Labour Senator Laura Harmon was very happy yesterday, taking to social media to rejoice in the news that the Minister for Justice, Jim O’Callaghan, has agreed to progress her long-desired legislation outlawing so-called “sex for rent” arrangements.
Those arrangements are exactly what they sound like: Some creepy men (theoretically women could do this too, but who are we kidding) have taken to attempting to benefit from the housing crisis by offering typically younger females, but also a fair few young men (in homosexual arrangements) accommodation in return for sexual favours regularly delivered.
The new legislation would create two new offences: It would become a crime to advertise accommodation where sex would be taken in lieu of rent, and it would become a crime to offer (presumably without publicly advertising) somebody accommodation in return for sex. The maximum penalty under the legislation would be a class A fine – meaning a fine of up to €5,000.
That the men who offer such arrangements tend to be predatory types who are a danger to society is not in dispute, and the evidence backs this up. Look at who it is who most typically gets offered such arrangements:
An Irish Council for International Students survey earlier this year found one in seven people had been offered rentals where they share a room – and sleep in the same bed – with people they do not know.
All the respondents who received sex-for-rent offers were non-native English speakers and 68pc were female.
Here’s my question – stipulating of course that I personally find the notion of sex for rent to be abhorrent and exploitative: When is consent not enough for the state to stay out of sexual relationships?
The Irish state and its governing political and media class have essentially over the past few decades made consent the magic word when it comes to matters sexual: Young men are often encouraged to take “consent classes”, while kids in our schools are taught that sex between adults is generally acceptable so long as consent has been secured.
In cases of sex for rent, grubby though they may be, there is no real question as to consent: Both parties have come to an arrangement that they consent to. Perhaps, in the case of the woman, sex has been consented to under slight financial duress.
But since when is consent under some duress not consent? Do we really think that there are not, in Ireland, wives who are having sexual intercourse with their husbands when they don’t really feel like it, just to trade that for the reward of a contented spouse? Does consent always have to be enthusiastic to count as consent?
I ask these questions because this writer, for one, has always found the “consent” standard around sexual liasons to be entirely unsatisfactory: Were I setting the curriculum (and I doubt I am alone in this) I would be teaching young people (especially but not only males) that sexual relationships necessitate a positive duty of care for the other person’s physical and emotional well-being. That it is not just enough to wait for a magic word and then “go”, so to speak.
That would also seem to be the message of the sex for rent bill: That pure consent to an arrangement between two adults is not enough, if that arrangement puts one of them under duress or may seem exploitative.
But here’s my next question: How do you even enforce this law? Particularly the part which criminalises an unadvertised offer of sex for rent?
The first part of the law is simple enough: If somebody is dumb enough to put up an advertisement which says “room free so long as sexual favour provided”, then that’s a fairly open and shut case. But of course, that’s not what is likely to happen in the majority of cases.
In the majority of cases, these situations are likely to develop where somebody is unable to pay their rent and their landlord suggests an alternative method of repayment. Unless the landlord is dumb enough to put that offer in writing over text message, it is going to be very hard for the state to prove beyond any reasonable doubt that such an offer was ever even made.
Further, what is the nature of the crime here? Is it a particular form of words? If a landlord says to a tenant (as he absolutely should not as a moral matter) that she wouldn’t have to pay rent if she was his girlfriend, is that a proposition for sex for rent? What if it’s a more vague “well there are other ways you could repay me”? Is there room for honest misunderstanding, where a clumsy romantic approach is taken to be criminal because the person approached is a tenant?
The law – and public morality – around sex in Ireland remains greatly confused. If consent between adults is all that is required for sexual activity, then neither sex for rent nor prostitution should be illegal as a matter of logic. And yet, both now will be.
Perhaps it is time that what we teach children about consent and sexual relationships caught up to how we treat those relationships in the real world. Consent is not enough by itself. It never was.