Several young women have alleged incredibly poor and inappropriate treatment - in one case, sexual assault - from security guards working at London’s Lovebox Festival.
The festival, which took place on Friday and Saturday 14th and 15th July, saw attendees pay up to £72 per ticket per day to see performances by acts like Solange, Jamie xx, Annie Mac, Chase and Status and Jess Glynne. The Debrief has heard allegations of sexual assault, bad treatment of young women by security on entry and a lack of support for young women when reporting homophobic abuse at the festival. The Debrief has also heard of young women feeling they were ‘profiled’ on entry because of liquids they tried to bring on site.
Louisa Davies, 24, was at the front for headliner Frank Ocean on Friday night. ‘I’d had a pretty good day, but waiting between Jamie xx and Frank Ocean it got really busy,’ she tells The Debrief.
‘I told my friends “Guys, I’m too hot, I’m gonna stand a bit further back because I want to enjoy it”.’ On finding some more, Louisa stopped and faced the stage. And then ‘Loads of guys in yellow - security guys - walked past me in a line. Obviously, I got out of the way, because they were all coming through for a reason.’ She continues, ‘I was wearing denim shorts and he rubbed his hand all the way up my thigh then put it inside my shorts, towards my crotch basically, and touched me there [on her crotch].’
‘I pushed him, I was obviously like “get off”, but then I froze and he walked away before I had a chance to fathom what had happened.’
Louisa has since blogged about her experience for Chapter W. She tells The Debrief: ‘It was so personal and invasive. People touch your bum and it’s horrible, but you kind of move with it. But I felt that was just so horrific and I burst into tears and ran to the back of the bar.’
Eventually, she found a friend, who found a security guard, this time in orange, and said, according to Louisa: ‘Your fucking staff assaulted my friend, what the fuck?’ She says the ‘guard got really arsey with us, saying “If you’re going to swear at me, I’m not going to help you” and it was like, “We’re angry, how else do you expect us to be?”’
The pair calmed down, but Louisa was disappointed by the response: ‘By this point I was sick of it, the security guard had been asking what the guy looked like and when I said I couldn’t remember, he was like “Well, what do you want me to do?”’
Louisa says that the security guard eventually instructed them to speak to a ‘person in grey’ near the exit of the festival. She says ‘I didn’t want to just walk up to someone and be like “HI!” I wanted someone to be there so I didn’t have to tell the whole fucking world. Luckily my friend was there and he did it all for me.’
They found the ‘person in grey’ - Louisa does not recall their job title, but remembers: ’she took my report and took me seriously. She said they could “narrow it down to people of that description who were in that area at that time”.’ This woman advised Louisa that if she wanted a refund for her Saturday ticket, to also submit a complaint on Lovebox security contractor Showsec’s website’s general enquiries form. ‘That upset me’ Louisa says because it would involve having to tell the story all over again.
Louisa hasn't spoken to the police; ‘I just can’t offer any more information than I’ve got. It’s frustrating, but I was so shocked, and it was so busy. So it would be another dead end.’
With promises from friends, they would be ‘protective’ and no realistic prospect of a refund Louisa returned to Lovebox the next day. ‘Would a refund even sort the problem?’, she wonders. ‘I managed to have a good time, but I did think “This guy is probably here somewhere, this could be happening to other people” and it’s just not on’, she says.
The festival should respond, Louisa says, by ‘making sure their staff have checks and are interviewed more rigorously. ‘I would have gone up to a security guard to report what happened but [I would have been thinking] “It’s one of you, so how do you know I can trust you?”’
Sophie, 27, and Hannah, 23, share Louisa’s mistrust of Showsec’s security guards. They have told The Debrief that a woman in the crowd at Solange had turned to them as they kissed and said: ‘you're fucking sick, you two sad dykes’. The alleged abuse continued with further homophobic insults and at one point Hannah, says, ‘she pulled me into her like she was going to head-butt me. There was a guy in-between us who had to push her off me.’
Throughout, Hannah was certain that a nearby security guard ‘saw it all and did nothing’. She reports that when she did ask him to intervene, ‘he said “Just ignore it and carry on dancing”’. Two more security staff came over to talk to her, she says: ‘they could see how angry I was, but they all ignored it and just told us to go to a different section [of the festival].’
Sophie says that while ‘It’s disappointing that in 2017 we were treated like that’ it was, to her, ‘more upsetting the guards didn’t step in.’ Hannah adds: ‘There are always going to be little narrow-minded people out there but you expect support from others, right?’
Hannah and Sophie decided to leave the festival and filled in a complaints form on their way out, they say they were told they would be contacted within a week.
After posting about their experience to Facebook, they got a speedier response from MAMA Festivals, the company which runs Lovebox. In an email to Hannah seen by The Debrief, a manager urged the couple to report the incident to the police and said they will be investigating the incident with ShowSec. The manager also apologised, saying ‘it’s quite a disgusting way to behave and we have no desire to have these kinds of people attending our events.’ Additionally, Hannah has been offered free tickets to any future events.
Though Hannah and Sophie eagerly await the results of the investigation, neither are planning to take up the offer of free tickets. Hannah also notes Lovebox’s use of rainbow flags on their promotional material: ‘They’re profiting off of the flag and using it as a way to reach a wider market in a very liberal area. They certainly displayed no level of responsibility or understanding of homophobia at the time. It was almost a non-issue for them.’
Lovebox isn’t the only festival with issues when it comes to treatment of women and minorities; there have been incidences of rape and sexual assault reported at festivals across the UK in recent years.
In response to this, the Association of Independent Festivals launched a Safer Festivals Charter this May to restate a zero tolerance to sexual violence at festivals. As part of this pledge, festivals follow recommendations from women’s rights charities and organisations to make their spaces safer. Though 60 festivals signed up to this Safer Spaces charter, Lovebox and MAMA Festivals did not. A spokesperson for the AIF told The Debrief: ‘These incidents are completely unacceptable and we want our campaign to be an ongoing conversation. Our signatories decided to support it this year and we hope to see this grow next year.’
Lovebox’s main stage did broadcast a brief advert for Girls Against- a group which seeks to end sexual harassment and assault at music events and has influenced the Safer Spaces charter. The advert contained a message reading: ‘Sexual assault, sexual harassment and non-consensual groping are not tolerated at this festival. If you have been affected by any of these crimes, please speak to festival staff or security for support’. There was also an offer to contact Girls Against.
However, a spokesperson from Girls Against tells The Debrief: ‘We had the opportunity to have some communication with Lovebox ahead of the event. We were able to display our visuals but would liked to have had more time to actually talk to staff or organisers face to face.’
‘We were particularly disappointed with these occurrences at Lovebox, especially within security. We now want to focus on contacting Showsec to make improvements.’
The spokesperson also suggested that a festival about ‘love and unity’ should have an interest in signing up to the AIF’s Safer Spaces Charter.
By using rainbow flags, giving Frank Ocean a headline slot (he is an out queer man emerging from a historically homophobic hip hop scene) and teaming up with Girls Against, even if only for one fleeting advert, Lovebox and its organisers gave the impression of attempts to make the festival safe and inclusive. Yet, while the ‘Welfare’ part of its website provides advice regarding: phone theft, pickpockets, ‘suspicious behaviour’, the decibels of the sound-systems and the prospect of strobe lighting, there is zero mention of harassment and assault or any sort of hate crime. Additionally, security has got tighter in some respects: while two women were told they had their makeup confiscated as part of the festival’s ‘no liquids’ rule, one alleges that a Showsec staff member who had conducted the search of her bag and instigated the confiscation of her makeup told her it was an ‘acid attack risk’. This woman believes that she was ‘profiled’ because of her dual Iranian-White British heritage and later spoke to police officers who, she alleges, informed her that the liquid ban on site was nothing to do with acid attacks.
Following the recent terror attacks in the UK and the legacy of the 1987 Hillsborough disaster, there is (quite rightly) not only pressure on security contractors to avoid tragic fatalities, but a temptation to become complacent about other safety issues. However, the bar is so low that there’s a feeling, as customers, we’re lucky to be safe and fussy to complain.
We need to have a deeper conversation about how security guards are recruited and what they’re trained to watch out for. These are the people who are supposed to keep festival attendees safe but, at present, it appears some staff aren’t.
To become a ShowSec security employee an individual needs a Security Industry Authority (SIA) badge, these can be awarded to people with previous criminal convictions, depending on the severity of the crime or the time passed since the crime. However, though previous sex offenders are barred from working with vulnerable people and children, it is unclear whether previous sex offenders are blanket denied SIAs. The Debrief has contacted SIA for comment.
In 2015 the journalist Kate Lloyd conducted a Broadly investigation which revealed the extent of the rape and sexual assault problem at festivals, sparking a national conversation about it. However, in 2017 it seems the standard still needs to be set higher so that it’s not about people surviving, but thriving, in what is sold - and boy, is it sold, festivals are profit-making companies, after all - as a jubilant and exciting atmosphere. And if organisers or their employees aren’t getting the memo when it comes to women’s rights over their own bodies, LGBT+ people’s rights to be who they are and love who they love, then how can either of those groups feel safe at their events?
An open letter to the Eavis family, who run Glastonbury, recently went viral. It thanked the organisers for supporting a survivor of sexual assault who knew her attacker would be at the festival, has gone viral this week. Notably, the staff gave Laura a letter, signed by a senior organiser, reading: ‘The bearer of the letter must have her requests for her safety taken seriously and must be taken to safety immediately’. She could hand it to any staff member on site at any time, and be led to safety. It’s a heart-warming story. However, why can’t everyone at every festival have an envelope like that? And maybe, instead of wasting all that paper, how about having security guards who are trained in issues concerning homophobia and sexual violence, and implored to take everyone’s safety concerns seriously.
MAMA Festivals has responded to questions from* The Debrief* with this statement: 'We are very concerned about the allegations that have been made and recognise that we have a duty of care to safeguard all those who attend the Festival. We are working closely with our partners Showsec to ensure that the matter is thoroughly investigated'
Showsec will not give a comment as the MAMA Festivals investigation is pending. SIA has also been approached by The Debrief for a response to these allegations.
This article was updated on 21.07.2017 to reflect statements from MAMA Festivals and Showsec respectively
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This article originally appeared on The Debrief.