MDLBEAST SOUNDSTORM
R - E -S - P- E - C -T MDLBEAST’s Soundstorm 2021 made a huge impact on the Middle East over four days in the desert. More than 732,000 visitors attended the festival, which featured a new anti-harassment campaign called Respect and Reset (R&R). Here, Judy Bec, head of operations at Boomtown Fair, reveals all about how she devised and delivered R&R, a zero-tolerance policy on harassment designed to make festivalgoers feel safe
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ell us about MDLBEAST’s Respect and Reset (R&R) project and how the project came about I started working with the MDLBEAST team in August 2021. I was introduced to them by The Event Safety Shop early in the summer following discussions they had been having regarding the issue of harassment and violence particularly against women and girls at events in Saudi Arabia. As organisers, they are passionate and highly committed to having a positive impact on women’s experiences at events in the Kingdom. MDLBEAST decided to create the R&R programme. It wasn’t called Respect and Reset when we first started, and we got through several creative agencies before my colleague and I came up with the title ourselves.
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In Saudi Arabia, men and women have only been legally allowed to mix in public since 2018. Therefore, attending largescale crowded events is still new to them. Being in a crowded environment presents opportunities for harassment and other bad behaviours that have not previously existed, and just as in the UK, these opportunities are exploited. The main difference between harassment at events in the UK and Saudi Arabia is that the men’s behaviour is bolder. Following the first MDLBEAST event in 2019, the social media campaign #MDLBEASTharassment trended across the region, and still in 2021, women who were asked about their primary safety concern at events cited sexual harassment as number one. Clear that whilst this is a wider, societal issue (and not just in Saudi Arabia), the MDLBEAST
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management resolved to bring the subject front and centre in the conversation from the early planning of Soundstorm 2021. Even if they couldn’t solve the problem at societal levels, they could start the education process through events, and aim to improve the experience of events for women. Who pulled the R&R team together? MDLBEAST reached out to The Event Safety Shop for advice on how to tackle the problem and tasked them with taking on the project in collaboration with the MDLBEAST team. They, in turn, engaged myself and Tami Richter [SXSW’s director of event staffing and resources] to develop the programme because both of us are event operations managers with experience in implementing anti-harassment initiatives at our own events.
