Bring back live music but don’t bring back sexual harassment at gigs
Prior to the COVID-19 pandemic incidents of sexual harassment and violence at live music events were regularly flagged up by music fans and artists. What happens when venues re-open?
‘The extra price of a gig ticket’ gig going in the Before Times
Prior to March 2020, media coverage of incidents of sexual harassment and violence at gigs in the UK, and further afield, was on the rise. In the summer of 2018, YouGov found that two in five young festival goers had been subjected to unwanted sexual behaviour. This finding was published a year after a woman called Gina Miller attended British Summer Time festival in London and was upskirted by two men in the crowd as she and her friends watched The Killers.
“It’s always been this hidden thing that people haven’t really wanted to talk about” says Dr Rosemary Lucy Hill, an academic from the University of Huddersfield who has conducted research into the scale of sexual violence within the live music scene, “Someone described it to me as being like the extra price of the gig ticket. Which is horrendous.” She describes the stories she and her researcher Molly Megson heard during the first phase of their research project as being “upsetting” and adds “they affected Molly and I for quite a long time.”
As a regular gig goer, she brought her own experience to the research “There’s definitely been gigs that I’ve gone to that have felt distinctly un-safe, as well as others where I’ve been groped.” When I initially spoke to her in the summer of 2019, she had recently spoken to a 17 year old girl about these issues “I got the sense from her that this wasn’t news” she says, sadly “It wasn’t like she’d never heard about this stuff before. I got a sense from her that this was something that was important to be talked about.”
When it comes to incidents of sexual harassment and violence, I have bookmarked a depressingly large number of reported examples from various sections of the media, and social media, over the past three or four years. There have been cases of audience members being abused and harassed by other audience members, by security guards, or by artists. Artists have also been on the receiving end of harassment and violence, from audience members, from audience members again, from booking agents, and by other musicians. Journalists reviewing gigs have also been harassed and assaulted.
Outside of gigs at venues, there have been well publicised incidents at music festivals both in and outside of the UK. As previously mentioned, YouGov found in 2018 that two in five young festival goers had been subjected to unwanted sexual behaviour. The issue wasn’t new however; in 2010, two women were raped at Latitude Festival and another was raped at T In The Park. Since 2010, instances of rape, sexual harassment and assault are regularly reported during the UK festival season.
One of the reasons why the issue of sexual harassment and sexual violence at gigs and festivals was receiving more attention in 2019 was that artists of all genders were regularly calling it out when it happened at their gigs, particularly on social media. As a rule, these statements would emerge the morning after a gig, once the artist had been made aware of an incident that had happened the night before. We are sick of this, the announcements taken as a whole seemed to say, we don’t want to be associated with this behaviour, and we don’t want sexual predators at our gigs.
Let’s establish something before we go any further: I love live music.
Whether you’re attending alone or with friends, live music can provide some of the most magical moments of collective, transcendental togetherness and joy imaginable.
As such, it’s no wonder that so many people around the world are missing it. Not only are we missing the music, we are also missing the togetherness.
Pre-COVID-19, there were positive examples of promoters, organisations and initiatives working to make gigs safer for women, for minorities, and for those with disabilities. These would include the activist organisation Attitude Is Everything, which campaigns for better access to live music for deaf and disabled people, the punk band Dream Nails and their riot grrrl inspired girls to the front policy, and gig promoters Loud Women, who operated fully inclusive safer spaces at all of their events.
Lucy from Dream Nails said that “95% of the time, the men that come to and enjoy our shows are very respectful and enjoy partaking in this small act of allyship with their sisters. It is funny how men often come up to us after shows and say ‘wow! I’ve never felt like that before! It was weird!’ It’s usually good natured but does hammer home for us how ingrained cis male privilege is in public and recreational spaces.”
Cassie Fox, who started booking and promoting gigs in London under the Loud Women banner in 2015, initially as a way to secure better gigs for her own band, first came up against the issue of safer spaces in 2016. Loud Women had booked the venue for their first festival, only to hear a number of “really worrying stories” about the venue they had chosen, and the alleged behaviour of some of its staff, not long after placing the booking.
“Members of staff who’d been abusive to women” she explains, adding that there had been talk of “a guy who’d actually been accused of rape; somehow they’d linked it to someone who’d worked there, or had something to do with the venue. All sorts of really toxic stuff was being heard.”
Initially, Fox considered cancelling the booking and moving the festival to a new venue. “But then we were thinking ‘Why should we lose a venue to this horrible behaviour? Why should it just be this swamp of toxic behaviour?’ So we, I think rightly, decided to work with the venue to see if we could do something about it.”
Luckily for Loud Women, the venue management were eager to salvage their reputation and were amenable to change. Fox contacted the organisation Good Night Out, who campaign for safer nightlife and also run training sessions for venue staff in safer spaces and in being prepared for issues and incidents when they happen. The venue arranged for all of their staff to receive the training and, according to Fox, “Made sure that the event we were holding was really immaculately safe and positive.”
While this was good for Loud Women’s first festival, Fox was keen to see the good work continue once the event was over. “I know they [the venue] wanted Loud Women to clean up their reputation, as it were” she laughs, “I was really keen for that legacy to then carry on in the more macho pub gigs they were holding afterwards. I don’t know how much did carry on, but certainly all of their staff got that training, and it got them thinking about it.”
Loud Women tend to hold their gigs in smaller venues but, for the festivals, larger venues are hired. Larger venues means more people, and more people mean a greater likelihood of an incident happening. “For the festivals we bring all of our own volunteers” says Fox “So we have lots of Loud Women volunteers in hi vi vests all around the festival.” This level of visibility means that “there’s always someone that you can see really clearly and someone that you can grab for help if you need it” similarly, if festival goers need advice or are feeling overwhelmed by the large crowd and/or the noise, the volunteers are also able to find that person somewhere quiet to take time out from the event.
In addition to having had the same pool of volunteers for the past five years, Loud Women aren’t resting on their laurels. They revisit and refine their safer spaces policies, they look at what has and hasn’t worked at events, and they build on their successes while rectifying any mistakes. “We always make sure that we work with venues who respect that as well” says Fox.
Activism and research: Tackling sexual harassment and sexual violence at gigs
When I originally spoke to the Baltimore based musician and activist Shawna Potter in the summer of 2019, she was partway through a European tour with her feminist hardcore band, War On Women. We spoke on FaceTime, her from Zurich, me from Greater Manchester. She had not long published a book, Making Spaces Safer: A Guide to Giving Harassment the Boot Wherever You Work, Play and Gather, a short, accessible, handy sized publication that built on the years she had spent as a safer spaces trainer and activist, providing safer spaces training for a variety of venues and organisations. She was keen to stress that her book was not specifically about strategies for tackling sexual harassment and sexual violence at gigs, not because it couldn’t be used for that purpose, but simply because it was created with the idea of providing training and strategies for tackling all forms of harassment.
As a woman in a hardcore punk band, she has often had people take her aside and tell her “‘The punk scene’s so sexist’, or ‘hardcore’s so sexist, harassment happens — blah blah blah’ and I’m like ‘It ain’t just hardcore, you know, I hate to tell you, it’s kind of anywhere we go in public’.”
She added “People that are exhibiting bad behaviour do not just do it at a random punk show after six beers. They’re doing it on some other scale, even at a smaller scale, in other places, with other people, and they’re carrying that around with them, that’s in them somewhere, so it’s gonna come out. And the sooner that that behaviour can be curbed, or corrected, the better. And frankly that takes more and more people saying ‘Hey, no — you can’t do that here’.”
What she intends to do with her training, and with her book, is to provide venues, staff and individuals with the tools and strategies to challenge harassment, in its many forms, whenever and wherever they encounter it… safely.
Another inspiration for Potter, in doing her work, is the number of times she’s seen venues claim to be safer spaces merely by putting a rainbow flag poster in the window, without providing any training for staff. Not only does this create a false promise and give attendees a false sense of security and reassurance, it also means that staff are entirely unprepared when an incident of harassment does happen. In Shawna’s experience, it’s not a case of if such incidents happen, it’s a case of when. This is why she uses the phrase safer spaces, not safe spaces.
Dr Rosemary Lucy Hill’s Healthy Music Audiences project, a collaboration between herself, researcher Molly Megson, Girl Gang Leeds and Kate Zezulka of the Leeds Music Hub, was a research project of two halves. The first half was “more about finding out what people’s experiences were like at gigs” said Hill when I spoke to her for the second time via FaceTime in October 2020. Hill and her researchers spoke to audience members about their gig going experiences, but also venue managers and promoters because they wanted to hear about their experiences of “when something happened, what did they do about it and what did they feel they could do about it.”
The results were “Quite eye opening really because a lot of them just felt really at sea with things, and didn’t know what to do.” Venues and promoters knew there were problems with behaviours such as sexual harassment, and sexual assault, but they didn’t feel equipped to deal with that.
It’s not the first time that venues and venue security have felt, or been perceived as being, ill equipped or under prepared when it comes to dealing with incidents, whether they be incidents of harassment or violence: The public inquiry into the Manchester Arena bombing in 2017 has raised a number of issues about security arrangements at the venue, both generally and on the night of the Ariana Grande concert. Counter-terrorism legislation, which would increase the burden of responsibility of venues and security staff when it comes to providing training to anticipate, prevent and deal with future terrorist attacks in public venues, was released for public consultation in February 2021.
The phase one findings by Hill and her team, particularly this sense of venues and promoters not knowing how best to tackle the problem of sexual harassment and sexual violence, led to the second phase of the project, which focuses on how best to “implement change to prevent or deal better with incidents of sexual violence.” They began to run events, including one in Leeds for venue managers and promoters in June 2019, which was well attended.
At the event, the research group presented their findings to the venue managers and promoters. In inviting a number of different managers and promoters from different Leeds venues, they hoped to provide an opportunity for different venues to “talk to each other about what they were doing, and their experiences.”
At the event, they introduced the venues to Good Night Out and another organisation, White Ribbon (the campaign to end male violence against women), who also have a safer music campaign. Hill and her researchers really wanted the venues and promoters to “take up either White Ribbon’s accreditation or Good Night Out’s training scheme” and some of those present did, “but it wasn’t as many as we would have liked.” Nonetheless, “it still felt like a really successful event.”
Hill is a pragmatist and accepts that there were a number of reasons why venues and promoters chose not to engage with the training and accreditation offered, including money. “It’s not like it’s mega expensive, but when you’re a venue on the breadline to start with, spending another five hundred quid on training can be really hard.”
While the training offered by Good Night Out covers how staff relate to each other, and to the audience, Hill was concerned that it didn’t cover “how the audience should be interacting with each other”, itself part of the problem when it comes to incidents of sexual harassment and sexual violence at live music venues. Similarly, Hill and her team took a microscope to the many and varied safer spaces policies drawn up by different music venues. They found some good practice and some “rubbish practice” as well as plenty of examples of “people not really knowing what they were doing but knowing they needed to have one” and doing it really badly.
She was also aware of the wider discussion around safer spaces, and accusations that safer spaces are really about “excluding white men and not really therefore being very inclusive”. She and her team had come up against this attitude a number of times in the course of their research and, while feeling it was “misguided”, also knew that they couldn’t ignore those views if they wanted the venue owners and promoters to engage with what the project was doing. After all, a venue that is unhappy with the language of safer spaces might not be against the idea of making things better; “they knew that they needed some kind of policy but they weren’t sure how to go about it. The safer spaces thing clearly wasn’t going to work for them, and also they were saying ‘we don’t have the experience and the skills to write a policy ourselves.’” says Hill.
From this, the project team began to think about how they could produce a resource for venues and promoters that would be useful while also taking into account “these different perspectives on what safer spaces are and how useful they are” The idea was to enable venues to “be quite positively minded about what they’re able to do, and what they’re already doing.” By using positive language, rather than a list of ‘don’ts’ in their policies, the venues could write something that not only worked for the venue, but which demonstrated how the venue’s attitude and policy benefitted everyone. The whole thinking process was a long one, but it didn’t happen in a vacuum: Hill and her team did consultations with venues as well as with a broad, inclusive and representative section of the Leeds community.
In September 2020, the research group launched a website: saferspaces.org.uk which seeks to take promoters and venues by the hand and gently lead them through the process of creating a safer spaces policy for their venue. It also signposts organisations such as Good Night Out, and other useful organisations and resources, including Shawna Potter’s book.
The launch event for the website took place via Zoom in September, and was widely attended by a mixture of interested parties, including musicians, promoters, venue staff, academics and journalists. The feedback on the day from those who attended was interested and positive.
Under reported and under discussed: Sexual violence and harassment against artists, in music venues
As I mentioned earlier, incidents of sexual violence and harassment at music venues can impact everyone who uses those venues. Shawna Potter, speaking with her musicians hat on in 2019, explained that one of the hardest aspects of touring is not knowing what to expect when you arrive at a venue. “That goes from the size of the stage, the kind of PA, the other bands playing, all the way to ‘Is everyone here gonna be creepy to me?’ or “Do they know what they’re doing when it comes to marginalised people?’ ‘Will I see a non white face anywhere?’” and, ultimately, “Am I just gonna see a bunch of cis white dudes and feel out of place all night.’”
Her concerns were echoed in the summer of 2020 when I spoke to Scottish musician and activist Siobhan Wilson, who was in the process of setting up POWA (Protection Of Womxn in the Arts) with fellow Scottish musician and activist Ashley Stein. Like a number of other Scottish female musicians that year, they were beginning to realise the extent to which women musicians in particular were vulnerable to the cold new reality of COVID-19, but also the extent to which female musicians in the Scottish scene had always had to contend with unsafe working conditions. #MiseFosa, the Gaelic #MeToo, which had emerged earlier in the summer out of the Irish folk scene, had also raised concerns about a culture of sexual harassment and violence within their own music community.
The Musicians Union Safe Space Scheme was set up in the aftermath of the #MeToo movement in order to “enable musicians to share instances of sexual harassment, abuse, bullying or discrimination in the music industry.” Musicians can report their experiences to the union via their online tool or by emailing the Musicians Union Safe Space Scheme.
A report by the the union, For The Love Of Music: Ending Sexual Harasment In The Music Industry, was published in January 2021. Amongst it’s conclusions was an acknowledgment that the live music arena was not a safe workplace for women:
“Musicians work in a range of environments where sexual harassment may be more likely to take place — for example live music venues, festivals, pubs and environments in which alcohol consumption is likely.
There is also a significant power imbalance between musicians and the people who engage them to do work, which can make sexual harassment more likely.”
The pandemic, while shutting down the immediate problem of sexual abuse and harassment at live music venues, has merely moved it to other arenas, particularly the home. As Shawna Potter said earlier: People that are exhibiting bad behaviour do not just do it at a random punk show after six beers. It’s not possible to know if the massive increase in reported domestic violence cases in the UK since March 2020 is linked to the closure of pubs and other social outlets, all that is certain is that there has been an increase in domestic violence during the COVID-19 pandemic in the UK.
For many in the live music industry, the post-COVID-19 priority will be simply to get live music venues open again. The pandemic has further highlighted and aggravated already existing inequalities in the music industry, including how musicians earn money, and it has ruined the livelihoods and career chances of those crews who provide the expert technical and construction skills that ensure live music events happen. In the UK, musicians and crews are also feeling the cold chill of Brexit on their backs, and the prospect of crippling extra costs if they ever want to play gigs in an EU country ever again.
Just as there’s no point in saving venues if there are no musicians left to play in them, it also feels pointless to re-open if 51% of the population face more obstacles in attending than the other 49%. And women were already being put off attending gigs and festivals, pre-COVID-19. As Dr Rosemary Lucy Hill points out, women do a lot of over thinking before they even step out of the door to attend a gig. “We think carefully about what we’re gonna wear, where we’re gonna stand, who we’re gonna go to gigs with. How much we’re gonna drink. Whether we’re gonna go to this particular gig.” Because women have been hit disproportionately hard, economically, by the COVID-19 pandemic, they will also have less money to spend on entertainment when gigs do resume.
COVID-19 Safer Spaces
Back in September 2020, when it looked as though the pandemic was easing in the UK and the possibility of a very tentative return to live music and performance seemed likely, discussions of COVID-19 secure venues begot a surprising side discussion: While making venues COVID safe might we also make them safer spaces? If you’re already spending time and money adapting venues and training staff to implement COVID-19 safety measures, maybe putting a safer spaces policy and training in place would be a relatively straightforward add on to that?
“It’s almost embarrassing to be wanting to talk to venues about the future of gigs when actually they don’t know whether they’re gonna be open in the next month” said Hill when I spoke to her in October 2020.
But, on reflection, safer spaces training and COVID-19 secure measures do “seem to be a natural fit together” she feels. “If you’re thinking about safety in terms of not spreading infectious diseases then you might as well think about safety in terms of people not groping each other. And therefore having some sort of more encompassing safer spaces policy might be useful there.”
She explains “We wrote our template, the 5 step set of questions, thinking particularly about sexual harassment but also thinking a bit more broadly in terms of lessons learnt from Attitude Is Everything, in terms of accessibility, some of the conversations we were having with trans music fans, and black minority ethnic venue owners, and events organisers. To think a little bit more broadly about what safety might mean. And I think there’s room therefore in the questions that venue managers might think ‘How can we bring in questions around safety in terms of Covid into this policy?’”
She concludes “One thing that might be useful would be turning the safer spaces thing on its head and start from Covid and bring all of the other stuff in. Because people have to think about Covid.”
Like the UK, the US has been hammered by the COVID-19 pandemic. As such, Shawna Potter found herself focusing much of her energy in early 2020 on ensuring that she could live and survive. Despite this, she did notice an increased interest in safer spaces training in the early days of the pandemic and also in the wake of the death of George Floyd in late May 2020.
“People were really starting to recognise that there’s an uptick in harassment against Asian Americans right now” she explained when I FaceTimed her at the start of November 2020, mere days before the US election “and that police brutality is still happening against black people especially, so people started realising that they were needed as bystanders. And so there was a lot of interest, and I already did some trainings.”
As time went on however, the economic reality of the pandemic, and of the choices citizens were being forced to make in order to survive, kicked in. “Unemployment is running out, the government stimulus is long gone, and people wanna stay home just to stay safe but they have to go to work because there’s no other way to pay the bills, and so they’re struggling with that” She confessed. “I actually think that people are not as able to commit to taking a training as they would be if they just had their basic needs met” she concluded.
In recent weeks, women’s lack of confidence in the UK police to protect them (which appears to be part of a wider lack of confidence identified by a YouGov poll in February 2020) has been exposed in the wake of the Sarah Everard case, and there have been a tsunami of accusations of sexual abuse and harassment in our schools. Why, the question is being asked, should it be down to women and girls to prevent and mitigate instances of sexual violence and harassment? Why are boys and men not being included in these conversations? To carry this further, why should it be women who have to dodge out of the way of a groping hand? Why can’t men and boys learn to control themselves and be educated to know what is and isn’t acceptable behaviour?
While these conversations are continuing, one thing we can do as music fans is to continue to talk about the issue of sexual harassment and sexual violence at gigs. Because, as the recent conversation around sexual harassment and sexual violence in schools has shown, if you don’t talk about it, flag it up, and provide overwhelming evidence that the issue exists then it will not be recognised as a problem to be addressed, however wrong that thinking is.
Similarly, without wishing to piggy back onto the UK government’s worryingly hyperbolic COVID-19 era slogan, ‘Build Back Better’, it does seem to be worth asking what we can do when it comes to ensuring that sexual violence at gigs does not return when the venues re-open.
“[I am] starting to see events happening, industry events, which are ‘What is the future of the music industry?’, ‘What is the future of music festivals?’, ‘What is the future of gigs?’ And I think that that makes for a really good opportunity to make sure the issues of what we might call equality and diversity remain on the table, or come to the table if they weren’t there before” says Dr Rosemary Lucy Hill, though she admits that she has yet to be approached by anyone organising any of these kind of events. “It would be interesting to know if other people, like Good Night Out have” she muses.
When venues re-open and live music does start up again, music journalists writing about live music should be sensitive when writing about incidents of sexual violence and harassment, but at the same time they should also strive to represent the reality of gig going in their writing, whether that be in features or in gig reviews themselves.
In a related note, and in a world where artists and their teams have greater control over artist press coverage than ever before, it would be nice if PR’s and publications didn’t penalise writers for calling out unacceptable behaviour by an artist, a member of their team, or by their fans. That includes incidents of sexual harassment and sexual violence, whether against members of the public or against artists.
As Hill says, a gig is about more than just the band. “I don’t know whether that’s something journalists are taking on, or want to take on” she told me in 2019, “That the gig is more than just whether the band are in the right frame of mind for the night.”
For musicians Dream Nails and Shawna Potter, while they welcomed discussions of sexual harassment and sexual violence at gigs, they didn’t necessarily feel that gig reviews were always the right place to raise the issue.
Anya from Dream Nails had a novel idea in 2019 “I think it would be a really interesting social experiment for gig reviewers to start rating live music partly based on how inclusive and safe the environment was for fans.” She said, “It could be like a five star rating system! Having said that, I don’t think it’s the reviewer’s personal duty (anymore than anyone else’s) to put themselves on the front line and take on someone causing an incident, because then that puts them in danger. The best thing to do is to alert the venue security and let the person experiencing the harassment know that you are an ally and can provide support if they need you.”
As members of the audience, it would be a good thing if we felt knowledgeable and confident enough to raise our concerns with venue security if we see something we suspect is wrong. Most people, Shawna Potter feels, want to do the right thing when they see an incident unfolding before them; they just don’t know where to start.
“If I saw someone choking in front of me, or having a heart attack, I might have some ideas about what to do” she says, “but without seeing the information ‘This is what you do if someone has a heart attack’, ‘This is what you do if there was a fire’, ‘This is what you do if someone’s choking’ — without seeing that a bunch of times, in a bunch of different ways, or knowing that there’s a guide, a poster in every restaurant that tells you exactly what the steps are, I would feel uncomfortable. I wouldn’t just reach down someone’s throat and try to pull out what they’re choking on!” she laughs. “It’s almost like that idea if you just see something in print, it feels more official, it feels more real. And it’s something to follow.” She says.
Potter’s book builds on the principles of bystander intervention theory to provide audience members with a number of different strategies they can use when they do see something happening that they feel is wrong. As both Anya and Potter acknowledge, this doesn’t have to mean walking up to the perpetrator and tackling them directly, but it does mean doing something and not just turning away from what is unfolding in front of you.
As to what artists can do, they can continue to call out incidents and behaviours when they happen at their gigs and, if they feel safe doing so, they could do a lot simply by talking to venues and promoters about the environments they will be performing in and by raising any concerns they might have about how safe a space that venue is. It is worth noting however that, for reasons outlined earlier in this piece, many artists will not feel that they are able to discuss their concerns with venues and promoters. This is a problem that needs to be tackled as part of wider initiatives to tackle sexual harassment and discrimination within the music industry at large. Organisations such as The Musicians Union and POWA, as well as the musician Kate Nash, have begun the long and arduous task of collecting evidence on a number of interrelated issues in this area. It will be interesting to see what happens next.
One of the recommendations of the Musicians Union report is for the UK government to “Introduce a mandatory duty on workplaces to protect all workers from sexual harassment” their reasoning being that “A mandatory statutory duty would create a clear and enforceable legal requirement on all workplaces to safeguard workers, and help bring about cultural change in the workplace.” All workplaces would mean gig venues and music festivals being subject to the same safeguarding laws and regulations as other workplaces. This wouldn’t solve the problem of sexual harassment and sexual violence against workers, including artists, but it would provide a level of accountability that is lacking at the moment.
Ending, or even reducing, incidents of sexual harassment and sexual violence at live music venues and festivals will be no easy task. It will require the strongest efforts of every interested party to even bring it under control because, for years, it has raged unchecked. The COVID-19 pandemic, and the imposition of social distancing, have provided an unexpected opportunity to tackle it. Let’s hope we take it.
