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The word “kindness” has become fully embedded in the way clubs, collectives, DJs, media outlets and content creators communicate. It appears in codes of conduct, event descriptions, Instagram posts and the statements that now accompany much of nightlife. At first glance, it is difficult to see this as anything other than a positive development. But when the word starts replacing the actions it is supposed to describe, and becomes a convenient way to project a welcoming image without having to demonstrate what is actually being done to protect people, that is where a serious problem begins.
Article en français.
The conversation around safety in nightlife did not come out of nowhere. Long before “kindness” became part of the industry’s vocabulary, associations, activists, queer collectives, harm-reduction workers and people working on sexual and gender-based violence had already begun documenting and raising the alarm about what was happening in nightlife spaces. Their work helped force conversations that the industry had often preferred to avoid, while developing concrete tools to address them. Consentis, founded in 2018, for example, trains nightlife professionals and works on prevention, reporting and victim-support protocols. Creating safer environments requires expertise, time and clearly defined responsibilities. It also requires funding, and given the current electoral climate, organisations working in this field may increasingly have to find other ways to keep doing that work.
The way the word “kindness” is used today can therefore feel particularly hollow. When an organiser puts it in a code of conduct but has no procedure in place for handling a report, the word protects nobody. When a club communicates extensively about its values while staff do not know where to direct a victim or how to react when a situation escalates, the promise remains largely aesthetic. The real question is what a venue is actually capable of doing when being “kind” requires making an uncomfortable decision. From experience, the answer is unfortunately often disappointing.
Safety in nightlife sometimes, and actually quite often, requires conflict. Protecting someone may involve confronting inappropriate behaviour, asking someone to leave, challenging an internal decision or taking seriously a testimony that creates discomfort within an organisation. The idea that a welcoming space should necessarily be one in which nobody is ever upset is dangerous because it gives those responsible for harmful behaviour another opportunity to avoid accountability.
We experienced a very concrete example of this during a discussion about hard techno at Paris Electronic Week in 2025. When Clubbing TV raised the issue of far-right symbols and individuals associated with the far right appearing at certain events, one of the responses we reported was: “Let’s stop the hate between us, everyone is welcome.” The answer sounds generous and kind, but it does not actually answer the question. Saying that everyone is welcome tells us nothing about what a venue does when racist, homophobic, transphobic or violent behaviour directly threatens the safety of part of its audience. Openness only means something when it comes with boundaries and a willingness to enforce them. What we need is action, not just words.
This is also where “kindness” can begin to serve another purpose: preventing criticism. On social media, questioning a professional practice, a booking decision, a conflict of interest or a power dynamic can quickly shift the conversation away from the issue itself and towards the supposed negativity or harassment that criticism might generate. This is especially visible when influencers are criticised, or when DJs are questioned for refusing to publicly oppose far-right ideologies. Harassment is obviously a serious issue, but it cannot be used to make every criticism of how the scene operates appear illegitimate. Questioning which profiles are given opportunities, the role of networks and money in bookings, the way an organisation handles sexual and gender-based violence, or the contradictions between what it says and what it does is not the same thing as encouraging people to target individuals.
This mostly benefits those who have an interest in keeping certain conversations limited. Calling for kindness is much easier than answering questions about how a venue responds to problematic behaviour. The word can then become a way of shifting the discussion towards the tone being used rather than the substance of the criticism. People questioning the system are asked to choose their words more carefully while the mechanisms they are describing continue to operate exactly as before.
The scene has also made extensive use of the language of kindness as it has been forced to publicly confront sexual and gender-based violence. Here too, necessary discussions have sometimes been redirected towards more comfortable debates about the reputation of accused individuals, the threat of cancel culture or the violence of social media. Those questions can of course be discussed, but they should not replace the initial issue. What structures exist for receiving reports, protecting the people concerned and preventing the same situations from happening again? When an industry becomes more concerned about the reputational damage caused by an accusation than about the conditions that allow violence to continue, the language of kindness starts losing its meaning.
The same applies when we talk about discrimination or the presence of the far right in certain nightlife spaces. The idea that “everyone should be able to party” is difficult to oppose while it remains abstract. It becomes considerably more complicated when particular ideologies or behaviours have the direct effect of driving other people away. Inclusivity is not simply about opening the door to everyone. It also means thinking about the conditions that allow people to remain inside without having to tolerate behaviour that threatens their safety.
The word is also frequently used when the economic transformation of the scene is criticised. When people question nepotism, the arrival of highly visible profiles who are able to skip several stages of an artistic career, or the growing role of personal branding in programming, the response is sometimes that we should simply be kinder to the people concerned. Again, nobody should be harassed because they received a booking, but that principle does not prevent us from examining the system that made the booking possible. A cultural industry must be able to face questions about its power structures without treating every structural criticism as a personal attack.
Perhaps the biggest difficulty is that kindness has become vague enough to describe almost anything. It can mean protecting a victim or protecting somebody’s reputation. It can refer to welcoming a marginalised audience or to refusing to remove someone whose behaviour is creating a problem. As long as the word is not accompanied by specific commitments, it can be made to mean whatever is most convenient at the time.
That is why it may be more useful to talk about accountability, prevention and safety. Those concepts force us away from the much easier territory of good intentions. A venue that genuinely takes these issues seriously should be able to explain how its teams are prepared, what happens when an incident is reported and who makes the decision when protecting someone requires intervention. That demands more than a code of conduct posted on Instagram, but it is precisely what separates an actual policy from a communications strategy.
Kindness still has a place in nightlife, of course, and thankfully so. It simply needs to return to what it was supposed to mean: allowing people to feel respected and protected rather than asking everyone to avoid difficult conversations. In an industry where power imbalances, violence and discrimination exist just as they do elsewhere, creating safer environments sometimes requires taking a position, setting boundaries and accepting that those decisions will not please everyone. And with France heading towards elections that could have major consequences for the country, we would also like to see a scene that is a little more willing to engage.