Case Studies
Throughout our progress, we’ve found some exemplar changemaking ideas, initiatives, legislation and research. We’re compiling these across the world, where venues, artists, community groups, legislators and researchers are working towards making safe and inclusive spaces. You may find ideas here for your own teams, or chuck your support behind existing collective efforts.
Venue Initiatives
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Camden, UK
Situated in Camden, London, Buttoned Down Disco (BDD) is an independently promoted event with monthly residency at KOKO Nightclub. The event promotes a happy, safe atmosphere through a regulated door policy. To enter, patrons must subscribe to an invite list (functioning like a mailing list), where invites can be printed or shown via your phone to their door person. This requires patrons to have online interaction with the brand and culture before entering the venue. It’s a conscious process to keep out walk-ins from the street, and monitor the internal culture.
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New York City, USA
House of Yes is a self-described funky venue showcasing dance, circus, theatre & cabaret performances in a former ice warehouse in New York City.
Their policies and promotional strategies for managing consent are industry-leading. They have available signage “Consent is Sexy” for download on their website, provide educational signage within the venue to empower their patrons to understand the difference between flirting and harassment, and employ a dedicated consent manager role who handles complaints and processes.
Their website has a hub of information for event promoters in how to manage consent. They require consent policies, staff training and signage at all programmed events.
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Lincolnshire, UK
The Ask for Angela campaign started with a simple idea: helping patrons to self-identify when they’re unsafe, without needing to verbalise it, in case they’re in the presence of danger. There are variations of this campaign including “the angel shot”, so patrons can order drinks at the bar without alerting the presence of unsafe company.
They can approach the bar and “ask for angela”, where staff are trained in responding through safety processes to help the patron safely leave the situation. The campaign provides signage and information on how to implement it in venues.
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Perth, Australia
After comprehensive training of all staff and security on their events, Club Freak offers a green lanyard process that visually indicates team members who are available to respond to their safety needs and concerns. They collaboratively promote their safety processes and zero-tolerance policy across social media, event promotions and door code.
“If you see something amiss or feel uncomfortable or have any concern at all, please approach a Team Freak member with a green lanyard as your first point of call.”
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Safer Spaces At Festivals is a campaign and charter of best practice originally launched in 2017 to tackle sexual violence, harassment and assault at festivals. It was relaunched in May 2022 by AIF in partnership with Rape Crisis England and Wales, Good Night Out, Safe Gigs for Women, Girls Against and UN Women.
They have created a Charter for independent festivals to commit to take all reports of sexual violence seriously. This is combined with processes, health resources, signage, and promotion of consent principals to gig-goers. They’ve got 90 signatories so far, and growing.
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Exeter, UK
In the UK, Stamp Out Spiking is a charitable organisation, established to tackle the increasing incidents of drink spiking across the UK and Worldwide. They offer SOS-global accredited training courses targeted on public health and safety around drink spiking. The course is only 20 minutes, and costs £5.
They also have an online listing of products available to help venues in reducing drink spiking including StopTopps and Night Caps.
Artist Initiatives
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Melbourne, Australia
Melbourne based punk-trio Camp Cope lead waves in 2017. Press reported the St Jerome’s Laneway Festival had introduced a harassment hotline in collaboration with Camp Cope. 1800-Laneway was a hotline which acted as a means for “patrons to report and escalate any inappropriate or disrespectful behaviour”.
The initiative was simple: any festival attendee who experiences disrespect, threatening behaviour, abuse or assault is asked to call 1800 LANEWAY. Laneway Festival launched a video with Camp Cope explaining the program and encouraging visibility of the issue. The video also featured Ella Thomspon (of GL), and singer-songwriter Julia Jacklin.
The band also started the reactionary hashtag trend #ItTakesOne, to draw awareness to disturbing behaviour trends at local gigs. Spearheading the campaign, Camp Cope had enough of “the dickhead-ery that’s ruining live music”.
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Perth, Australia
Boat Show was a Perth-based punk band who had representative members at the first SVWA Backyard Round Table discussion. Fronted by Ali Flintoff, Boat Show collaborated with the venue and promoter to have visible signage at their gig for a ZERO-TOLERANCE POLICY for harassment, intimidation and abuse.
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London, UK
Riders are standard hospitality practice, touring musicians can ask for drinks in the dressing room - but what if we used them to promote inclusion?
EQ50 is a collective of women working towards fairer representation within drum and bass, The Jaguar Foundation aims to make electronic music a more equal place for future generations.
They were commended for promoting the Inclusion Rider strategy for musicians and DJs to demand promoters to implement a zero-tolerance policy to harassment and assault at events.
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Australia
Where better to start making our venues inclusive than our stages? The Girls Rock! Australia is a national network of girls rock camps. Each program is independently run by a team of musicians and educators passionate about empowering girls, trans and gender-diverse young people through music education and mentorship.
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Perth, Australia
WOMPP — Women of Music Production Perth — is a female-run label, booking agency and Ableton user group community. WOMPP gives the opportunity to female, transgender and non-binary music makers to share, discuss and showcase music production within the broader Australian music community. Alongside the record label and booking agency, WOMPP curates monthly community meetings and showcases.
Community Initiatives
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Perth, Australia
Local powerhouses have started Boorloo-based community initiatives, parties and workshop series to promote safety and inclusion.
In 2021, Soul Alphabet members founded their manifesto, to foster change alongside event organisers, patrons and the wider creative community.
This collective effort offers workshops, fundraisers, events and community building to work towards safer spaces for Bla(c)k people, POC & queer/LGBTQIA+ people, especially those living at the intersections of these groups in Boorloo/Perth.
Club Jewelz, run by local DJ’s & radio hosts offers workshops and event series to bring underrepresented creatives to the forefront, with a focus on inclusivity, diversity and accessibility in dance music.
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Egypt
Award-winning HarassMap is based on the idea that if more people start taking action when sexual harassment happens in their presence, we can end this epidemic.
The app offers a quick guide to sexual harassment, and empowers users to report what they’ve witnessed to collate data, share stories, and get active as a collective society to report to authorities and raise awareness. It aims to promote intervention strategies in bystanders.
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Mumbai, India
This free crowdsourcing platform is for personal stories of sexual harassment and abuse in public spaces. The data, which can be anonymous, gets aggregated as hot spots on a map indicating trends at local levels. The collated report is then available to local communities and local administration to identify factors that cause behaviour that leads to violence, and to work on strategies for solutions to public safety (especially for women). The process takes under 2 minutes. The app offers a comprehensive category-breakdown on incidents, and legal FAQs on how to respond.
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New York City, USA
Right To Be organisation offers a series of initiatives to help tackle sexual harassment, which is rife on the streets of their home in NYC. This community-led initiative has grown significantly in the last few years, and now offers free virtual trainings in bystander intervention strategies and personal development to support communities in combating street and sexual harassment. They promote social strategies through publications (online and in print) on a global scale.
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Perth, Australia
Not just for healthcare workers, SARC is an invaluable asset to the Western Australian community to help challenges misconceptions and provide tangible skills in responding to sexual assault.
Presentations include Sexual Assault and Responding to Disclosures, The Impact of Trauma, Building on Trauma Knowledge, Vicarious Trauma and Self Care for Workers.
SARC also runs a 24/7 crisis counseling line for recent assaults (08) 6458 1828
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London, UK
For four years, Safer Gigs for Women UK has been a volunteer-run community effort to promote awareness of sexual assault at music events. They pop-up at festivals and events offering resources, merch and support to patrons. They work with venues to ensure they take on reports seriously, and with bands to recognise minimum standards about acceptable behaviours in gig-goers and how to promote.
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London, UK
Founded by activist Nadia Khan, Women in CTRL is a not-for-profit organisation and professional member community of over 5,000 members globally which provides tools and training to empower women to leadership.
To promote diversity and inclusion in leadership roles is to make tangible, global effort.
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Melbourne, Australia
This club night believes that a holistic approach toward safer space policy is needed to create change.
It requires in-house policies and values that are supported by all venue staff from security to punters to workers and artists.
Cool Line
An SMS-line provided to event goers, that can be used to report any issue, harassment or concern throughout the night. This text line is run by safety officers organised by the event.
Legislative Initiatives
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Lithuania, Europe
Started in 2020, funded by European Union’s Rights, Equality and Citizenship Programme, the SHINE project aims to create a common culture among nightlife stakeholders and give them appropriate tools to prevent sexual harassment in nightlife venues. One of the project’s main foreseen achievement will be the creation of a multipliable working model through implementing quality management systems, training programmes and awareness, networking between nightlife stakeholders, and education.
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Australia
In a Discussion Paper published in 2006, the Model Criminal Code Officers’ Committee was commissioned to conduct Stage One of a national project on drink spiking. Drink spiking was identified as an emerging issue for examination under the alcohol priority area by the Ministerial Council on Drug Strategy, and rising media attention.
These early-2000s models were instrumental in shifting attitudes around drink spiking. The combative effects of awareness, training, resources/guidelines and policy.
The 2004 National Project on Drink Spiking report report outlines a series of resource packages tailored to the different stakeholders in the drink spiking initiative, from emergency hospital workers, liquor industry staff, to school students.
Research and Reports
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Melbourne, Australia
A literature review of 98 global programs, inclusive of high-, medium- and low-income demographics, assessed their effectiveness in reducing the prevalence of gender-violence. Findings highlighted the following key strategies:
• Communications and social marketing;
• Policy, legislative and institutional reform;
• Community mobilisation;
• Organisational development;
• Collective advocacy, and;
• Individual or group participation (i.e. school curriculums).
• Preventions have been shown to be more effective when combining a multi-component approach of the above.
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Europe
The Journal of Interpersonal Violence has published Nightlife Violence: A Gender-Specific View on Risk Factors for Violence in Nightlife Settings: A Cross-Sectional Study in Nine European Countries. Whilst obvious barriers to the applications of these findings (i.e. difference in location and cultures from Australia to Europe), the journal still highlights very interesting anthropological factors that contribute to gender violence in nightlife. It notes there are few empirical studies to assess differences in risk factors between genders.
Venue infrastructure and characteristics also played a role in a gendered experience of violence.
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UK
The Journal of Psychology, Evolution and Gender published a paper in 2002 which researched conflict in evening and social events in the UK, finding that factors contributing to masculinity and violence included the following factors:
• The perceived aim of the night out (‘to have a laff’) and different ways this was achieved;
• The appraisal of other men;
• Provoking situations;
• The sequence leading up to aggressive verbal exchanges and to fights;
• The role of alcohol;
• The importance of physical aggression in gaining status;
• The importance attached to responding to a challenge or insult by men and women
• Age differences;
• And ‘banter’ and story-telling among all-male groups.
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Perth, Australia
In 2020, WAM published the first paper of its kind, ‘Fair Play WA Report’ stemming from a series of forums and working groups.
Significantly, the report found that female industry practitioners are ten times more likely to experience gender discrimination than their male counterparts.
Live music venues were identified as being the primary space in which gender discrimination and harassment occurred for both industry practitioners and consumers. This was despite venues having a zero-tolerance policy for violence and being proactive in ensuring gender parity in their staffing as well as providing a safe environment for attendees and staff.
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London, UK
The Jaguar Foundation commissioned and released the report “Progressing Gender Representation In UK Dance Music”.
This project is the first of its kind to focus on all three of these areas together: the UK music industry, dance music, and the gender representation of artists.
Two-thirds of female creators identified sexual harassment or objectification as a key challenge, making it by far the most widely-cited problem.
“The burden should not always be on those who identify in this way to explain their experience to others. Things like the use of correct personal pronouns, correct name, and understanding higher risk safety concerns in live spaces are everyone’s responsibility to understand and act upon.”
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London, UK
This report analyses the change in the make up of board members, Chairpersons and CEO positions across 12 music industry trade bodies in the UK.
In 2021, it found that 27% of CEOs were women. There was an increase in representation of women from 34% (in 2020) to 42% of board members.