A Trend of Sexual Assault Is Happening at Concerts and Nobody Is Talking About It
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Concerts can be traumatic for women who are groped or sexually assaulted in mosh pits. That's why five European teenagers and self-proclaimed intersectional feminists created Girls Against, a campaign that wants to eliminate sexual assaults that take place at shows. Girls Against has received significant attention on social media, in the news, and even from several indie bands.
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Girls Against started after Hannah Camilleri, one of the members, was assaulted during a Peace concert in Glasgow, Scotland, two months ago. According to the Independent, she took to Twitter to complain and got the attention of the band’s lead singer, Harry Koisser, who went on to voice support for Girls Against on Twitter and repost a tweet about her bad experience:
The band Slaves also showed support for Girls Against after hearing reports of groping at one of their shows:
"Cardiff was an amazing show but it has been tainted for us now after hearing reports of lads groping young girls in the crowd," Slaves wrote on Facebook. "Putting your hands all over any women without her permission is not on at any sort of concert. Going as far as putting your hand up her skirt forcing her to leave the venue and go home, ruining her night, is disgusting. Please go and follow girls against on Twitter to fight this kind of behaviour [sic]. If you are reading this and you were one of the men doing this. You aren't welcome at our shows."
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Band member Isaac Holman told BBC's Newsbeat that they now require a female security member to hang out around the pit at all of their concerts.
"When a girl is trying to say something to a security man he might not be taking it too seriously," he said. "It might fall on deaf ears so we thought by having a female member of security in the pit as well it would make the girls feel a bit more safe."
Though Girls Against has gotten a lot of positive attention so from bands so far, they want to gain support from even more bands, and launched a crowdfunding project.
“We’d really love Catfish and the Bottlemen to get behind us and it’s been really frustrating because we’ve been tweeting them loads and other people who know them have said they would tell them about us,” Anna, a teenage member of the group, told the Independent.
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Despite all of the support Girls Against has received, the girls have also faced immense backlash online from trolls.
“To be honest, we find most of it quite funny," Anna continued. "We just brush it off and laugh at it because the people who are tweeting us calling us names and things like that are just looking for attention and we’re not going to give them it.”
Unfortunately, women have faced concert assaults long before Girls Against and social media came to be. In 1999 in the U.S., four women reported being sexually assaulted at Woodstock. Three of the women were reportedly assaulted on the campground while the other was assaulted in front of the stage at a show. The woman at the show was crowdsurfing before being assaulted by more than one man.
"Due to the congestion of the crowd, she felt that if she yelled for help or fought, she feared she was going to be beaten," read a state police investigation report obtained by CNN.
