There’s a new gadget on the market. Sleek enough to fit into that special extra pocket you get in the right hand side of your Topshop skinny Baxters, the Pd.id looks a lot like a USB stick. Unlike a memory stick, though, you’re allowed to drop this one in liquids.
In fact, that’s the whole point of it. Because the Pd.id is a tester for date rape drugs. The trick is you plop one end of the gadget into your drink, and if it contains any nasties – like Rohypnol, Zolpidem and other benzodiazepines – a red light on top will flash on, and a signal will be sent to your phone to let you know that your drink has been spiked.
The design is still in the prototype stages, with creator David Wilson writing on an Indiegogo crowdsourcing profile for the device, ‘The Pd.id was driven by 18 stories from friends who have been drugged and the fact my own kids are now teenagers. Yes, we are here to raise funds. But even more importantly, we want to raise awareness about a global crisis that often goes unreported and unacknowledged.’
He continued, in the profile which calls for donors to contribute $100,000 (£59,000) of funds to the project’s development into an actual product, ‘It’s about personal protection, feeling secure, and it’s about empowering our daughters, sons, sisters, brothers, spouses, partners, friends, co-workers and ourselves to be safe in an often unsafe world.’
The glossy pitch on Indiegogo shows where the funds would go when donated, and provides a production timeline which would see the Pd.id in ‘mass production, assembly and shipping’ come April 2015.
As well as the fact that, as Wilson cites, one in four women in the USA will be raped or sexually assaulted In their lifetime and that ‘25% of those assaults are facilitated by alcohol or compounds known as Date Rape Drugs’, it’s depressing that we need this sort of device.
In a dream world, there wouldn’t be horrible, creepy people trying to spike drinks so they can take advantage of people.
Wilson, a scientist, explains in his plea for crowdsourcing, ‘We must prevent this’ – but is this gadget the right solution?
What do you do if the red light goes off when you’re testing your drink when you’re on a date? Do you up and leave immediately? Do you tell your date what’s going on then throw the drink in their face, Made In Chelsea-style? Or do you call the police?
None of these situations (and all the others we’ve pondered) feel like they’d end well. Far from preventative, the Pd.id is illustrative, simply showing that your drink has been spiked but neither stopping it from happening nor offering a solution to what happens when you find out it has.
If there was a subtler way of finding out your drink has been spiked – say, by a member of waiting staff telling you they thought your date looked suspicious when you were at the toilet – then it would be less confrontational and potentially safer for you in the long run.
A spokesperson from Women Against Rape told *The Debrief *that this will neither work on a practical level – ‘If you meet somebody in a bar and they buy you three or four drinks in an evening, you’re not going to be able to test every single one in front of them’ – or a social level – ‘You can be as safe as you like, but the majority of rape and sexual assault is by partners’.
Women Against Rape added, ‘What we want to see is every single woman being taken seriously when they report rape to the police, and having the police do the most basic investigations thoroughly in order to prosecute rapists, I think that’s the best preventative measure.’
Of course, if would-be drink-spikers knew the Pd.id technology existed, they might be put off, just like graffiti artists stay away from places where they know their daubs will be whitewashed over, but in the meantime, there are other, subtler ways of avoiding getting your drink spiked.
You can get widgets like the little plastic ‘spikey’ to put into the top of your drink to stop people from slipping drugs in, and, more practically, you can make sure you buy your own drinks and take them with you everywhere, even the toilet.
You shouldn’t have to do all of this, but it’s worth being vigilant, because it sounds a lot more practical than whipping out a plastic gadget in front of the smarmy creep who’s dropped a roofie into your drink in the hopes of raping you when you’ve passed out.
Plus, we need to change our attitude towards date rape drugs. As long as they’re considered the one big bad of our night out then we won’t be vigilant about other things that could make us vulnerable. A study done in 2009 found that so much emphasis is put onto the dangers of date rape drugs that many students are in ‘active denial’ that drinking alcohol, taking drugs and walking alone at night could, sadly, be as dangerous as accepting a drink from a stranger.
Researchers at Kent University found that although half of the 200 students they interviewed said that they knew someone whose drink had been spiked, police had no evidence to prove that rape victims are commonly drugged with what we call ‘date rape drugs’, said the report in The British Journal of Criminology, reported by The Telegraph.
Regardless, back to those 25% of sexual assaults and rapes in which the victim is plied with either drink or drugs. How do we stop that?
As well as scaring off would-be drink spikers and showing them exactly what sort of pricks they are by increasing conviction rates when they are caught, maybe awareness is the most important impact of this sort of gadget.
Bouncers are big, mean fighting machines, so what if they were trained not only to calm down rowdy people in the queue on the way into a bar, but also to look out for half-collapsed girls being shoved into cabs by clear-eyed blokes on the way out? What about putting enough staff behind the bar for a service so efficient that you don’t have to send a bloke you don’t know up to get your drink? What about the really simple things, like being allowed to drink from a plastic cup when you’re out in the smoking area?
It’s not a big ask, and certainly not one that needs a team of scientists to put it together.
Follow Sophie on Twitter @sophwilkinson
This article originally appeared on The Debrief.