Ms Joanne Cusack:

What Dr. Casey spoke of was the implementation and maintaining of up-to-date anti-harassment policies and procedures. The idea is that there is an appointed equality manager in every arts-funded venue, festival and organisation to whom people can go, including audiences, artists and technicians alike. They can go to this person and disclose any experiences of harassment that have happened within that environment.

We are looking for the resources to enable organisations and festivals to do this. They need the training. Staff need to be trained to deal with disclosures of harassment. The Rape Crisis Centre is currently providing an excellent training programme on how to deal with disclosures of harassment, which can be funded and extended to the arts so that when these policies are put in place, the training and the toolkit is there for the organisations and the venues.

This is all part of the bigger picture of all public funding being conditional. We are looking for policies and procedures for the benefit of all staff, contractors and participants. We want anti-harassment protocols for all venues, reporting on gender balance line-up, which includes such things as technical crew, contractors, and board staff, the provision of training for the staff in the publicly funded organisations and venues, and a disclosure of any circumstances in which allegations of harassment are upheld against a member of staff. It is also important the organisation regularly reports back to the funder on how it is managing these policies and procedures. They are just a set of conditions that needs to be put in place so that we are not constantly giving funding to predators and perpetrators. It is very simple, but it can make real change.