Creating a Safer Festival

We are proud to be a FestivalSafe partner festival.

Rogue Fest welcomes everyone who joins the festival with and for a sense of community, caring, inclusion, and respect. We do our utmost to ensure that the Festival is a safe place to be yourself, fly your flag, and get your yaya’s out fearlessly. We expect each participant to do their utmost, too.

We are committed to promoting and upholding best practice to address incidents of aggression, sexual assault, or harassment and to ensuring that our festivals are safe and inclusive spaces.

Rogue Fest will not tolerate abusive, threatening, or illegal behavior from anyone – staff, volunteers, performers, or guests. We are all in this together and require a level of common courtesy and compassion be exercised by everyone.

Rogue Fest defines abusive, threatening, or illegal behavior to include, but is not limited to:

  • Unwanted sexual attention, advances, touching, and innuendo/flirting
  • Verbal insults, disruptive or discriminatory language, gestures, or actions
  • Ignoring the sentence, “No.”
  • Any form of harassment, sexism, racism, genderphobia, homophobia or other anti-social behavior
  • Verbal, digital, or physical threats of violence
  • Destruction of personal or festival property
  • Possession of weapons or illegal drugs/controlled substances

Rogue Fest reserves the right, at the sole discretion of the staff team, to revoke festival privileges from any individual found to be engaged in abusive behavior, and when deemed necessary, involve the RCMP.

We encourage all Rogue Fest participants and attendees to familiarize yourself with where to find First Aid & Harm Reduction, and the Main Gate. These are the places you can find help if you need it. There will also be roving security and harm reduction volunteers. You can ask anyone with a radio for help.

The Victims of Crime Act provides all victims with the following rights:

  • To be treated with courtesy and respect by all justice personnel, without discrimination
  • To receive information on the justice system, victim services and related legislation
  • To receive, on request, certain case specific information regarding police investigation, prosecution, sentencing and release of the offender
  • To be given a reasonable opportunity to provide victim impact information for presentation to the court before sentencing of the offender
  • To receive independent legal representation, provided free of charge where you cannot afford it, if an application has been made for disclosure of your personal records

Consent is an enthusiastic YES! Anything less than that is too grey of an area and will not be viewed as consent by the Rogue Fest Team. Sexual harassment, aggression, assault, and rape are obviously unacceptable. 

Rogue Fest will always believe the person who did not give consent.

Consent should always be mutual and continuous. You should never feel pressured into doing something you don’t want to and have the right to say no or change your mind at any time.

If you witness someone engaging in abusive behavior, contact the security team or any team coordinator. They are trained and ready to handle such situations. As a volunteer or guest, you do not need to engage if you are in any way uncomfortable. 

If you ARE comfortable engaging, make certain that you are able to do so without escalating the situation.

The 5 Ds of how to be an active bystander:

  1. DIRECT – directly intervene in the situation
  2. DISTRACT – take an indirect approach to deescalate the situation and interrupt what is happening
  3. DELEGATE – get help from someone else to intervene
  4. DOCUMENT the situation as it is happening
  5. DELAY – after the incident has happened check in with the person who was harmed.