What’s the story behind Good Night Out?
It started as a project with Hollaback London, a movement to end harassment in public spaces powered by local activists. We were collecting and mapping people’s stories and found lots of incidents were taking place in bars and clubs. It was interesting because we thought, surely that’s where there’s security, safety and lots of people? But no. From this, we wanted to empower and educate staff and owners to understand and intervene in sexual harassment. The project took a while to design because we were mindful that it’s easy to ask a venue to just put up posters. What it’s really about is examining shared attitudes and ideas around alcohol and responsibility when it comes to victims and perpetrators. Getting underneath that was a big job.
How are you tackling sexual harassment?
We’ve spent the past six years testing and developing the full-service accreditation programme we now offer. We work with venues to learn what they’ve done so far and what issues are coming up. Then, we offer a best practice policy that’s legally sound but goes deeper. It puts choice back into the hands of people who are targeted. We train staff, owners, managers, DJs, artists, and security on how to enact that policy. The principle is always to make it as accessible as possible.
How has Covid-19 affected you?
Before the pandemic, we were working with local councils, like Hackney Council, to design an intervention that would go onto billboards on bus stops. It was about reframing myths around sexual violence, so we called it Reframe the Night (we love a pun). Rosa funding covered the overheads and we operated as a core team of four. This meant we could expand our work into partnerships with the City of London and the city’s Night Tzar, too. When the pandemic hit, all of this work and the interest we’d get each week from licensed premises just stopped. It was a very difficult moment. We tried to hit the ground running with Good Night In, which was a series of individual free workshops for individuals.
How did you form the idea for Club GNO?
We were talking about trying to safeguard our organisation and realised we had a resource that we weren’t tapping into: the support of people who care about what we do.
The people who love going out but who don’t work in bars of clubs. Club GNO was born out of wanting to ask people for financial support and share our expertise as widely as possible. We have a broad range of toolkits, workshops and other resources, so sharing it out to individuals made sense to us. Club GNO is a membership-based scheme, but we also offer free membership for people. It’s about not putting a price on sexual violence prevention skills.
What do people gain from Club GNO?
All members get a quarterly newsletter, access to all of our resources and tools, a tote bag and an enamel pin. We’re also building an online space for members to connect and share their own resources. Our work is ultimately centred on the skills and response around sexual violence. It’s an educational piece rather than supporting individuals on the frontline.
How else have you evolved during the pandemic?
A big part of our work over the past six months has been reworking our training programmes and packages to make sure they work online. Feedback has been really awesome, with people saying “I never realised online training could be this fun and this exciting!” We want to build on that so venues know they can offer training while staff are on furlough. Now’s a good time for organisations to think about what they’re doing. Something everyone’s noticed is during lockdown there was an equivalent #MeToo with people having time to reflect. One of the areas we worked on during the pandemic was the comedy circuit. Now we’re looking at ways we can pivot to support broader prevention agenda across all forms of art, culture, leisure. Our approach to nightlife works, so we want to broaden it out.
What does the future look like for Good Night Out?
It’s still uncertain how much capacity there will be in nightlife. We want to ensure we’re able to reaccredit some of the Student Unions we work with, but that’s been difficult. In term two we’re hoping to get out to do some training at universities once their campus bars open back up.
We have a partnership with Galop around access and inclusion for trans and gender non-conforming people. It’s around bathroom access and challenging hate crime attitudes that are really common. We’re also working with the Association of Independent Festivals ahead of potential events in summer 2021. Another thread of our work is accountability. What does it mean for an individual to reflect on their own behaviour when they’ve caused harm? How can we build skills to manage these complexities when services are already overstretched? These are the questions we’re asking at the moment.
Read more about Club GNO and follow Good Night Out on Twitter.