Holyrood ministers have written to a website hosting adverts suggesting sex-for-rent deals in Scotland asking them to take action, MSPs have been told.
Free advert site Craigslist contained posts from male landlords offering flats rent-free in exchange for "romance", the Herald has reported.
Questioned about the sex-for-rent deals during First Minister's Questions at the Scottish Parliament, Nicola Sturgeon said she was "horrified" by the reports.
She said: "The housing minister (Kevin Stewart) has written to the website concerned asking them to take action.
"As a government, we are already taking action through the implementation of Equally Safe, which is our strategy to tackle any violence against women and girls, and we're also taking action to improve the availability of and access to housing for everyone, and action to tackle poverty and inequality which can so often render people vulnerable to being exploited in this way.
"Any person always has the right to refuse to consent to sexual activity and forcing someone in any way to participate in sexual activity is a crime."
Labour's Claire Baker said: "We know that these sex-for-rent adverts have been posted online for properties in Scotland but we have no way of knowing how many tenants are currently in these arrangements."
She asked what action the government was taking to ensure any landlord found to be offering rent in exchange for sex would be properly dealt with.
Ms Sturgeon said one of the challenges she foresaw in tackling the problem is a frequent lack of a formal tenancy agreement but the government would look at what further action it could take.
She agreed with Green co-convener Patrick Harvie's call that any landlord found to be requesting sex in lieu of rent would be struck off the landlord register, subject to the local authority's statutory process.
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