What The Pop Papers Say: If you go to a festival, you should accept you might get attacked, apparently

Catching up with the last couple of weeks' NMEs last night was a bit surprised to come across a blasé "Festival Safety Report" from last week's issue. (This is the31st July edition.)

In response to the two attempted murders and alleged abduction-sexual assault at T, and the rapes at Lattitude, Luke Lewis considered the modern festival. The message, somewhat surprisingly, is that you have to expect this sort of thing:

T in the Park Organiser Geoff Ellis was similarly keen to place violenty crime at the event in context.

"T In the Park, while it's on, is essentially the fifth biggest town in Scotland. Statistically, over a weekend, you'd actually expect crime to be higher than it is."

What? Two people are stabbed, someone bundled off and sexually assaulted, and you're shrugging that you're surprised there's not more of this sort of thing?

That's not an entirely encouraging response. Especially since there are dozens of reasons why you'd expect a town to have more crime than a festival, starting from the basis of "not having to pay over a hundred pounds to be in a town".

Latitude's Melvin Benn was also busily stressing how, hey, rapes happen and it isn't like it's the festival's fault, is it:

"Will I review things? Of course. I'm not complacent. But in no way could Festival Republic be attributed any blame for what happened. I feel very strongly about that."

Benn popped up shortly after Latitude suggesting that the answer might be for women to be more careful, and this washing of hands of any possible shred of culpability is a bit rich.

One of the reasons - and I'm using "reasons" in the sense of "excuses" - given for the rapid inflation of ticket prices for festivals over the last few years has been the increased levels of security. It's now increasingly clear that when festivals talk about security, what they're really talking about is perimeter fences, forgery-proofing tickets and making sure wristbands don't get swapped, rather than, you know, keeping the people who are buying the tickets safe. Because, you know, there's a lot of people there, and you'll always have crimes when lots of people come together.

That's true to a point, and nobody expects a festival to be totally crimeproofed. Pilfering from tents and the extortionate price of lager is something festival attendees have learned to bear with a stoicism that does them credit. And no matter how well-run a festival is, there's a chance that an idiot with a grudge and a knife, or an arsehole rapist will still be roaming about intent on ruining somebody's life.

But when it does happen, the organisers should respond with more than a shrug and a rush to try and protect the brand.

Here's Melvin Benn:

"I don't think this will harm festival going. People acknowledge that this is an incredibly unfortunate thing to have happened. But it isn't about being in a festival environment. It's about society in general."

Yes, you did read that correctly: Benn just described two young women being raped as "incredibly unfortunate".

But, hey, it's society - what can you do, eh?

Still, the NME has a proud liberal, pro-fan history, right? Luke Lewis will be pointing out that this isn't good enough, and perhaps suggesting it's time for festivals to think about ensuring their increasingly younger audiences are able to avoid "incredibly unfortunately" being raped. Right?

The bottom line is we should be wary of ramping up a few, admittedly appalling incidents into a tabloid-style scare story

Because, of course, either you shrug and say 'hey, let's focus on all the people who didn't get stabbed' or else you're running a tabloid scare story. It's not like four unconnected incidents might be worth treating with something more than a shrug, a chance to at least explore how they happened and if there's any lessons to be learned, is it? I wonder how many rapes and stabbings the NME would consider the point to start that conversation? Or would that always be "tabloid-style scare stories"?

Most revellers were sober in their response. The majority of people I spoke to [at Latitude] seemed to accept that, statistically, with such a concentration of people in one place, serious crimes were bound to happen at festivals.

How fortunate that echoes the views of the festival promotion companies, who the NME works with in oh-so-many ways. But if it's really true that you should just accept you're in with a statistical chance of being raped or stabbed when you go to a festival, perhaps that should be printed on the tickets. Maybe even a little check box to accept that when you buy them online.

After all: at Latitude, being raped is just an unfortunate thing that might happen to you, what with all the people there.