Posted by cerrynn1 on Thu 2 Sep 04, 9:34 AM to cerrynn1's blog.
It's been my opinion for a while that the main benefit of the safecall system comes from what you learn about your prospective person in the process of gathering the necessary safecall information.
First, here's what you should find out from a prospective play partner. This is what I suggest people get before a "vanilla" first meeting, with no play intended:
1. *All* of his telephone numbers, including home landline and work landline, not just a mobile. Call all of those numbers to make sure they are valid and accurate.
2. The address of where you will be meeting up (preferably a public place, like a pub or a restaurant), and that location's phone number. As above, call the number to make sure it's correct.
3. The prospective person's home and work addresses, with postal codes. You can go onto the Royal Mail website to see if such addresses actually exist, although that won't tell you whether your prospective person actually lives/works there or not.
4. The make, model, colour and registration number of the person's car.
This is what you should get if you are female (sub or domme) planning on meeting a male (sub or dom), assuming a no-play first date. In many ways it's not fair that the male should be giving all this information ... after all, women can be dangerous too. But I think, unfortunately, statistics indicate that in general women are at greater risk. For this first meeting, *in a public place*, just to check compatibility and potential chemistry, I think it's unlikely that a typical female could overpower and abduct/assault/rob/whatever a typical male. There are exceptions for the atypical among us, of course, but just in general ...
So for *this* meeting I suggest that the female party withhold any information except her mobile number. If it doesn't go well, you don't really want someone knowing where you live, etc. It's not fair, it's not right, but ... there it is. And yes, I know that women can become stalkers as easily as men ... it's just a matter of who stands the better chance of defending themselves effectively should the worst case scenario occur.
As I said in the first paragraph, the main value of getting this information is *not* really so that the cavalry (in the form of the police or friends) can step in should things go pear-shaped. The main value is in seeing how the prospective person reacts when you ask for this information. If the person is everything he says he is he should have no problem in giving this to you. Matou volunteered all this information to me before I even asked him for it, before we met up in person the first time, even though all that was initially planned was that he was going to meet me off my train at New Street Station, then have a coffee at a caf in the station, and then walk together a short distance through the city centre to the Birmingham Munch.
You can learn a lot about someone by how they respond to your requests for this information. The landline phone numbers can be especially revelatory. If someone doesn't want to give you their home number -- only their mobile -- the most likely explanation is *not* that they are an axe murderer. The most likely explanation is that there is a wife or partner at home whom they would rather you not know about (much less talk to!). This is information worth knowing (it may not make any difference to you, but it's still nice to know).
If someone doesn't want to give you their work number, similarly it probably doesn't mean that they are an axe murderer. It probably does mean -- especially if they have told you about their wonderful job as a Captain of Industry -- that in fact they are really either unemployed, or working as a shelf-stocker at Tesco. Nothing wrong with either of the above, but as with the little matter of wives/girlfriends/partners, it's nice to know these things. More precisely, it's nice to know if someone has been telling you the truth or not.
An aside: I have been told by more than one submissive that their prospective, or sometimes actual-and- current, Dominant can't give out any details about his/her work because s/he has a Top Secret Security Job (no doubt with License To Kill) with Her Majesty's Government. Ummm ... either BDSM attracts a disproportionate number of spies to its ranks, or these people are trying to cover up something (and probably not "for your eyes only" defense secrets, either), and/or there are a lot of unbelievably gullible submissives out there. I leave it for you to decide.
If the prospective person is perfectly happy to give you all this information and it all checks out, you've probably gained 99% of the benefit of the whole safecall routine. But it is still good practice to set up the call, or calls, and make them. Here is what I was taught to do:
Find someone trusted and reliable. They don't have to know about the BDSM context ... you can just say it's a first date with someone you met on the internet. Give them *all* the information listed above. Call them the first time when you have arrived at the meeting location (before you go inside and meet the person), just to let them know that everything is *on* and on schedule. Then, call them again about fifteen or twenty minutes into the "date". *Then* call a third time, once the date is over and the prospective person has departed and you are safely on your own again. Have a code word set up, something that wouldn't sound unusual to anyone listening to your call, but a word you wouldn't ordinarily use. For example, if everything is going well, you might tell your safecall buddy that things are "brilliant", but if things are *not* going well, you might arrange to say that "everything is marvellous". Whatever -- use whatever you feel comfortable with. If you use the danger code word, you'll need to decide precisely what that means and what, exactly, you want your friend to do in that event. I usually don't recommend that the friend come over themselves to check out the situation ... although perhaps a group of friends, including some large rugby-player types, might be a suitable "posse" to send out. Even though we all know that the police are unlikely to respond in force to a situation like this, I tend to think that calling the police (and giving *them* all the information on numbers, addresses, etc) is still the best step, perhaps in combination with sending a group of friends to the rescue.
I'm not even going to get into the problems of how safecalls would work if the first meeting were to include play in a private and/or isolated location. As ShereKhan has said, if you've gone to someone's house and that person is intent on doing you harm, a safecall would probably be irrelevant and useless. Hopefully that's not the case. Hopefully you play for the first time at a club or play party where there are people around to help should you need help. Hopefully you've thoroughly checked out the person well before you consent to take off your clothes and let this person tie you up (incidentally, it's a good idea *not* to allow any bondage until you know the person pretty darned well, in my opinion). Hopefully by the time you actually *do* play, the person with whom you are playing is *not* a total stranger, but rather someone that you know and -- at least to a limited extent -- trust.
There is no such thing as complete safety in what we do. You exercise your common sense, you do a careful risk assessment, you try to minimise the risks as much as possible and put as many safety nets in place as you can. You accept that the risk is still there, but you take some comfort (even as you take responsibility) in knowing that you have done as much as you can. But you still keep your eyes open and your wits about you, at least until you have *proof* that this person has your best interests at heart. There's an old saying (possibly American; I don't know): "Trust others ... but always count your change". I think that goes double and triple in what we do.
To Matou ... thank you for teaching me so much, when we were first together right down to today. And thank you for thinking more about my safety in those early days than I did! Ai shiteru, Sensei, itsumo ...
your cerrynn{M}
Edited Thu 2 Sep 04, 12:18 PM by cerrynn1
