Adverts for the Rich meet Beautiful (RmB) dating site encouraging female students to link up with wealthy men looking for company in exchange for favours will be banned in the city of Brussels and the commune of Watermael-Boitsfort. “The city of Brussels will prohibit these adverts because the mayor evidently cannot tolerate them, “explained Maïté Van Rampelbergh, spokesperson of mayor Philippe Close. "No authorization has been requested for circulating such a message on campus. That’s why we are going to order the police to prevent this campaign.”
In Watermael-Boitsfort, a municipality in the Brussels-Capital Region, Mayor Olivier Deleuze announced on his Facebook page on Monday that he would issue a banning order against the campaign.
On Monday, a billboard of the RmB agency was posted on Avenue Franklin Roosevelt, opposite the Janson Amphitheatre, the biggest at the Free University of Brussels, ULB.
In Louvain, the municipal councilors in charge of Equality of Chances and Student Affairs have already said that the ad campaign was not welcome on the university campus.
On Tuesday, ULB spokesperson Nicolas Dassonville said his institution’s legal affairs section was studying the various tools at its disposal to put an end to this “abject” campaign. Chancellor Yvon Englert addressed the students, reminding them of the social actions conducted at the universities to prevent students, male and female, from falling into hardship.
The ad campaign specifically targets female students aged 18 to 26. A complaint has already been filed against it with the Publicity Ethics Jury. The Brussels Region Secretary of State for Equal Chances, Bianca De Baets, announced that she intended to lodge a complaint with the Office of the Public Prosecutor, like the UNECOF student union.
According to Nicolas Dassonville, there was no RmB billboard to be seen near the ULB on Tuesday morning.
The Brussels Times
