The CEO of Black Lives In Music has called on the UK government to enact all the recommendations of the ‘Misogyny In Music’ report published by Parliament’s Women And Equalities Select Committee last year. Charisse Beaumont says that government action is required to properly tackle sexual harassment and abuse within the music industry.
That call came as Beaumont spoke at another session of the Women And Equalities Committee in Parliament yesterday, alongside music journalist Laura Snapes and musicians Lucy Cox and Celeste Waite.
It was the last Conservative government that formally responded to the ‘Misogyny In Music’ report. It agreed that something should be done to tackle harassment and abuse in the music sector, but rejected all the recommendations for legislative reform, instead saying that the industry itself should address the issues.
Illustrating the scale of the problem by citing her own organisation’s research, Beaumont says, “We have hundreds of stories from women of being harassed, including sexually assaulted by male artists as well as promoters; people assaulting women in music education; participating in almost naked casting videos; young women pressured to drink and take drugs, who are then assaulted; male producers grooming young female vocalists”.
“It’s rife in all genres, particularly classical music”, she adds. “55% say they are currently experiencing bullying or harassment with over 78% having experienced bullying or harassment in their lifetime in their work. 50% say they have had an experience within the last twelve months”.
There are industry initiatives to address these issues, and other cases of discrimination and misconduct, including the new Creative Industries Independent Standards Authority, and BLiM’s own programmes like its Anti-Racist Code Of Conduct and the EquiTrack reporting tool.
However, Beaumont says that the legislative reforms proposed in the ‘Misogyny In Music’ report are also crucial, a position also taken by the Musicians’ Union when the last government issued its response to the select committee’s recommendations last April.
At the time MU General Secretary Naomi Pohl said, “The government had an opportunity to listen and learn from those lived experiences and implement the changes that the select committee’s report recommended. Instead, the government decided that women’s safety is not a priority. Again, survivors are not being listened to”.
The hope now is that the new Labour government might take action. BLiM has set out some of the select committee recommendations that it wants ministers to enact.
That includes amending the Equality Act “to ensure freelance workers have the same protections from discrimination as employees” and to “improve protections for people facing intersectional inequality”.
The report “also recommended the government should legislate to impose a duty on employers to protect workers from sexual harassment by third parties, a proposal the previous government initially supported and then rejected”.
The last government “also failed to give assurances that it would extend the time limit for bringing Equality Act-based claims to an employment tribunal from three to six months as recommended by the committee”.
The select committee also recommended that the use of non-disclosure agreements should be prohibited in cases of sexual harassment and abuse, bullying and other discrimination, but - while “the government plans to bring in such measures in higher education” - it “did not support the committee’s recommendation to do so for music or other sectors despite the compelling evidence presented by the committee”.
