Screening and personal safety

The risks in this work are not the ones portrayed on television. The Beyond the Gaze survey of 641 UK sex workers found that 80.8 per cent had experienced at least one crime in the previous five years, and the ranking is instructive: unwanted online contact or harassment at 65.1 per cent, threatening communications at 56.2 per cent, non-payment at 53.8 per cent, verbal abuse at 49.1 per cent, sexual assault at 22.2 per cent and physical assault at 15.6 per cent.

In other words, most of what goes wrong happens through a phone, and the measures that help most are the boring ones taken before a booking is agreed.

Screening a client

• A working telephone numberCalled, not texted. A number that answers in a normal voice removes most time-wasters and a good share of the rest. A number that never answers is the commonest single warning sign.
• A name and, ideally, a workplace or an email that matches oneNot identification papers. Enough that the person exists and could be found again.
• How the enquiry readsPressure to meet immediately, refusal to give a location, argument about the rate, questions phrased as demands, and requests to remove the condom from the conversation are all reasons to decline. Tone is information.
• A hotel booking in the client's own nameWhere a hotel is being used, this is straightforward reassurance and most clients give it without objection.

Check-in arrangements

Someone who knows where the booking is, when it started and when it is due to finish, and who will do something if the confirming message does not arrive. That person can be a friend, a partner or another escort. What matters is that the arrangement is agreed in advance, including what counts as an alarm and what should happen next.

The practical version is three messages: the address and finish time before going in, a short message on arrival, and a message on leaving. Escorts who work regularly usually settle into some version of this within a month.

Reporting schemes

nationaluglymugs.org runs a UK-wide scheme for reporting incidents and receiving warnings about dangerous individuals. National Ugly Mugs is a registered charity, works with sex workers of all genders, and allows reports to be made without involving the police. Its casework line is 0800 464 7669. Reports are pooled so that a warning raised in one city reaches escorts in another.

The scheme exists because reporting to the police is uncommon: in the same survey only 23 per cent of those who had experienced a crime had ever reported it, and 39 per cent said they were unlikely to report in future.

Other sources of information

• saafe.info, Support and Advice for Escorts, a peer-run site and forum covering screening, working practices and safety.
• beyond-the-gaze.com, the safety guidance produced by the research project cited throughout this page, written with sex workers rather than about them.
• swarmcollective.org, a sex-worker-led collective.

Online safety

Since most incidents are digital, most of the defence is digital too:

• A separate mobile number and email address for work, never used anywhere else.
• A working name that appears nowhere in private life, and a private name that appears nowhere in work.
• No photographs that contain identifying background detail, and none reused from personal accounts, where reverse image search will find them.
• Location and contact metadata stripped from images before uploading.

More on all of this on discretion and privacy.

Money

Taking the fee at the start of a booking removes the single commonest financial risk. Deposits for travel bookings are reasonable and normal; a request for a deposit from a client who then cannot be reached again is not a booking. Carrying enough cash to leave by taxi at any point is a small precaution that occasionally matters a great deal.

Substances

Nearly two thirds of respondents in the Beyond the Gaze survey said they avoided drugs and alcohol while working, which is a higher figure than most people would guess and reflects something practical: judgement is the main safety equipment in this job. A drink with dinner is ordinary. Matching a client drink for drink is how bookings go wrong.