As the popularity of AcroYoga grows, more people are getting hurt, serious injuries become more common, and as in the larger yoga community, abuse, harassment, and sexual assault occurs. Those with the most ability to create change are the organizations who host festivals and train teachers. The AcroYoga Safety Advisory Panel proposes they make these problems a priority in the following ways.
Sexual harassment and abuse
- Collaborate with RAINN to train staff and form policy. Dealing with these issues is genuinely difficult and we don't expect acrobats to have the experience and expertise. Bring in people who do.
- Collaborate with Project Callisto to make reporting problems more effective. Reporting problems to the friends, colleagues, or the very people who are the source of the problems is not effective.
- Have public standards of behavior, a procedure for reporting and handling grievances.
- Include consent training in teacher trainings.
Physical safety
- Require First Aid training for all teachers they certify or hire.
- Record injuries which occur at their events, require teachers to do so; make public an anonymized summary to help educate everyone about risks. Accidents happen. We need to change the culture so that there is no shame in being injured, and to treat every accident as an opportunity for everyone to learn. By acknowledging accidents and studying them we can create a culture that values safety.
These changes can be driven from the grassroots, by letting the businesses we support know that we expect them to make community safety a priority. What you can do now:
- Join the discussion at the AcroYoga Safety Advisory Panel
- Share this with your local acro groups
- When you are a student, ask the events you attend their timeline to meet these expectations.
- When you teach at an event, ask your colleagues running it their plans to implement these.
