Safe Calls

[gagged_Louise]

Just adding that if your date proves to be, not a serial killer, but a dangerous or overenthusiastic rapist masquerading as a Dom, and you get out alive but in a mess and manage to call your safeguard person afterwards, the fact that you had him/her (the safecaller) in on what you were doing is no guarantee that you can get this Dom/me nailed for rape. Even if you're totally aure that what you had to go through was a violent and non-con rape, the court may still judge that he* had reason to think you'd accepted it, and hence, he didn't really intend to rape you but to help bring out your fantasies (and this still presupposes that court and jury can muster some understanding of what bdsm is about)

Of course, lawmaking and practice about rape/sexual abuse are variable from one country to the next, but it's been noticeable in several countries that it can be very hard to establish that someone actually intended rape, and the idea of intent - which is a very central one to get anyone convicted - is sometimes interpreted in a highly restrictive way, so that there's a lot that has to be shown to indicate that it was, like, intentional rape.
There was a case in Sweden this spring where a girl (aged around 20) had been through a night of very violent sex with two men; she had been offered a good deal of drink and narcotics and then, she claimed, beaten up and raped. Toward the end she was half unconscious, and had some memory blanks afterwards. Now medically it was clear she had been assaulted, penetrated and badly roughed - for instance she'd had a cell phone pushed into her ass - and the court judged her description of what had happened was definitely more trustworthy than that of the two men, but still they were acquitted. The court felt it had not been proven that these two guys actually understood that she had rapidly lost interest, protested and fought not to be abused like this. So in the court's view (I don't think they were unanimous and the case is going for appeal soon) it wasn't certain it had been intentional rape.

Though it was not stated openly in the news coverage of that trial, it seemed very likely that she had some interest in rough/s/m sex and might have asked those two men to have a hot kinky night with her - so they'd have been able to see her struggle and angry outcries as just "token resistance" but at any rate she rapidly got overtaken by what they wanted to get from her, and started crying and fighting to get free ("safeword" was obviously something they had never heard about). In my own view the court took a too narrow view of what it takes to prove intent, but this is a problem that can crop up again and again when a rape case gets to court, and it's got a special bearing on bdsm preferences.

*I'm assuming from here that the Dom/rapist was a man, to avoid bothering with double pronouns, though I'm of the opinion you can be raped in other ways than penetrative sex, and men, in that sense, are not immune from being raped by women)