A report calling on the Government to quickly introduce legislation against sex for rent offers has said such deals are being used to make money for pornography sites.
The report from the National Women’s Council makes nine recommendations on how sex for rent in Ireland’s rental market should be tackled.
It also notes that a move by Meta to default end-to-end encryption will make it more difficult to hold the platform to account for hosting harmful content.
The council’s report, which is being launched on Thursday, says it is “shocking” that “Pornhub now advertises sex for rent videos as a genre of porn”.
There are almost 1,000 such videos on the platform this week, the report found.
“Their abuse is therefore happening both within each instance of sex for rent, whether as a proposal or an agreed living arrangement, and in a broader sense where women’s poverty and precarity is commodified by pornography platforms.”
Among its nine recommendations is that user-to-user platforms, such as those that carry ads for sex for rent arrangements, should be brought under the remit of the Online Safety Commissioner “so that they can be included in the online safety code in development”.
The report says that financial sanctions should also be placed on any social media platform “that fails to filter visible harmful content offering sex for rent proposals, solicitations, or advertisements”.
The report calls on the new domestic, sexual, and gender-based violence agency, Cuan, to conduct large-scale research on sex for rent in Ireland.
The research should “begin to scope out the extent of the issue in terms of prevalence, so it can be addressed in terms of policy and the provision of services and supports for victims”.
The report also calls on the Department of Justice to create a named offence to clearly target predatory landlords, and define the specific behaviours involved.
“This law should recognise sex for rent 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’,” it said.
It comes as the Government plans to bring forward an amendment to human trafficking legislation as it goes through the Seanad — two-and-a-half years after seeking legal advice on the issue from the Attorney General following an investigation by the Irish Examiner.
