'Your Choice' Campaign Launches To Tackle Toxic Behaviour At Gigs

SLAM co-founder and venue owner Helen Marcou today headed a six-person panel to launch a joint initiative dubbed Your Choice; an "industry supported campaign to address the growing cultural issues around behaviour and lack of personal accountability within Australian venues and event spaces," and a concentrated attempt to reduce incidents of violence, discrimination and sexual assault at music events and mass gatherings.

"These issues are not exclusive to the music industry," Marcou continued, "they are issues within our Australian society. However, as a community of festival promoters, venue owners, artists, promoters and managers, labels, publicists and more, we are committed under the Your Choice banner, to work together to raise awareness of this important cultural issue, encourage a more positive conversation with our audiences and come up with preventative strategies to support and enhance those already in place."

Working in tandem with the Victorian Sexual Assault Force, of which Marcou is a member, and the Victorian police, Your Choice hopes to increase social awareness and utilise industry resources "to achieve a better and safer experience for all patrons at live events," stated Unified group labels CEO and founder Jaddan Comerford. "As an industry we unanimously agree on this issue, and we've come together to show that support."

"It is about raising awareness. At the end of the day, the idea is that if someone wants to something antisocial at an event it's their choice, so it's your choice to do that and your choices will have an impact on other people," continued Comerford, echoing the new campaign's credo: Your choice = Our experience. Our choice = Your experience. Everyone is Responsible - venues, festivals, events, and you. 

Building on the work of initiatives Victorian Sexual Assault Force and grassroots movements like Camp Cope's It Takes One, Your Choice hopes to create a network that will support gig-goers and musicians by equipping both industry figures and punters with the tools and resources to identify, communicate and halt misconduct.

"The scope of Your Choice is to support campaigns like [It Takes One] and take the best of those grassroots campaigns but be able to distribute them on a national scale," said Rhett McLaren, co-owner and Director of The Hills Are Alive Group. "It'll be a resource platform where we're able to take good ideas like that, share them amongst other promoters, take the best practices from other events in the whole of Australia... It'll be a resource base for young promoters, young venues, new venues to go to an oracle of how to create a safe environment for your audience."

Jessica Ducrou, co-CEO of several festivals including next week's Splendour In The Grass, said that Your Choice will be in full effect for the annual music and arts festival. "We've been working on this campaign for a number of weeks and it will roll out for Splendour. We particularly wanted to launch the campaign with Splendour in mind.

"The message loud and clear is that if you see some antisocial behaviour at the festival you do need to talk, you do need to speak up, we do want to hear from you. We're always going through a process of improvement, we see this as a really important step for a safe event for everyone."