Pink Therapy is a British kink education and therapy group. They have been known to attend the Community-Academic Consortium for Research on Alternative Sexualities annual conference, which will next meet immediately prior to the 2016 Folsom Street Fair in San Francisco, September 24. 2016..
They have produced excellent educational materials about the handling of power and the ethical obligations of participants, leaders, facilitators, educators and therapists. I get questions all the time from therapists in training about their responsibilities at kink events. Should they even go? Do they need to sacrifice their personal sex lives to serve their clients? How long after a therapeutic relationship stops is it safe to be seen by a client at an event?
These documents, which do not answer all questions, do outline the ethical responsibilities of informed consent among participants at different levels of power and experience.
Pink Therapy has produced two sets of guidelines that can be downloaded from their website:
Guidelines for Community Members Attending Parties or Events, downloadable here:
Guidelines for Community Members
Guidelines for Facilitators, Organizers and Community Leaders, downloadable here:
Guidelines for Leaders
How needed are these? The 2014 Consent Violations Survey reported that over 30% of the over 4000 respondents who volunteered to complete the survey had experienced a violation. This must not be confused with all kink event participants due to a self-selected sample, and we have no way of knowing what percentage of kinksters saw our survey, and how many of those decided to respond. But 20% of the violations involved kink event organizers or leadership in the event sponsorship. This violations were perceived not just as mistakes, but abuse of institutional authority within the community.
Please feel free to reproduce these, distribute them, and modify them as best suits your community.
Pink Therapy can be found on the web at: