As the thirteenth Annual Goth Picnic approaches, I am once again reminded of how important it is to foster a scene which is safe for all to attend. This picnic in particular has always been family friendly and designed to be accessible to all goths and their friends however opening up the event to more people comes with the risk of certain undesirables from coming in.
It is an unfortunate reality that predators, sex pests, racists and bullies exist within every single community in our society and the Goth scene is no different. Each year the list of blacklisted names I have grows as more and more people come to me as an event organiser to tell me of someone who has hurt them egregiously. I am happy to hear the complainants out as sadly not enough is being done to shut known predators out of the scene. Frankly, I’m sickened every time I see that a known abuser’s band has been booked again or that a sex pest DJ is once again spinning records on a dance floor.
If they are known to be bad people then why are they allowed to keep preforming at and attend events? Mostly because like all predators they can be charming and popular until of course they are not. They cultivate a vibe of affability and they have friends who vouch for them (you know the whole “oh but they’re wonderful with me, they never hurt me” apologists), so they stay in the community and continue hurting people.
The Annual Sydney Goth Picnic has a zero tolerance approach to sex pests, abusers, racists and bullies. This is to keep the scene safe and foster it’s growth. Many times I’ve heard from young Goths that say they no longer will go out to events because some leach was watching them the entire time, I’ve heard from LGBT+ Goths who tell me that they don’t feel safe at Goth clubs because of how they were objectified, and from Goths of colour who don’t feel welcome because unfortunately there are people in the scene who wrongly think that Goth is only for white people.
Predatory people are destroying our scene, therefore as event organisers we have a responsibility to shut them out. We have a responsibility to keep people safe, particularly young and vulnerable people, at events.
So now the challenge for us here is as follows, we want to grow our little picnic but we also need to keep our community safe from predatory types inside the scene and trolls and “goth girl” fetishists who try to infiltrate our events. I don’t exactly know what the answer is, but it might include becoming more official and using ticketing services to have a record of names we can refer to so we can turn people away in advance.
In any case, we will continue to strive to make the Goth scene safe.
Annual Sydney Goth Picnic 