Distress hand signal

At sea, the oldest hand signal to indicate distress is to flap the arms up and down.

[1] In aviation, a downed pilot would hold their hands straight above their head to indicate that they want to be picked up.

As people then mainly communicated by social media, the Canadian Women's Foundation (CWF) devised a hand signal called the Signal for Help which women could use to secretly indicate that they were at risk of domestic violence and so needed assistance.

In 2021, a girl in Kentucky then used the signal when she had been kidnapped and people who saw it alerted the local police who rescued her.

In Guyana in 2022, the Ministry of Human Services and Social Security mimicked the existing Signal for Help and announced a gesture of clasping the fingers into the palm and releasing them, in a repeated motion three times, to be used as a signal that the person was a victim of human trafficking and required help.