton, chief executive of Community Foundation Ireland, said the failure by policy makers to act on the area to date “is hugely difficult to understand as the body of evidence grows”.