Sometimes you start a piece and it becomes an odyssey...
I first began researching and talking to people about the issue of sexual harassment and sexual violence at live music venues and music festivals back in 2018, not long before I left my job at the University of Manchester. It was not a happy time so, in retrospect, choosing to research a topic as dark as sexual harassment and sexual violence at gigs wasn't the wisest decision I could have made.
What made me want to investigate these issues initially was that, having written the previous summer about a lack of women headliners at music festivals, I was beginning to appreciate the ways in which the two issues related to each other, both directly and indirectly.
Life got in the way in 2018 but I didn't entirely let the issue go, in fact events in 2018 and 2019 conspired to make me believe that it was just as vital a time to be writing about the issue of sexual harassment and sexual violence at gigs. Artists were tweeting about it, journalists were writing about it, YouGov were publishing findings on it, and there were activists and academics working in that area who would be interesting to speak to and, when I did speak to them, had a lot of really good stuff to say.
By late 2019, I had a new day job and my writing time was being increasingly squeezed by it, meaning I had to - reluctantly - put the research to one side again.
Then, Covid happened.
Like a lot of people, I was suddenly left with a lot of time on my hands.
Unfortunately, it wasn't a particularly great time to be talking to people about sexual harassment and violence at gigs, what with live music being on indefinite hold and everything.
By Autumn 2020, things were looking a little bit more positive and the issue was being talked about again by activists. Time to jump in again.
The article I have just published over on Medium was pitched to a number of newspapers and music publications in the summer of 2019, albeit in a very different form and with a different focus to the one it now has. No one was interested, which I don't take personally as this is often the case and I'm really crap at pitching. In 2021, it has been re-angled and re-focused to reflect the current times we are living in, but I feel it's all the better for that. I didn't re-pitch those publications I'd sent it to in 2019, mainly because I felt like I wanted to write a no holds barred piece and it's not always possible to do that if you're working with publications, but I am hoping people manage to find and read the piece all the same.
If you'd like to read it, you can do so here.
Photo by Hanny Naibaho on Unsplash
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