Victim Not Suspect

Institutional Silence

Evidence · Long-form

Institutional Silence

Music, NDAs, and the harm that never gets recorded

The premise

Live music is where two failures meet. The first is harm that is widely known but never formally recorded. The second is a system where reporting costs the victim more than it costs the person responsible.

Victim Not Suspect documents what happens when institutions treat the record, not the truth, as the thing that decides outcomes. Policing is where we started. But the same architecture appears wherever an institution can know about harm and choose not to write it down. The UK music industry, examined twice by Parliament in the last three years, is one of the clearest examples on the public record.

This page sets out what that record shows. It names patterns, not people.

The scale, on the record

The numbers below are drawn from published surveys, academic research, and evidence submitted to Parliament.

  • A 2021 Musicians' Union survey of almost 800 members found 48% had experienced sexual harassment at work, 58% had witnessed it, and over 85% never reported their experiences.
  • Research cited in written evidence to Parliament found more than 40% of women under 40 have experienced sexual harassment at a live music event. The Government's own written evidence to the Misogyny in Music inquiry acknowledged the same figure.
  • YouGov polling cited in evidence to the same inquiry found 22% of all festival-goers, and 30% of female attendees, had experienced unwanted sexual behaviour at a UK festival. Among women under 40, 17% had been sexually assaulted while conscious and 6% while unconscious or asleep. Of all the women who experienced unwanted sexual behaviour, 1% reported it to festival staff.
  • A University of Glasgow study of the Scottish folk scene found 72% of incidents happened in social settings around performances, with fellow musicians most often identified as those responsible.
  • Durham Law School research concluded that the size, layout, attitudes and behaviours at festivals combine to make these events conducive to sexual violence.

Parliament has looked at this directly. The Women and Equalities Committee's January 2024 report, Misogyny in Music, found a culture of misogyny and discrimination it described as endemic, in a sector where most workers are self-employed. The Committee noted that much of the evidence it received had to remain confidential, including evidence concerning household names.

Its June 2025 follow-up, Misogyny in Music: on repeat, recorded that most of the original recommendations had been rejected by the then Government, and that a year on, sexual harassment remained pervasive, with reporting rates low due to fear of retaliation.

Read those two findings together. An industry where harassment is endemic, and a Parliament that received evidence it could not publish. The silence is not an absence of knowledge. It is a feature of how the system runs.

Why it goes unrecorded

The Musicians' Union attributes low reporting partly to the informal working environment: late nights, alcohol at gigs, one-on-one studio settings. Around 90% of MU members are freelance, which means no employer, no HR function, and until recently no meaningful legal duty owed to them by anyone.

In the MU's survey work, over 90% of musicians indicated that fear of losing business and opportunities prevented them from reporting incidents. That is not reticence. It is a rational response to a system where the reporter carries the risk and the reported carries none.

The same structure appears across live performance. In evidence to the Women and Equalities Committee's current inquiry into women in live comedy, a witness described a highly fragmented sector: some venues with real policies, trained staff and reporting routes, and then the promoter who runs one night a year in a pub. Structure exists in patches. Harm does not confine itself to the patches.

Where no institution exists to hold a record, people build a substitute: the whisper network. Warnings passed between women, names shared quietly, scenes that everyone knows to be careful in. Whisper networks protect some people some of the time. What they cannot do is document anything. No pattern is ever formally established, no institution is ever obliged to act, and the same names circulate for years while the record stays clean.

The counting gap

There is a second layer to what goes unrecorded, and it is in the statistics themselves.

The headline figures in this field are framed around women under 40. Where all-ages data exists, it tells a similar story: 30% of all female festival attendees reported unwanted sexual behaviour, against 34% of women under 40. A four point gap, not a cliff edge. Yet no equivalent headline figure is published for women over 40 at live events. They sit inside the totals and are never broken out.

Where women over 40 are measured separately, the data is about disappearance rather than safety. The Musicians' Census found women's representation in music drops significantly after the age of 54, with women reporting age discrimination at higher rates than men. Industry research by MIDiA and TuneCore found 38% of women citing ageism as one of the main challenges in the industry.

So the evidence base performs its own quiet version of the problem it measures. Under 40, women are counted as harassment statistics. Over 40, they are counted as attrition statistics. As audience members over 40, the demographic that fills a large share of live music crowds, they are barely counted at all. Invisibility in the data is still invisibility.

NDAs

A whisper network keeps things quiet by default. An NDA does it by design, with legal advice.

The Women and Equalities Committee recommended that the Government legislate to prohibit the use of NDAs and other confidentiality agreements in cases involving sexual abuse, sexual harassment or misconduct, bullying or harassment, and discrimination relating to a protected characteristic.

When the Commons debated non-disclosure agreements in April 2025, members drew directly on the misogyny in music evidence. The chief executive of Black Lives in Music had told the Committee of hundreds of stories from women of harassment and sexual assault by artists and promoters, assaults in music education, young women pressured to drink and take drugs and then assaulted, and producers grooming young vocalists. The debate returned repeatedly to the vulnerability of self-employed workers, the people NDAs silence most cheaply, because they have the least power to refuse one.

An NDA in a misconduct case does exactly what a failed complaints process does. It ensures the record stays clean while the harm stays real. The difference is that the NDA does it on purpose, with legal advice, and often as a condition of the victim receiving anything at all.

This section reflects the position as of mid 2026 and will be updated as legislation progresses.

What trying looks like, and its limits

Several organisations work on this directly.

Safe Spaces Now, run by UN Women UK, grew out of workshops with 700 women and girls across the UK. It has trained 550 volunteers across ten festival activations, placed Guardian Angels in festival crowds, and helped establish an All Party Parliamentary Group with safer public spaces as a goal. Safe Gigs for Women and the Good Night Out Campaign train venue staff and support gig-goers. The Association of Independent Festivals' Safer Spaces charter has been signed by more than a hundred festivals.

Ask for Angela, launched in 2016, gives anyone feeling unsafe in a venue a codeword to signal for help.

All of this is genuine effort. And almost all of it is voluntary, which is where the limit sits.

In late 2024, BBC undercover filming found that in 13 of 25 London venues signed up to Ask for Angela, including major chains, staff did not respond to the codeword. The posters were on the walls. The training behind the posters was not behind the bar. The safeguarding minister's assessment was that safety schemes are meaningless without proper training. Since then, more than 30 councils have moved to make the scheme a condition of alcohol licensing, which is what it looks like when a voluntary measure starts to be treated as infrastructure.

The pattern is consistent with what the Women and Equalities Committee concluded about industry pledges generally: welcome, insufficient, and no substitute for enforceable duties.

One gap is worth stating plainly. Workplace schemes cover performers. Crowd schemes cover audiences. Neither covers what happens between performers and fans, where access is part of the job and part of the risk, and no scheme currently claims that ground.

Why this page is here

A complaint logged 89 days late. Evidence a committee could not publish. A survey where 1% of victims told anyone official. A settlement with a silence clause. A poster with no training behind it.

Different institutions, the same result. No record made, so nothing to answer for. That is the failure Victim Not Suspect exists to document, and it is why this page sits here.

Sources