At this worrying time, it is important that we all act in a responsible manner in order to protect each other. We must be clear that we are not an employer of escorts, all of the escorts who advertise on our website are independent escorts making their own free choice to advertise and work as escorts. We cannot manage or control these individuals by telling them what they can or cannot do. We cannot tell escorts they can or cannot work. It is the free and independent choice of each of them whether to work or not. What we can do however is provide options.
Our development teams have been working around the clock for over two weeks without rest in order to rush new features and new products out onto the website. We are getting these products out to give escorts the option to work remotely via phonesex or webcam. We have introduced a brand new "NON-CONTACT" section and encouraged our advertisers to make use of it. Over half of the advertisers on the website are now working in the NON-CONTACT section and we are aware that the majority of the escorts who are not in that section are not working at all, but are keeping their advert online to maintain their online presence.
In absence of any financial support from the government, a lot of the escorts will not have a choice but to work in order to pay their bills and feed their families. Last week we committed to giving help of €100,000 in the form of a hardship fund to escorts working in Ireland. (www.escort-ireland.com/covid19) We also allowed escorts to cancel their adverts without penalty and a reduction of rates for those who decided to continue advertising.
The safety and well-being of our advertising customers, as well as their customers, is very important to us and we are doing our best at this challenging time to direct them to the Government advice and to facilitate other NGOs in getting their message out to the masses. We have further written to government organisations to ask for safe working advice for escorts and would welcome their engagement with us.
We continue to operate our multi-lingual call centre and support the escorts through this difficult time.
