I'm making a short film about sexuality and dementia for the evening news. 

It may help to say a bit more about yourself and which evening news you're talking about.

We're exploring how dementia can affect people's sexuality and personal relationships, and also how care homes negotiate people's intimate needs, for example providing a sex toy to a female resident, supporting new relationships, touch therapy such as massage.

One friend has a 'living will' that explicitly says they are going to want to be able to masturbate and will need privacy, their favourite toy etc.

I've seen that in Australia this is relatively commonplace but obviously laws are different there. What's the situation in the UK? If anyone has ever worked with someone with dementia, how does that mentally/physically/emotionally benefit the individual? What are the challenges to you?

Australian sex work laws vary from state to state, of course.

In the UK, if more than one person goes there it's likely to make the care home a brothel, but a prosecution is going to be seen as not in the public interest - the 'shock horror' publicity is what is putting people off being open about it.

For the escort, one of the biggest issues is going to be establishing consent: does the person they're seeing have capacity? This can be hard enough to establish in terms of workers looking at relationships between residents... for an escort, it's not going to be at all easy.

Plus, looked at from the person with dementia's point of view, how are they going to be protected against abuse, particularly financial?

It'd be good to get some insight on this - I've spoken to various care home professionals who are very interested in this field, but no one said they had sex workers in the homes, regardless of whether they'd personally like to consider it.

Despite some of the issues above, some of them may well be keeping quiet about it actually happening at their care home. There's going to be an element of nervousness about being the first to come out about it happening. You'd probably find more people talking about it relation to other disabilities.

Another issue is around policing boundaries, aka the consent of the escort. A look will reveal that some clients need to be told not to do something. (What that is varies according to the individual's boundaries.) If dementia means that they need to be repeatedly told not to do something, it's going to end badly. Persistent boundary pushers normally get kicked out without a refund, so why give one to someone with short-term memory loss who didn't remember being told the first (and second and third) time?

(I've made the linkedin link non-clickable - I am not the only one to get more than enough unsolicited mail from the incompetent spammers as it is without having them notice here.)

Hi, I'm in Australia and have clients with dementia and other conditions/disabilites some of whom are in care/nursing homes (although I would say that having sex workers visiting facilities or nursing homes is not commonplace). Happy to answer any questions, Touching Base is also a really good resource.