We need to talk about sexual harassment at gigs

From the age of 15 onwards, I find it hard to count the number of times that I haven’t been harassed at a gig in some way or another on two hands. This sentence should be harrowing enough as it is, but the fact that I’m an avid gig goer and music journalist makes it even more so.

I’ve been a regular punter at my local music scene – and beyond – for over four years now, yet my happy memories of seeing astonishing live acts has been tarnished with harassment, abuse, and what could even be counted as assault.

One of the earliest incidents I can remember occurred whilst volunteering at a local music festival, managing the stage that the magazine I write for was running. I was making my way through the crowd to the backstage area attempting to find someone, when a pair of men felt it appropriate to grab me by my hair, stopping me in my tracks. Of course, I was made to feel guilty and that I was overreacting when I called them out on it. Of course. I was only 16 at the time.

Another incident involved a middle-aged man who made my gig-going life a bone-chilling hell. It began with him – after clearly misinterpreting my friendly conversation, which also mentioned the fact that I was 16 – following me and my friend back to her car, hounding me incessantly for my phone number. He then proceeded to stare and edge ever closer to me at any gig he saw me at, to point of me having to leave for a period of time, dreading the next time I would see him at a show.

In fear of dragging out this article to dissertation length, this final occurrence is one that I reckon would be enough to put anyone off snagging gig tickets for life.

Not that I’ve never been an annoying drunk, but one absolutely frazzled man at a gig – after spending most of the gig facing backwards into the crowd (oh, alcohol) – thought it would be funny to put his arm around me. When I pulled away, he grabbed me again. I racked up the courage to tell him where to go, but nothing would prepare me for what would happen next.

“Oh, it’s always you fucking women isn’t it?” He exploded at me, calling me “a fat cunt”.

This was followed by spitting, shouting, and swearing, so much to the point that my older male friend had to drag me away – not before I could retort with a snarky “Oh yeah, it’s definitely us women that are the problem, mate. And I wasn’t a fat cunt when you were trying to grab me, was I?”

Luckily I’ve always come away from these incidents pretty unscathed, apart from having an ungodly amount of adrenaline coursing through my system for the rest of the night. When I say “luckily’, it’s important to remember that there seems to be an increasing amount of stories regarding women being killed after rejecting men’s advances in the news as of late – if this doesn’t highlight the severity of the problem, I don’t know what will.

Convinced it wasn’t a personal problem, I reached out to other women, music fans and journalists, to find out if they’d experienced anything similar. The response I received was overwhelming.

At a Foals gig in Leeds, one friend, Holly, had a very drunken man shove his hand down the front of her underwear and grab her after she had begun dancing with him. After hitting him away – receiving no help from anyone else – she had to weave a difficult path to security to get him escorted out of the show.

Something that will be all too familiar to those who have survived harassment or assault occurred afterwards – she felt a heightened state of panic (naturally), and blamed herself for the incident. “He was just drunk”, “I shouldn’t have danced with him”.

Another friend, Alex, told me how at a recent gig she witnessed a man repeatedly trying to put his hand down the pants of the girl she was stood next to, and was refusing to stop. After Alex told him to stop, the next thing she remembers is waking up on the floor after the gig surrounded by paramedics – he had punched her in the face, knocking her clean out.

I received over a dozen other stories in a similar vein to this – ranging from attempts to unstrap bras, to bums being groped and nipples being nipped (yes, you read that correctly), to drinks being spiked, only for the drinker to be assaulted afterwards. I noticed a few disturbing commons themes across the responses I got: security not taking the issue seriously, nobody stepping in to help, and the perpetrator laughing it off as though it was nothing.

My own experiences have featured similar things – being told “Oh he was just being nice”, “Not to make excuses (this phrase never precedes anything good) but he was really drunk, y’know?”, and “Oh he just did something stupid, take a joke”. This victim-blaming rhetoric makes up the backbone of rape culture – something which needs to be addressed and stopped urgently.

Many are advocating for sexual harassment at gigs and the like to be taken much more seriously – including Girls Against – who are working closely with music venues to raise awareness of it, and to inform attendees what can be done if harassment occurs.

For the vast majority of people, music – and live music – is a way of escaping a dreary work week, a way of making new friends and memories that will last a lifetime, and even a career – let’s not let an awful minority of people ruin it for much longer.