WPixz/ShutterstockWhen Andrew (not his real name) lost his job during the COVID-19 pandemic, he turned to work as a courier. His days became a slog – cycling for hours in rain or shine, juggling Deliveroo, Uber Eats and JustEat. Despite the grind, he couldn’t afford to rent even a single room in his city. After months of sofa surfing and crammed bunk-bed accommodation, a friend of a friend offered him a room at a rent he could actually manage. The catch? He had to have sex with his new, live-in landlady once a week.This is what’s known as a sex-for-rent arrangement: when someone offers free or discounted accommodation in exchange for sex. I’ve been studying the experiences of people in sex-for-rent arrangements, and will be publishing my findings over the coming year. While such arrangements might come with a veneer of consent, research from the UK and US shows they are often exploitative and disempowering. They start with a power imbalance, usually economic, that allows one person to exploit another’s desperation for housing.There is relatively little academic research on sex for rent in the UK. But what we do have so far is deeply concerning. A 2022 survey by campaign group Generation Rent estimated that over 200,000 women may have been offered free or discounted rent in exchange for sexual favours. These offers sometimes appear on platforms like Craigslist or Facebook Marketplace, often couched in vague, euphemistic language: “reduced rent for suitable female tenant”, or “alternative arrangements can be discussed”.Investigative journalism has shown that these ads typically target young women – especially students and those in insecure work. While confirming that young women are heavily targeted, my ongoing research reveals how economically marginalised men are being exploited too. Through qualitative interviews with survivors of sex-for-rent, I am exploring how this exploitative practice occurs, who is targeted and why.Participants like Andrew often work in the gig economy, where wages are low and unpredictable. Others are migrants with no access to benefits or housing assistance, making it near impossible to access stable accommodation. Their experiences of sex-for-rent are made worse by social stigma, masculine expectations of self-reliance and a lack of tailored support.What I have found so far supports and expands on findings already established in existing research, which has found how sex-for-rent is advertised to young women online, and becoming a regular part of an insecure housing market.Survivors told me that landladies as well as landlords were engaging in sexual exploitation via sex-for-rent. Landlords were often aware of participants’ financial struggles and framed the arrangement as “helping them out”. Participants who tried to leave said they were threatened with eviction – both legal and illegal – to trap them.The 15 men I spoke to reported intense feelings of shame, degradation and emasculation. They were also often unaware of support services that might be able to help them, including housing charities or services for male victims of sexual violence. Many feared legal consequences, wrongly believing they had broken the law by “prostituting themselves” and doubted police would believe them.The limits of the lawSex-for-rent is technically illegal under the Sexual Offences Act 2003, which states that sex-for-rent amounts to “controlling or inciting prostitution for gain”. Yet only two successful prosecutions have occurred – Christopher Cox in 2022 and Frederick Allyard in 2024. It is unclear whether any further attempted prosecutions have occurred. But my research indicates that victims broadly believe that they themselves have committed an offence, rather than their landlords, grounded in the wrongful belief that sex work is a crime – it isn’t a crime to sell sex anywhere in the UK. What is illegal is soliciting, brothel keeping and pimping, though these concepts are poorly defined in British law.In 2023, the Home Office launched an open consultation on exchange of sexual relations for accommodation. While this is a welcome recognition of the issue, the consultation largely frames sex-for-rent as a matter of individual criminal landlords. It says little about why such exploitation persists – or how social conditions actively enable it. Rents outpacing wage growth have created conditions for predatory landlords to take advantage of tenants. William Barton/Shutterstock Landlords hold far more power than tenants in the UK. Rents are among the highest in Europe, with projections suggesting that 2.2 million working adults could be priced out of the rental market by 2030. The UK average rent is £1,339 per month, a more than 100% increase compared to ten years ago. People on lower incomes can spend up to 59% of their monthly wages on rent alone. At the same time, wages have stagnated, housing benefit is inadequate, and those with insecure immigration status are locked out of public support entirely. Tenants begin from a position of reduced power, in a housing system that gives more power to the interests of landlords. This system can be taken advantage of by predatory landlords, either through exploitation like sex-for-rent, or not keeping properties in liveable conditions. Even if there were more prosecutions for sex-for-rent, it wouldn’t solve the problem alone. We can’t just focus on individual acts of criminality – sex-for-rent is the outcome of structural inequalities in housing, made possible by policy choices: the erosion of social housing, the deregulation of the private rental sector, the rise of precarious work and punitive immigration controls. Properly addressing the problem would require more secure, affordable housing, an end to no recourse to public funds conditions and support services for all victims of sexual exploitation, not just women. Over a decade of austerity has left many of these services hanging on by a thread. The current government could do worse than to reverse these trends. Sex-for-rent is not a fringe issue. It is a symptom of how deeply our housing and welfare systems have failed – and it demands a response as structural as the harm itself.Chris Waugh does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.