Sexual harassment and violence at Australian music festivals: Reporting practices and experiences of festival attendees
| Author | Stephen Tomsen,Phillip Wadds,Bianca Fileborn |
| DOI | 10.1177/0004865820903777 |
| Date | 01 June 2020 |
| Published date | 01 June 2020 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
Article
Sexual harassment and
violence at Australian
music festivals: Reporting
practices and experiences
of festival attendees
Bianca Fileborn
School of Social & Political Sciences, University of Melbourne,
Australia
Phillip Wadds
School of Social Sciences, UNSW Sydney, Australia
Stephen Tomsen
The School of Social Sciences & Psychology, Western Sydney
University, Australia
Abstract
Despite the well-documented under-reporting of sexual violence, to date, no research has
considered reporting practices within the specific context of music festivals. Drawing on 16
in-depth interviews with victim-survivors, this article examines survivors’ experiences of (non)
reporting sexual violence in festival settings. We argue that while some barriers to reporting
are shared across contexts, others play out in context-specific ways. Our research argues that
the liberal, often transgressive culture of music festivals, combined with site-specific policing
practices and spatial context, creates unique impediments to reporting with particular
implications in responding to, and aiming to prevent, sexual violence at music festivals.
Keywords
Festivals, policing, reporting, sexual harassment, sexual violence, violence prevention
Date received: 20 August 2019; revised: 9 December 2019; accepted: 7 January 2020
Corresponding author:
Bianca Fileborn, Room E668, John Medley Building, School of Social & Political Sciences, University of Melbourne,
Parkville 3010, Australia.
Email: biancaf@unimelb.edu.au
Australian & New Zealand Journal of
Criminology
2020, Vol. 53(2) 194–212
!The Author(s) 2020
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DOI: 10.1177/0004865820903777
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Music festivals represent an important aspect of the social and cultural lives of
Australian youth and adults, with participation in the live music scene more broadly
reaping ‘improvements to health, wellbeing and social capital, as well as commercial and
cultural benefits’ (University of Tasmania & Live Music Office, 2014, p. 28). While
music festivals have featured in academic research relating to public health (Earl,
Parker, & Capra, 2005), drug and alcohol use (Hughes & Moxham-Hall, 2017; Lim,
Hellard, Hocking, Spelman, & Aitken, 2010) and as sociologically important sites
(Little, Burger, & Croucher, 2018), their role as a site of sexual violence has received
minimal attention. The topicality of this issue is reflected in recent media reporting
highlighting sexual violence at (predominantly youth-oriented and ‘alternative’) music
festivals across Australia, the UK, Europe and US (Brown, 2019; Davies, 2017;
Dmytryschchak, 2016; Lewis, 2017; The Guardian, 2017). In fact, a 2018 YouGov
poll of UK-based festival attendees indicated that two in five young women had expe-
rienced sexual harassment at a music festival, while 17% of young women under the age
of 40 years reported having been sexually assaulted. In response, grassroots activist
campaigns and industry-led awareness-raising, prevention and reporting initiatives
have been implemented (Burgess, 2018; Moran, 2017).
The growing number of initiatives to encourage reporting of sexual violence at music
festivals are undoubtedly important, given that sexual violence is almost universally
under-reported (Lievore, 2005; Sabina & Ho, 2014). However, these are currently
being deployed in the absence of a context-specific evidence base. In order to address
this gap, we examine findings from a mixed-methods study on sexual violence and safety
at Australian music festivals. In the context of this project, we drew on Kelly’s (1988)
continuum model in conceptualising sexual violence. The continuum takes a
victim-centred – rather than legal – approach to understanding sexual violence, with
any encounter experienced by the victim-survivor as constituting violence acknowledged
as such. This approach thus draws together forms of sexual violence that are often
deemed ‘trivial’ in dominant discourse, or excluded from legal definitions, alongside
more ‘stereotypical’ iterations, such as rape and sexual assault. Drawing on data
from in-depth interviews, we consider participants’ experiences reporting to different
‘authorities’ at music festivals.
1
We argue that the specific contexts of music festivals
produce local barriers to reporting sexual violence requiring a tailored response (see also
Sampsel, Godbout, Leach, Taljaard, & Calder, 2016), though these are also related to
broader structural impediments to reporting and prevention.
Reporting sexual violence
It has been consistently documented that the majority of victim-survivors do not report
to formal sources, such as police or medical personnel (Ahrens, Cabral, & Abeling,
2009; Brubaker, 2009; Eisenberg, Lust, Mathiason, & Porta, 2017; Sabina & Ho,
2014). Disclosure to informal sources of support, such as friends and family, is compa-
rably more common (Ahrens, Campbell, Ternier-Thames, Wasco, & Sefl, 2007;
Brubaker, 2009; Campbell, Greeson, Fehler-Cabral, & Kennedy, 2015; Lievore, 2005;
Orchowski & Gidycz, 2012; Sabina & Ho, 2014). Australian data suggests that 87% of
victim-survivors do not report to police (Australian Bureau of Statistics [ABS], 2017),
and these findings echo international data (United Nations, 2015). In relation to music
Fileborn et al. 195
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