Safety Policy

Passer Vulpes Productions is committed to not only creating shows that are safe for our audience, but also to create safe working environments for our cast and crew who work on those shows. The world is hard enough, and part of our values include ensuring that we do not contribute to the hardness of our world. 

Our Safety Values

We believe that anyone who engages with us, Audience or Collaborator is entitled to as safe an experience with us as we can reasonably provide. We believe that is our responsibility as producers to provide that safe experience.

We promise to put thought and planning into our productions, especially when it comes to the safety of those we work with. 

We accept that safety is a negotiation between our collaborators and ourselves - that open dialog and communication is required to ensure that our collaborator’s safety is respected, and that this Policy remains a living document, to be amended as new issues are brought to our attention.

These values apply to those who consume our shows, as well as those who contribute to its production. We explicitly do not welcome audiences of our shows who work to make our productions and our audiences unsafe.

More importantly, these values take precedence over our written contracts and policies - we will always take these values as the starting point for our approach to safety, and should our policies lead us to actions that would breach these values, we will choose instead actions that work towards these values.

For Everyone

Harassment

Harassment of our people, by producers, other collaborators, patrons (or other financial backers) or consumers of our show, will not be tolerated. We define harassment as behaviour directed at a collaborator (or subset of collaborators) that could be reasonably expected to make them feel unsafe, disrespected or excluded.

This is a particularly broad definition, and definitely includes

  • Unwelcome remarks, jokes, innuendoes, or taunts about a person's body, attire, gender, or sexual orientation outside the boundaries of consent

  • Negative stereotyping of race, gender, gender identity, religion, color, national origin, ancestry, marital status, sexual orientation, ability, or other status outside the boundaries of consent

  • Any unwanted or inappropriate physical contact such as touching, kissing, massaging, patting, hugging, or pinching outside the boundaries of consent

  • Unwelcome inquiries or comments about a person's sex life or sexual preference outside the boundaries of consent

  • Leering, whistling, or other suggestive or insulting sounds outside the boundaries of consent

  • Inappropriate comments about clothing, physical characteristics, or activities outside the boundaries of consent

This is not intended to be a definitive list. Ultimately, any behaviour that results in an individual no longer feeling safe or respected within our production will be considered harassment and treated as such.

Once harassment has been identified, it will be the responsibility of ourselves, the Producers, to make all efforts to ensure the harassment stops, and if it does not, to ensure that the offending individual is removed from our production and/or community. For our collaborators, we will ensure that either ourselves or production-external mediators are available to make this happen.

For Our Audience

Content Warnings

We will always work to provide content warning for content that could reasonably be considered distressing. These content warnings will be forewarned at the start of an episode. We do not believe that avoiding spoilers is a reason not to provide content warnings, and will always choose content warnings over protecting suspense in a story.

Community Spaces

For community spaces that are under our control, we will ensure that those spaces remain safe and respectful environments for everyone. We will not tolerate people within our spaces making others unsafe or disrespected, and those who do so will be ejected from our community spaces.

Patrons and other Financial backers

Our responsibility to safe environments apply to all people connected to our productions, including those who support us financially. This includes a reciprocal responsibility from those patrons to respect that safe environment. We will not tolerate financial backers making others feel unsafe or disrespected. This expressly includes ourselves - your financial contributions to our productions do not allow you to harass us to create more of what you want. Those who do so will be blocked from providing further support and ejected from our communities.

For Our Collaborators

Anonymity and Information Control

To extent legally possible, we will allow our collaborators to have full control over information about them released as part of our productions. We will respect any pseudonym requested. We will ensure that any bio and/or photo released about our collaborators will be fully vetted by that collaborator, and ensure that any requested changes are made as soon as possible.

We will especially respect our collaborators' needs in domestic violence or other abusive situations. We will ensure that all other collaborators are aware of what information they are allowed to distribute outside the production, and will enforce this to the best of our power. 

Resolution and Justice Process

Our intended goal with these policies is to ensure that all collaborators in our productions are aware of our expectations and are able to meet those expectations accordingly. However, we cannot assume that anyone (including us) will be perfect in these regards.

Should collaborators in our productions feel unsafe or disrespected, our preferred policy is for those people to be able to come forward to the Producer in charge of the production. As the producers in charge, responsibility for providing a safe environment ultimately falls on us, and we are willing to engage with any bad actors (in whatever way is required), in order to provide that safe environment.

We want to be clear on this – our collaborators’ safety is extremely important to us and we want collaborators’ experience with us to be one they remember fondly. We will not hesitate to do the work required to ensure that other collaborators (including us) do not poison that experience for them. We will do this, either by fixing it directly ourselves, or by arranging for mediation by a production-external mediator.

We understand, however, that we are not perfect, and that despite our best efforts, our actions may make our collaborators feel unsafe or disrespected, and that collaborators may not be willing to come to us in order to resolve the issue. Should one of us Producers commit actions that make our collaborators feel unsafe, we’d prefer that the other Producer be the contact point for resolution and restitution. However, should that not be appropriate (for example, if the collaborator does not wish to approach us directly), we will work with the aggrieved party’s chosen point of contact to provide a production-external mediator at our expense, or work with an accredited mediator of the aggrieved party’s choosing, again at our expense. 

If, after attempts to resolve the issue, there is no reasonable resolution available, We will make all efforts to ensure that the aggrieved party can leave the production, with no requirements or expectations. We will work to ensure that contracts we have our collaborators sign will provide for easy departure from productions and protection of the aggrieved party, but if they don’t for whatever reason, we will make whatever modifications of the contract required. We will also ensure, unless explicitly requested otherwise, that the aggrieved party is compensated for any already completed work, even if contracts are voided.