Festival spaces need to be safe and inclusive for all. Now.
Make a real difference by helping make our music spaces safe.
On 10th March 2021, we released a report revealing the prevalence of sexual harassment across the UK – only 3% of 18-24 year-olds had told us they weren’t being harassed. This data was made up of your stories, of what you’ve experienced, and it was shared so many times that it reached over 1 Billion people online.
Women reported feeling unsafe at festivals/nightlife and said they had little or no confidence that someone would step in and help if they were in a crisis or emergency in a public space.
We spoke to 700 women and girls across the UK in storytelling and design thinking workshops. From the co-created solutions, one of the key emerging needs was education and prevention work, giving people the skills to change mindsets, intervene and support others.
Safe Spaces Now and our festival Guardian Angels were born out of this work
Since then, festival fans have helped UN Women UK’s shape a national conversation, and your ideas have made a huge change at music festivals.
Be part of it. Sign up and download the fans toolkit above!
Become a Guardian Angel
Ask you favourite festival to become a Safe Space Now
Spread the word!
The story so far:
440,000 festival goers
10 UK festivals
550 Guardian Angels recruited & trained
510 key festival staff trained
10 Staff & Contractor handbooks & policies developed
Imagine a world...
What would you do?
Based on 10 years of creating safer public spaces around the world, and together with you, we’ve designed 150 solutions for change. We took them to Parliament and asked the UK’s leaders to take action.
We worked to bring these ideas into a reality – and are now bringing together music fans, music festival owners, Government, local authorities, public services and transport providers.
Are you with us?
Over 70%
of women in the UK say they have experienced sexual harassment in public
Only 3%
of women aged 18-24 told us they had not experienced any of the behaviours we asked about
This is a global issue – almost 9 in 10
women in some cities around the world feel unsafe in public spaces
Every 10 Minutes
somewhere in the world an adolescent girl dies as a result of violence.
And the systems in place to reduce violence and harassment ARE NOT WORKING.
Only 4% of women told us they reported the incidents of harassment to an official organisation – with 45% of women saying they didn’t believe reporting would help change anything.
We have to act now.
Data from YouGov Survey of over 1,000 women, commissioned by UN Women UK in January 2021.
Read the full data in the report by the APPG for UN Women.
UN Women is the only global organisation working for gender equality in every sphere of society: from running grassroots programmes with the most vulnerable, to accelerating attitudinal change with influencers and organisations, and helping goverments design more gender-equal policy.
Our mission is for every woman and girl to have an equal right to Safety, Choice, and A Voice.
We want you to be part of the change – because our voices are louder when we raise them together.
Film credits
Production Company: Missing Link Films
Writer/Director: Florence Winter Hill
Producer: Ben Link
Production Manager: Portia Abatan
1st AD: Ben Keswick
Director of Photography: Ronnie McQuillan
Editor: Flaura Atkinson at Stitch Editing
Colourist: Juliette Wileman at Absolute Post
Sound: Ellis McGourlay at 750mph
Composer: Cora Miron
For full film credits please see our YouTube channel here.