CODE OF CONDUCT

The Shibari Lounge is dedicated to providing a harassment-free experience for everyone, regardless of race, gender, gender identity and expression, sexual orientation, disability, physical appearance, body size, age, religion, or social class. We do not tolerate harassment of participants in any form. We prioritise marginalised people’s safety over privileged people’s comfort.

This code of conduct applies to all of Shibari Lounge’s spaces, both online and offline. Anyone who violates this code of conduct may be sanctioned or expelled from these spaces at the discretion of the owners, and in any spaces in conjunction with the Shibari Lounge’s community.


The Shibari Lounge’s core team members currently are: Bex-Bunny and Dark_Knot. Others may step in as a team members when they are designated to do so. Other temporary members/event leaders are invited into the Shibari Lounge to host events and workshops occasionally.

Some Estuary Dungeon & Shibari Lounge spaces and events may have additional rules in place, which will be made clearly available to participants. Participants are responsible for knowing and abiding by these rules.

Behaviours that are not acceptable include (but are not limited to):

Physical: 

    • Touching without consent. This includes belongings, toys, rope etc.

    • Interrupting a scene aftercare without consent (whether it is to ask questions or make comments, give unsolicited advice or compliments unless someones safety is at risk)

    • Inappropriate body language (such as uncomfortable staring, standing too close to people playing, purposefully intimidating postures, ‘aggressive’ posing/pacing, excessive drinking of anything intoxicating or substance abuse)

Non-physical: 

    • Abusive, disparaging or inappropriate language (such as sexist, racist language, body negative comments such as anything fat-phobic, ageist, cisphobic, ableist, etc)

    • Aggressive flirting, predatorial behaviour or uninvited objectifying language

    • Disparaging comments about people’s political views, beliefs, how they dress, or their professions

    • Negative comments/judgements about people based on appearance (for example “that person looks like a creep” etc)

    • Outing someone in the community who wishes to remain private (Using their real name apposed to Scene name/FetLife handle or exposing someones job or where the live for example if you know them from the outside world). 

Reporting

If you had an issue, incident, or were harassed by an attendee of the Shibari Lounge, or if you notice that someone else is being harassed, or have any other concerns, please contact the Core Team members (members on-duty will be clearly identifiable in the space, or will be identified at the beginning of an event), either in person if during an event, or at estuarydungeon@gmail.com if online or outside the space. We will respond as promptly as we can. 

You can talk to us regarding anyone engaged with Shibari Lounge: about someone from the space, about teachers and presenters, as well about anyone from the staff. If the person who is harassing you is on the staff, they will not be involved in handling your incident.

This code of conduct applies to The Shibari Lounge spaces, but if you are being harassed by a member of our community outside our spaces, we still want to know about it. We will take all good-faith reports of harassment by the Shibari Lounge members, especially regarding volunteers of the space, seriously.

In order to protect volunteers from abuse and burnout, we reserve the right to reject any report we believe to have been made in bad faith. Reports intended to silence legitimate criticism may be handled or deleted without response.

We will respect confidentiality requests for the purpose of protecting victims of abuse. At our discretion, we may publicly name a person about whom we’ve received harassment complaints, or privately warn third parties about them, if we believe that doing so will increase the safety of Shibari Lounge members or the general public. We will not name harassment victims without their affirmative consent. We will listen to their wishes regarding how they want an incident to be handled.

Consequences

Participants asked to stop any harassing behaviour are expected to comply immediately.

If a participant engages in harassing behaviour, Core Team members may take appropriate action, up to and including expulsion from all Shibari Lounge spaces and identification of the participant as a harasser to other Shibari Lounge members, other studios and events, or the general public.

Credits

This policy has been based on the Community Anti-harassment Policy by Annalee Flower Horne, Valerie Aurora, Alex Skud Bayley, Tim Chevalier, and Mary Gardiner (Geek Feminism Wiki).

This policy is released under Creative Commons Attribution International 4.0 (CC BY 4.0).