Digital Resistance in a Criminalized Labor Market: Analyzing U.S. Sex Worker Use of Bad Date Lists for Risk Mitigation and Community Safety

Commercial sex workers in the United States face high rates of violence and barriers to formal protection. Bad Date Lists (BDLs) are community-generated systems for sharing information about dangerous clients and unsafe encounters. Using directed qualitative content analysis of 120 publicly accessible BDLs containing 2,142 reports, this study examines BDLs as digital safety infrastructures. Findings show that BDLs support violence prevention, risk communication, harm reduction, and collective knowledge production, while varying regionally in reporting practices and organizational structure. Overall, BDLs demonstrate how criminalized communities build decentralized, experiential systems of safety and collective survival outside trusted institutional protections.