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Women and music festivals: A song for safety
Big music acts may be coming to India. But it’s still unsafe to attend gigs here. It’s worse still for women. Organisers, are you listening?
Ready? Eight-hour cab ride to the venue: Booked. WhatsApp group just for those attending: Set up. Phone: Fully charged. Sunscreen: In a travel-friendly stick. And yet, security-checks at music festivals in India have a way of ruining an Indian woman’s prep. Guards confiscate their trusty cannisters of pepper spray at the gates.
Why carry self-defence tools to a ticketed event for like-minded folks? Because, for women attending gigs in India, things have been kind of a mess.
At AR Rahman’s Chennai concert last month, the stampede-like situation and poor seating arrangements – Rahman later publicly apologised and promised refunds – were bad enough. Several women also shared on social media that they were molested by male attendees. Last week, four students at the Cochin University of Science and Technology (CUSAT) in Kerala died and about 60 were injured after a stampede at an open-air auditorium concert on campus, right before playback singer Nikitha Gandhi performed.
In October 2015 in Gurgaon, a 23-year-old woman died at a Skrillex concert from suffocation. David Guetta was supposed to perform in January 2017, in Bengaluru. But the event’s organiser, Sunburn, was forced to cancel it over the safety of the patrons. New Year’s Eve celebrations, weeks before, had resulted in reports of mass molestation across the city. It happens at college festivals too. In 2017, a Hindu College student was molested at her annual festival during a Sukhwinder Singh performance.
On-site medical tents address dehydration and offer first-aid. They’re not geared to handle cases of sexual harassment. Guards are trained to break up fights and keep the peace rather than deal with creeps. It means that at a gig or gathering in India, there’s no way to keep women, who form about half the paying customers, safe.
Gigs in established markets in the West have found ways to let women fans know that they matter. In August, when the Washington, DC, leg of Beyonce’s Renaissance World Tour was delayed by the weather, organisers realised that the largely female crowd would be heading home late. The singer paid the city an additional $100,000 to extend operating hours at 98 Metro stations, so fans could exit smoothly and return safely.
Adele stopped her own concert in Las Vegas to stand up for a fan in the crowd who she said was being “bothered” by security, only continuing once she saw the fan was safe. In 2011, she stopped in the middle of performing Rolling In The Deep to help a woman attendee who had fainted.
Of course, there’s a Taylor Swift example. On her Eras tour in May, she was performing in Philadelphia and singing Bad Blood, when she noticed a security guard scolding a fan in the front row. She stopped several times until he stopped.
It’s not surprising that these are women artists, standing up for the safety of women in the audience. Must women, then, only attend the gigs with women performers?
Event organisers in India, have invested in online payments and security bracelets to prevent fraud and theft but few factor in women’s safety at gigs. “Women’s safety is important and something that event promoters in India need to take very seriously,” says Karan Singh, CEO of Sunburn. The event organising company has women bouncers at all their gigs.
Perhaps festival organisers could come together to sensitise more of their security staff to handle incidents of harassment and molestation? Brunch reached out to NH7 Weekender, VH1 Supersonic and Lollapalooza India. None wished to comment on women’s safety at concerts.
So, maybe, at least, just allow pepper sprays in?
