What is BadDates.ca?

BadDates.ca is an on-line Bad Trick Sheet that can be used in any city or region in Canada.

What is a Bad Trick Sheet?

A Bad Trick Sheet is a list of descriptions of clients (or people posing as clients) who have threatened, assaulted, harassed or ripped off prostitutes. Lists are published periodically and handed out to sex workers on the street. Reports are usually collected by outreach workers who are distributing the list. Sometimes information comes from the police or the media, complete with composite drawings or photos. Bad Trick Sheets can serve as a warning system, so that sex workers can avoid cars and clients who fit descriptions on the list. Bad Call Lists have also been made available to sex workers who advertise and work over the phone, and reports are often collected over the phone.

Bad Trick Sheet history

The first Bad Trick Sheet in Canada was published in Vancouver in the mid-1980s by the Alliance for the Safety of Prostitutes (ASP). The first Bad Trick Sheet to use a database was produced in August 1990 by the Prostitutes' Safe Sex Project in Toronto. Within two years the Toronto Bad Trick Sheet had collected over 100 reports of serious assaults, sexual assaults and robberies committed on sex workers. Bad Trick Sheets have also been produced by the Sex Workers Alliance of Toronto, by Maggie's, and by Street Health in Toronto; by the Sex Workers Alliance of Vancouver, by Downtown Eastside Youth Activities Society (DEYAS), and by Street Youth Services and in Vancouver; and by Stella in Montreal. Bad Trick Sheets ("Ugly Mugs") have also been produced in major cities in Australia since the mid-1980s.

BadDates.ca — A national network

In most other Canadian cities there is no bad date warning service available to sex workers. BadDates.ca is a way for sex worker groups, individual sex workers and service organizations in any city in in Canada to put out their own local Bad Trick Sheets by filling out easy-to-use forms on the Internet.

Using the power of databasing and the networking capability of the Internet, BadDates.ca collects and stores data entered from any city in Canada which is then made easily searchable. BadDates.ca can also be used to look up reports from neighbouring cities in a region. Even reports from different regions (Edmonton/Vancouver for example) can be searched for correlations. Bad date reports can be collected cooperatively by several agencies and groups in the same city, to create a more comprehensive and up-to-date list.

Who is BadDates.ca for?

People who work for community service organizations, public health street nurses or anyone who works in the sex industry can apply for a BadDates.ca username and password. This will allow participants to enter information from their area using a web browser. Participants can search for all bad date reports from their own city or from cities in their region, to produce a Bad Date List to be distributed locally. Sex workers who are not interested in entering reports, or in printing and distributing a list, can simply use BadDates.ca to look up bad dates. BadDates.ca participants who want to publish lists and enter reports will be given a tutorial before receiving access. A BadDates.ca editor continually proofreads the database to remove redundant duplicate reports and copy-edit description entries.

BadDates.ca is an initiative of the Sex Workers Alliance of Vancouver. Part of the mandate of the BadDates.ca project is to create a board of directors representing all regions in Canada.

BadDates.ca is in its formative stage. Here is the prototype of the Bad Date Report Form for street workers. It is set up to collect data in the most consistent way possible. You can fill out the report form, and then see your entry when you view the Bad Date List! This is a beta version only, there are no user log-in or sign-up forms yet.

You can email your feedback to BadDates@walnet.org. Please forward this link to anyone who might be interested in participating: www.BadDates.ca.