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Part 2 What happened, what is coming next
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last edited
by KreveTTe 5 years, 8 months ago
This section is still in progress, please be patient.
- A brief history of what issues have arisen in the past, and what efforts have been made to address them.
- Prior to 2015? It is unclear if there were any efforts made to raise awareness of consent in the community. Anecdotal accounts were starting to surface that there had been consent violations in the community, but others remained blissfully ignorant that there was a problem.
- NoBED, Yes!BED is a consent education project that was first debuted at London Decom in 2014. It made its first premiere at Nowhere in 2015. The project is loosely modeled on the Bureau of Erotic Discourse (B.E.D. for short), a project promoting consent culture at Burning Man since 2005. The project promotes consent within the community with fun, sex-positive messages in a variety of formats:
- posters posted in each toilet, so all participants can read about consent while they're sitting on the toilet
- badges handed out at the event
- educational binders made available at Malfare, Welfare Enough, and NoInfo with more detailed information about asking for consent, saying no, receiving a no, and more.
- a workshop offered in 2015 called "Fuck Yeah" which went over much of the information in the binders
- Despite some initial resistance by people in the community, many people welcomed this effort and some of the cynics have since come around. There are still some who feel that the messaging is too negative, or is too frequent and is not necessary.
- What do we know about the scope of the issue and how it has changed over time?
- The short answer is: not much. We don't have many reliable resources of this information where it's tracked methodically.
- Starting in 2015, we added a few questions to the census about whether people felt that they had been treated respectfully during the event. Those questions have been included every year after 2015. They show:
- 2015 - [to add]
- 2016 - Nowhere's total population was 1939 people. 21% responded to the census questionnaire.
- 95% felt they were respected most of the time
- 5% had several disrespectful interactions
- 2017 - [to add]
- Malfare receives and responds to reports of consent violations, however their documentation is mostly for internal use to keep other Malfare and No-mad volunteers aware of what has happened. It is not done in a way such that they can easily provide numbers and statistics for the broader community. In 2017, Nowhere received six reports of consent violations, which is more than it has received than in any year prior. The nature of many of these were intentional consent violations, not consent accidents (misunderstanding about whether the other party consented).
- Known gaps/concerns with what isn’t being addressed, where Nowhere could improve.
- Victim support:
- Safe space for anyone who has recently experienced a consent violation (no matter how minor) or has trauma in their past
- Trained person available to help recent victims process
- Better training for volunteers who might be interacting with victims to prevent causing further harm (Welfare, Malfare / Nomads)
- Education / Prevention:
- Pre-event:
- Improving info provided in the Survival Guide
- Wiki with loads of resources (what you're reading now!)
- Other pre-event education such as Facebook PSAs?
- Promotion of consent culture within each barrio:
- Think about how consent violation complaints will be handled within the barrio (because unfortunately they do happen and how they are handled makes a HUGE difference!)
- Come to agreement about which areas of their barrio are OK for public sex and at what times (if not all the time).
- Check to see if camp leads are modeling / demonstrating healthy consent culture - no matter what is said about camp values, behavior speaks more loudly.
- On site:
- Greeters can model consent in their interactions as they greet new arrivals as well as educating people on its importance.
- Workshops on consent-related knowledge & skills have been sporadic, not well organized, not the best quality. They need better coordination and scheduling to prevent conflicts and make sure most of them are towards the beginning of the week so people can apply their new skills during the event.
- Orientation within each barrio at beginning of event promoting education about consent and where to go if there is an issue
- Barrios enact measures they have planned to promote consent culture
- Community members should look out for each other / don’t be a passive bystander if you see an interaction that looks concerning
- Bystander intervention is one of the techniques that could be taught in a workshop
- Structural measures to prevent known predators from coming on site / take appropriate action when participants violate consent of others
- Malfare - [add current processes]
- Nowhere's policy needs to be clarified regarding how to handle various situations beyond the immediate short-term. When can someone be kicked off site? Refused entry? Malfare enacts the will of the participants, but in many of these situations there are divided opinions/perspectives. Once the policy is clarified, Malfare can know better how to handle them when they arise.
- Ethics committee: There has been talk of forming an ethics committee for many years, and it seems that this is starting to gain more momentum. This committee can help set policies around how to handle repeat violations.
- Making it easier to report incidents:
- Ongoing education the community about where to go during the event if someone's consent is violated.
- Organizing a post-event assessment of how we did re: consent, announcing that we welcome reports and then processing that information to create an assessment of what happened and how we can do better.
- Creating a method for people to report incidents long after the event is over. In many consent violation cases, the survivor can take a long time to process what happened, recognize it for what it is, and reach a place where they feel comfortable reporting it. Unfortunately, because Nowhere is a volunteer-run festival that takes place for one week out of the year, there is no one who can receive or process reports during the rest of the year.
There is a project underway to create a year-round committee, ready to receive and process reports not only from Nowhere but many other European burns as well, and incidents that take place within the community outside of an official Burn event. The hope is that this committee can not only address individual incidents within the community year-round, but start to identify patterns of abuse.
2018 Up date
- Pre-event actions :
- Consent Barrio guide (see 2019 version)
- Encouragement to define some Consent leads both genders in each barrio
- Slack animation with all those interested to propose an action as individual or barrio representative
- On site actions
- Malfare / Nomad / Greeters training
- Barrio Tour, connexion with the barrio consent lead, last minute consent guidelines refresh, posters and badges distribution
- Respect Tuesday has been a success with more than 20 events dealing with consent that day / about 100 all along the week
- Launch of the Safe Space, a condidential place to be listened after a significant consent breach
- The consent violation reporting box through which the participants can ask for an appointment in the Safe Space
- Post Event actions :
- Community post-event information (anonymous / statistics) 17 reports received, most of them anonymous.
- Offended person support
- Perpetrators sorry for their actions support
- Lobbying for an educative instance that would process the reports received
- 2019 preparation
2019 Up date
- Pre-event actions :
- On site actions
- Malfare / Nomad / Greeters / Welfare Enough training
- Barrio Tour, connexion with the barrio consent lead, last minute consent guidelines refresh, posters and badges distribution
- Respect Tuesday has been a success with more than 20 events dealing with consent that day, more accurate approaches / about 80 all along the week
- Safe Space, a condidential place to be listened after a significant consent breach
- (new) Blue hats, a team of good listeners easily available to listen to any participant at the Safe Space
- The consent violation reporting box through which the participants can ask for an appointment in the Safe Space
- Post Event actions :
- Community post-event information (anonymous / statistics) 14 reports received, most of them anonymous.
- Offended person support
- Perpetrators sorry for their actions support
- Lobbying for an educative instance that would process the reports received
- 2020 preparation
Please find some resources to learn more
Tools & Resources available for any workshop provider and any Burn Core Team
Would you like to contribute ? Join the team !
Email nowherebed@gmail.com
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Part 2 What happened, what is coming next
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