First of all, many thanks to all of you who have joined the Facebook Group, and who have signed the online petition. Your support is much appreciated.
For now most of the lobbying is in the hands of experts such as Christine Burns who have direct access to Those In Authority. However, I am working on an essay about the whole toilet panic nonsense. If it is taking a little while, that’s partly because I’m on the road and partly because elements of it cross over quite strongly with what I was planning to say about the gender imbalance issue. Bear with me, please.
I do, however, want to raise one issue arising from this, because it is an event management issue and therefore has direct bearing on science fiction conventions.
This morning Roz pointed her readers to this post which talks about the fact that large events such as Pride are pretty much obliged to hire private security firms, because in this regulation-obsessed country you can’t do security for a major event unless you have the appropriate qualifications. Willing volunteers from within the community are unlikely to have the necessary licenses, and so can’t be used.
We see this sort of thing already in some respects in Worldcon. Tech crews sometimes have to rely in people who are professionals in the industry because union rules at the convention center only allow union members to operate the equipment. And Worldcons are also often obliged to use professional security staff supplied by the convention center (at ruinous rates). We have also learned, from bad experiences within our own community, that people who want to do “Security” are often the last people who ought to be allowed to do it, because they are more interested in pretty black uniforms and bossing people about than in the success of the event.
The problem with this sort of thing is that the security people you hire may know nothing about the event that they are supposed to be guarding. This can lead to the sort of inappropriate behavior that Roz suffered on Saturday. And with really big events (and Pride is really big) your chosen security firm may subcontract because they don’t have enough staff to fulfill the contract. This makes it very difficult to ensure that the people you hire get appropriate sensitivity training.
And this problem will get worse, particularly in the UK where the government adds new regulatory burdens on a daily basis. The next big problem is likely to be child safety. There are moves afoot that may mean that everyone working on an event has to be vetted to ensure that they are safe around children. That’s going to open a whole can of worms about socially conformant behavior, with the defenders of the Patriarchy doubtless wanting to ban anyone who is gender variant, anyone who is sexually variant, anyone who has ever had a drug conviction and so on. It will be a mess, and it will be just one more nail in the coffin on volunteer activity.
