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Comment by DFHippie | Hacker News Reader

I'm happy that it worked as well, but then there's this:

> Police say the teenager told investigators that she traveled with the man through North Carolina, Tennessee, Kentucky and Ohio. Authorities allege she had been attempting to get motorists’ attention to call 911.

Apparently it didn't work very fast.

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What percentage of the population would have any idea what that hand signal (or any hand signal) means? Other than extremely common things like the middle finger, of course.

Curiously, the middle finger has been used as a duress signal by prisoners of war: http://www.usspueblo.org/Prisoners/The_Digit_Affair.html

That was prisoners in North Korea at a time of much less intercultural contact. It might still work -- in North Korea -- today, or it might not. It could not possibly work anywhere else.

Indeed, times have changed. The whole world consumes American media. Despite this, my brother and I were able to have coded conversations in a European hostel (where everybody spoke English fluently) using shared anecdotes (Shaka, when the walls fell). We weren't in duress, but not all is lost for people who are.

Probably not very many, I've never heard of "domestic violence hand signals".

Well now you have.

And knowing is half the battle.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Signal_for_Help

> The Signal for Help was introduced by the Canadian Women's Foundation on April 14, 2020.

Behavior change & language development take time.

It's weird because maybe a small percentage of people know the signal, and if the signal became Too Popular then it would lose effectiveness or otherwise be recognized by those who would cause harm

That is true of the codeword calls for help. As a hand signal, this has more utility even if it's known because you can hide it from your attacker.

Effective here because it didn’t need to be heard. So good for loud places too.

ASL for “help me” would cross the TikTok culture gap.

Your comment reminds me of a video clip I saw where someone dialed 911 and proceeded to "order a pizza," thus giving them her address. She got lucky and the dispatcher was fairly quick to figure it out and didn't hang up on her.

https://youtu.be/ZJL_8kNFmTI

I suppose it's not pure luck at all. Here in Brazil dispatchers are trained to cope with callers that appear to be trying to sneak an address in a seemly unusual call.

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