Emma, a student at a university in the southeast of England, also makes money from remote sex work. She now has just a couple of regular clients but was previously earning up to £500 a night, two nights per week, from her bedroom by advertising her services on Craiglist.

Emma said she does not qualify for financial help beyond the basic loan, and her parents do not give her money as they did not support her choice of course. She knows between 20 and 25 other female students at her university doing sex work, ranging from online work, through Tumblr, Snapchat, and Kik, to meeting clients in person in their cars for sex. One of her friends, she said, has lived for two years in a flat in London, paid for by a married man who stays there at weekends.

“I’m not the only person that’s done it,” she told BuzzFeed News. “A lot of girls that I know do it — that’s how I found out about it. Because of where I’m based, we pay the same for accommodation as London but we don’t get the London weighting.”

Emma said she doesn’t do sex work as much any more and she now has two part-time jobs to help fund her studies, but she struggles to juggle these around her lectures.



“[Sex work] is not something that you want to do,” she told BuzzFeed News. “It's degrading. It’s horrible. It affects your studies as well. Some of these guys are nasty, and I don’t know what my university would do if they found out.”

“My friends don’t want to be doing it,” she added, “but it’s because they don’t have the support of a family. Having to turn to these means we have had quite a few sexual assaults on our campus, but because Craigslist is quite popular a lot of girls are doing it.

“It’s not that we’re not concerned about our safety — we’re just trying to get somewhere so we can get a job. The problem with student finance and the way it is is that it doesn’t meet the cost of living, and that’s going up.”

She added: “If student finance [companies] don’t start to listen, girls are going to go missing, girls are going to get raped — a lot more than they do now.”

Maia is a postgraduate student at Oxford University, and as a mother on an expensive and labour-intensive course, she felt she had no other way of getting through her master’s.

“The thing about Oxford,” she told BuzzFeed News, “is it’s pretty much double to do a postgrad there: tuition fees, then you have to pay college fees, which [together] is about £12,000.”

Maia got a first in her undergraduate degree and was offered a place to continue her studies at Oxford, which she thought was a “huge opportunity not to waste” — but money was a problem.

“I grew up on a council estate,” she said. “My mum died, my dad’s not around — that’s not even on the radar financially or for anything else.”

She approached some rich relatives and managed to partially finance her degree. “A distant relative said they would support my accommodation,” she said, “and I could get a postgrad loan for up to £10,000.”

She had enough to cover her rent and tuition, she said, but not her college fees or her living costs. “I thought I was this close,” she said, “so why not look at the whole sex work thing?”

Maia said she has to be “really careful”, as she is in a long-term relationship and has children, but sex work is one of the only ways she can earn money and still fit in caring for her family and completing her degree.

“I felt like I really hadn’t got any options in terms of getting that money any other way,” she told BuzzFeed News.

“I’m not bothered about the stigma,” she said. “I think if you’re a consenting adult you should be able to do what you want to do. It’s perceived in society as this scum-of-the-bottle thing.”

She signed up for SeekingArrangement and met a man who continues to finance her studies. While some were just looking for sex, she found an older man who was also looking for companionship.

“He said he didn’t want to pay for sex,” she said. “It was better to frame it as a mutually beneficial agreement.”

They got on well, she said, and go out for dinner now on a weekly basis — before having sex.

Maia is aware of the safety risks and said that the first time they met was in a pub. “I have one or two people who know what I'm doing, as an extra safeguard,” she said.



“I was very, very clear from the outset that these are my terms and consent eternally applies,” she said. “The first time was the hardest. Even right up until I met with him I was like, what the fuck am I doing? I don’t even know why I felt like that; I didn't have a problem with it, but still, you have this really perverse narrative that what you’re doing will cast you into the scum of society.”

“He never hands me the money,” she said, explaining that the man leaves it for her on the table and that they both prefer it that way. “The money is good, and he takes me out for dinner — I get a posh dinner out of it as well. I can’t afford posh dinners.”

“For me, this doesn’t feel exploitative,” Maia said. “But for a 19-year-old undergrad who isn’t confident or savvy enough, I see how it could be.

“I don’t think there’s anything else I can do that’s that time-efficient in terms of financing myself through my master’s.”

Becky, a student at the University of Southampton, put an advert on Craiglist offering remote sex work, as her maintenance loan is not enough to survive on and her parents are not in a position to help her.



She offers sexting and intimate videos and pictures for between £10 and £15 per set.



“My Craigslist ad isn’t for my tuition fees. The cost of that is already covered by loans, so that isn’t a worry,” she told BuzzFeed News. “The worry is not receiving enough maintenance loan or grant just to fund the cost of living, food, travel, etc.

“My home, family life isn’t great at the moment and I need to get home a lot. However, no one can help me fund this, hence why I put the ads out. This maintenance loan is based on your household income, but they do not take into account the house outgoings.”