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Lifestyle The New Sober Boom Getting Hooked on Quitting

Getting Hooked on Quitting

Education Liberal Arts Cuts Are Dangerous Is College Necessary?

Liberal Arts Cuts Are Dangerous

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Finance Dying Parents Costing Millennials Dear Gen Z Investing In Le Creuset

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Crypto Investing SEC vs Celebrity Crypto Promoters ‘Dark’ Personalities Drawn to BTC

Investing SEC vs Celebrity Crypto Promoters ‘Dark’ Personalities Drawn to BTC

SEC vs Celebrity Crypto Promoters

‘Dark’ Personalities Drawn to BTC

Reviews Lifestyle The New Sober Boom Getting Hooked on Quitting Education Liberal Arts Cuts Are Dangerous Is College Necessary? Finance Dying Parents Costing Millennials Dear Gen Z Investing In Le Creuset Crypto Investing SEC vs Celebrity Crypto Promoters ‘Dark’ Personalities Drawn to BTC

Lifestyle The New Sober Boom Getting Hooked on Quitting

Getting Hooked on Quitting

Education Liberal Arts Cuts Are Dangerous Is College Necessary?

Liberal Arts Cuts Are Dangerous

Is College Necessary?

Finance Dying Parents Costing Millennials Dear Gen Z Investing In Le Creuset

Dying Parents Costing Millennials Dear

Gen Z Investing In Le Creuset

Crypto Investing SEC vs Celebrity Crypto Promoters ‘Dark’ Personalities Drawn to BTC

Investing SEC vs Celebrity Crypto Promoters ‘Dark’ Personalities Drawn to BTC

SEC vs Celebrity Crypto Promoters

‘Dark’ Personalities Drawn to BTC

Exclusive: Burning Man calls itself a safe space. Assault survivors say it’s got a sex crime problem

The Playa is a "lions' den" where security responds to sex crime scenes by trying to sniff out "consent accidents"

Published May 17, 2019 2:38PM (EDT)

Ena O’Daniel is no stranger to festival culture. Growing up in the town of Rough and Ready in Nevada County, the kind of small Sierra Nevada canton that gets ranked among the “best hippie towns,” she became acquainted with counterculture celebrations as a kid, and the enthusiasm persisted into adulthood. Over the years, the people that she met at small festivals, like the Earthdance Global Peace Party, often raved about the mother of all transformational festivals: Burning Man. So in 2014, the 36-year-old hospice nurse packed up her grey, 2007 Honda Element and drove to Black Rock City, the home of The Burn.

Every summer at the end of August, tens of thousands of people from all over the world make the journey to the week-long festival. For many, attending Burning Man is a definitional personal experience, part of their identity. What started as a small summer-solstice gathering on San Francisco’s Baker Beach in 1986 now draws 70,000 festival-goers to Black Rock Desert in Pershing County, Nevada. Burners pay anywhere from $200 to $1,200 for a ticket and $80 per car to enter Black Rock City, a sun-blasted, nearly six-square-mile patch on a 200-mile Pleistocene era lakebed, the talc-like silt of which whips up in squalls covering everyone and everything (“I got dust in curious places” reads a billboard in Black Rock City). The excursion is an escape from what Burners call the “default world.” An authentic human connection, that feeling of being in the moment, is what O’Daniel loved about the smaller festivals — and what she looked forward to experiencing at Burning Man. “You can just be,” O’Daniel said.

O’Daniel took the 340 mile-drive from San Francisco to Burning Man alone, meeting up with campmates at Black Bear Diner, the last restaurant before the final stretch of County Road 34, a narrow, two-lane, straight shot through the wasteland. Sitting with four veteran Burners whom she met at the High Sierra Music Festival, O’Daniel ate corned beef brisket with shredded griddle-fried potatoes as her “pre-Burning Man” meal. It is wise to attend your first Burn with veterans. There is plenty to learn about life on the playa, which is what Burners call the festival zone,  as attendees are expected to bring their own food, water and shelter to survive for the week. But for all the advice she received about what to expect and how to prepare, one subject did not come up: Protecting yourself from sexual assault.

The final eight-mile stretch to Burning Man takes two hours as thousands of cars and RVs crawl toward the main gate. At the checkpoint, O’Daniel handed in her ticket, and baptized herself in the dust, a ritual for all virgins of the festival. “You can jump out of the car, ring the bell,” she said. “Then they say ‘Welcome home’ and you roll around in the dust.”

On the playa, she set up her tent and changed into a white lace slip and black yoga shorts, then tucked her dust mask behind her dark-brown and white ombré hair. A costume is a hallowed tradition on the playa. Later, biking around on an old mountain bike that she decorated with gold paint and LED lights, she met new friends at different camps, loosely organized communities that collaborate to make an offering to fellow Burners — sometimes cookies, sometimes massage or music — and paid a visit to The Temple, a meditation and memorial space that is ritualistically burned to the ground, along with the central effigy, at the culmination of every gathering. While the raucous burning of the “man” on Saturday night is perhaps the most familiar symbol of Burning Man, many Burners find more meaning in the somber destruction of the Temple on Sunday.

“It is really powerful,” O’Daniel said. “[In The Temple] you can leave a picture of someone who has passed away,” and many do; by the time the temple burns, its insides are decorated with thousands of photos of loved ones.

O’Daniel had been close to many of her patients at the hospice center where she worked for four years and brought pictures of them to hang in The Temple. Not a church-goer, O’Daniel saw the temple as an opportunity to ritualize loss and grief. “It is kind of a structured way that you’re able to appropriately grieve, or let parts of yourself go that you don’t want anymore so that part I really enjoyed,” she says.

On August 26, 2014, “Tutu Tuesday” at Burning Man, frilly dance skirts bloom like peonies across the playa. O’Daniel wore a multi-colored tutu and spent the entire day hanging out around her camp with new friends. “It was a mellow [night],” she said, explaining that she had been told to conserve energy in order to stay out late and party later in the week.

O’Daniel went to bed wearing layers to protect against the cold desert night, donning her tutu, black yoga pants, a tank top, and a fleece. She awoke unexpectedly as the sun was rising, to the sound of someone unzipping her tent. At first, she thought it was a campmate waking her to watch the sunrise.

“I felt someone who came up behind me, and ripped down my pants, and I felt a hard penis, and then he bit my neck really hard, trying to pin me down, and then he tried to penetrate from behind,” she said. “Because I was laying on my side I was able to use my elbow to get him off and say ‘fuck off,’ I was trying to yank up my pants up and elbow him at the same time.”

O’Daniel said the man — who was five-foot-nine-inches with black hair, had a tattoo of large praying hands on his neck — didn’t run out. He just left.

“He wasn’t upset, he wasn’t pissed, he wasn’t anything like that,” she said. “He just took off. I was just so surprised.”

O’Daniel burst out of the tent, in a state of shock, and told her friends she’d just been attacked. At first, she wasn’t sure how to respond. “I had not been to Burning Man, so I didn’t know if this was just like, well, crazy stuff happens,” she said, but her bite mark darkened her fair skin as the morning progressed. When O’Daniel shared what happened to her with Burners throughout that day, they were incredulous. “Everyone you share with, most of them are very supportive, and like, ‘Oh my god, this doesn’t happen here, this is a safe place, this is a one-off,’” she said.

“Like walking into a lions’ den”

On its website, Burning Man publicly positions “sexual misconduct” as “uncommon and unconscionable.” But Salon has obtained Pershing County Sheriff’s Office records detailing 62 sexual assaults, including rape and attempted rape at Burning Man dating back to 2002. Burning Man spokesperson Jim Graham told Salon in a statement in any given year there are five to 20 sexual assaults are reported, but some of those don’t qualify as sexual assault under Nevada law. That number is likely underreported as nationally only 23 percent of sexual assaults are reported in the United States.

From hundreds of documents reviewed, rangers and victims spoken to, it is clear that, contrary to Burners’ perceptions, women are at considerable risk of being sexually assaulted on the playa. Moreover, their false sense of security is due, in part, to the disorganized way that Burning Man discloses sex attacks — and the improper instructions and training that the all-volunteer internal security force known as the Black Rock Rangers and their supervisors, called Khakis, receive from Burning Man staff and administrators of Black Rock City LLC, the organization that runs the multi-million dollar event. An inadequate self-policing system has the effect, intended or otherwise, of silencing and dismissing victims of sexual assault and other forms of abuse before they have an opportunity to report the crime to law enforcement.

Additionally, Burning Man’s official response to reports of sexual assaults, when brought to their attention by victims, has been directly dismissive.

In the “default world,” only an estimated 230 out of every 1,000 sexual assaults are ever reported to law enforcement. Sexual assaults in the United States are under-reported for many reasons, one being that perpetrators of sexual violence are less likely to go to jail than any other criminals. According to Rape, Abuse and Incest National Network (RAINN), 0.7 percent of rapes reported to police result in a felony conviction and 0.6 percent result in incarceration. Still, it’s much worse for women on the playa.

At music festivals, the only type of event with data available that is useful for comparison to Burning Man, the numbers indicate sexual harassment and assaults are far higher than other events. In 2018, Calling All Crows, an organization based in Boston whose mission is fighting sexual harassment at music festivals, surveyed 686 people of all genders who had been to a music festival in the last five years. Those 686 people reported 1,006 incidences of sexual harassment or assault, meaning many had experienced an assault more than once. Of those assaulted, only 58 people — just eight percent —  chose to report the incident to authorities or seek assistance at the festival.

Burning Man is more than a music festival with camping, however. The playa is a place where people abandon real-world inhibitions, and experiment with a variety of drugs — psilocybin (mushrooms), marijuana, ecstasy and cocaine are among the most popular, but nearly every drug imaginable is available, despite the presence of two dozen Pershing County Sheriff’s deputies and 20 rangers from the Bureau of Land Management. In addition to outlandish, often provocative, costumes, Burners adopt playa names like Fuzzypants, Sexy Bacon, Turtle, and Cactus, which provide an opportunity to try out a new identity for the week; O’Daniel’s playa name was Fucking Awesome. “People are supposed to name you,” she explained. “So this girl I had only just met came up and gave me a bracelet with that written on it, and said that was my name now.”

After the event, back in the default world, it is not uncommon to hear Burners refer to........

© Salon