Dedicated to feminist issues and the promotion of women in the arts, the Festival des Créatives is currently being held in Geneva. In 2021, the festival published its “Pink Notebook for Gender Equality in Culture”. Still available, this “action manual” devotes several pages to questions of sexual harassment.
Three years have passed. French-speaking cases of harassment in the performing arts sector have been revealed and actions taken by public authorities to better regulate professional practices in the performing arts, a field of activity, like sport, where relationships of power and questions linked to respect for personality or bodily integrity are particularly sensitive. Let’s take stock.
In Geneva, City and Canton, as well as in the commune of Meyrin, any institution, association or artistic company obtaining financial support from the public authorities must now undertake to sign a charter of “commitment in the fight against attacks on personality.” This approach aims to raise awareness among actresses and cultural actors of the problem of harassment. It was set up with the aim of prevention. No charter in Lausanne, but a kit for the prevention and detection of psychosocial risks at work. The municipality wishes to regularly survey cultural institutions to “ensure that all cultural institutions have written and solid foundations in terms of preventing health and safety risks at work”.
>> Fight against harassment in the workplace, where are we? The interview with Myriam Jakir Duran, head of the Cultural Department of the City of Geneva:
A signature that involves several measures
Head of the cultural department of the City of Geneva, Myriam Jakir Duran specifies that the signing of this document implies several measures: “the monitoring by all people employed in the structure of online training relating to the prevention of harassment and Likewise, a sexual harassment prevention kit must be distributed to the people concerned. It is also necessary to be able to benefit from a person of trust within the association, to have a committee which has the role of. employer, implement measures within the association and report any information or doubt concerning a situation which could be likely to harm the physical or moral personality of an employee.”
The public authorities intend to make these associative committees responsible in their role as employers. The burden on associations is too modest to afford to hire a resource person to join an external structure offering a “trusted person in business” service. The public authorities also subsidize a structure called Safe Spaces Culture, capable of discreetly collecting testimonies in the event of suffering at work and providing advice to injured people. In Lausanne, the culture department relays and supports this approach to setting up an “external unit of trust for the entire cultural sector”.
An approach to avoid inter-personal relations, most of these associative committees being made up of relatives or friends of the artist who ultimately benefit from the subsidy. There is indeed, underlines Myriam Jakir Duran, “a point of vigilance to clearly dissociate the roles and responsibilities, either of the artistic direction, the administrative direction or the employer, the committee.”
No surveillance mission
These approaches offer a first safety net, but – and this is where the problem lies – they do not include a surveillance mission. It is in fact a task which remains delegated to the companies’ association committees. Knowing that a show project, by nature ephemeral, often brings together less than ten people, the proximity of the protagonists hardly allows anonymity or the denunciation of a case. In Geneva, the cultural service has hired a person to advise and, if necessary, guide people confronted with cases of harassment. But here again, it is a question of collecting possible testimonies, and not of controlling the dozens of companies and other subsidized structures.
How then can we ensure that cases are indeed detected and properly taken care of? This is where a French-speaking association called “Arts-sainement” can intervene. Close to the field, made up of artists aware of these issues, this association offers advice and in particular allows people affected by harassment to report the case via a form to be completed with various criteria characterizing the type of harassment (sexual, but also moral , relating to mobbing or racism, etc.). The association can also liaise with the public authorities and support the people concerned in their approach to the authorities. She has‘a website.
Procedures that remain unclear
Opening an investigation for harassment of any kind is one thing. How can we then correct or sanction a case of abuse? And how can we envisage what happens next, both on the side of the victim of abuse and on the side of the person who committed an act of harassment? At this stage, the procedures are still unclear and under discussion with the public authorities. There may be mediation, the obligation to follow specific training in matters of harassment, the suspension of a subsidy, its cancellation or even in the most serious cases a criminal denunciation.
And when these steps have been taken, what happens next, when the artist who has been found guilty of harassment intends to continue his career and lead a new creation, dance show, play or performance? The question remains open. Added to the supervision and institutional sanction is the damage to reputation and the reactions of the public and the professional community. After years of silence in an environment where employability is very fragile, the subject remains very sensitive and can exacerbate reactions when a case is finally considered, made public and treated by cultural and political institutions.
Thierry Sartoretti/ld
