Safe call

What is a safe call?

A safe call is the arrangement that someone you trust knows where you are and what time you will check in, plus a plan for the case that the check-in does not come. Dutch has no fixed word for it. In sex work and in the kink scene, the safe call is a standard measure for meeting someone you do not know.

What a safe call is made of

Two halves, and the second is the more important one.

The research project Beyond the Gaze, from the universities of Leicester and Strathclyde, describes how people who do this professionally set it up. You let someone you trust know where you will be, and you check in on arrival and on leaving. Some send a description of the other person the moment they are in the shower. For a longer appointment there is a check-in at set times. And then the sentence most people skip: have an agreed plan in place for the case that the check-in does not happen.

That plan is the whole point. Without a plan there is nothing. A call that does not come is only information if someone knows what to do with it. Without instruction your friend waits, and waiting costs exactly the hours you wanted to save.

Why people set up a safe call

Because a first meeting with a stranger is the one situation in which no one misses you.

The police in Limburg warned in November 2023 that meetings arranged through certain dating sites more often ended in violence, imprisonment, and extortion. That same report names something at least as telling: out of shame or fear of reprisals, people do not report it.

A safe call changes little about that beforehand. What it changes is the time. Without an arrangement no one notices anything until you turn up again yourself; with an arrangement the clock starts running at the time you chose yourself. That is the whole return, and it is reason enough to set one up.

Where this fits on this site

I ask about it myself and I like it when you do it, because it puts you more at ease and me too. What you get from me for that is on the page about preparing for our date.

Sources

• Buddying, Mobile Phone Tips & Emergency Help Messages. Beyond the Gaze, a practical guide for internet sex workers. A research project by Prof. Teela Sanders (University of Leicester) and Prof. Jane Scoular (University of Strathclyde), funded by the Economic and Social Research Council and started in September 2015. It is about the profession that has applied this measure the longest and most systematically, and that makes it the source of choice for its mechanics. Gives the check-in on arrival and departure, forwarding a description of the other person, the periodic check-in on longer appointments, and the instruction “have an agreed plan in place if the checking-in system is not followed”.
• Afspraken via online datingsites niet altijd veilig. Dutch police, Limburg unit, 13 November 2023. A report from the investigating authority itself about complaints that have come in to it. Gives the warning that dating meetings through certain online dating sites more often end in violence, imprisonment, and extortion, the team leader’s remark that “a kind of trend” is forming, and the finding that people do not report it out of shame or fear of reprisals. The report is regional and names no numbers; it stands here for the occasion, not for an estimate of scale.

Related terms

A safe call is the arrangement outside the room, alongside everything you agree on inside the room.

• Safety call. The same measure under the name you come across more often.
• Autobondage. The one practice where this is the last safety net.
• Safeword. The emergency brake inside the room, opposite this one outside the room.
• House rules. How a play party solves the same problem collectively.
• Sex work. The trade in which this measure is daily work.