[scoopertrooper]

There is nothing wrong with simplifying a problem to get at its essence, but yes it is important to accept real-life is messy.

I'm sure in a restricted set of circumstance this may help people (as it did in this story), but I sincerely doubt it'd lead to a material increase in kidnapped people being liberated.

It'd certainly be less effective than other interventions such as cracking down on people trafficking networks or poverty reduction programmes.

The expressiveness of hand gestures (in general) is quite limited and any gesture used for covert communication must make a tradeoff between conspicuousness to the public and conspicuousness to the attacker. This limitation restricts the situations in which they can be made and results in gestures that could be easily dismissed or otherwise misunderstood and thus limit their utility.

[pferde]

I can't believe this needs to be pointed out, but it's not an either-or proposal. We can have signals such as this one, as well as efforts to curtail human trafficking.

[kortex]

> The expressiveness of hand gestures (in general) is quite limited

Clearly you've not met many sign language speakers. Or Italians.

This is a perfectly cromulent covert hand gesture. It has high coding entropy - I've literally never once seen someone make this gesture (outside of videos demonstrating it). Fingerspelling is not remotely similar since it's a sequence of codes in rapid succession.

[darkerside]

> I sincerely doubt it'd lead to a material increase in kidnapped people being liberated.

Sure was material to this chick