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Belgium DJ & Producer Amélie Lens. Credits : Kate Davis-Macleod, Vogue
Belgium DJ & Producer Amélie Lens. Credits : Kate Davis-Macleod, Vogue
Belgium DJ & Producer Amélie Lens. Credits : Kate Davis-Macleod, Vogue
Belgium DJ & Producer Amélie Lens. Credits : Kate Davis-Macleod, Vogue

Amélie Lens dismantles Electronic Music's culture of silence

Alexandre Trochut

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February 26 · 2026

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Alexandre Trochut

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Feb 26 · 2026

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Alexandre Trochut

Written by Alexandre Trochut

Published in Culture

02.26.2026

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February 26 · 2026

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Alexandre Trochut

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02.26.2026 · 06:00 PM

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In an Instagram statement, Amélie Lens deconstructs abuse myths & shows how silence, reputation & justice failure protect abusers in electronic music.

The hard techno scene's reckoning produced many reactions. Most were institutional: agencies severing ties, festivals issuing statements, comment sections performing outrage. Amélie Lens did something different.

In a video posted to her networks — visibly shaken, at moments unable to continue — and in a written statement that followed, one of electronic music's most prominent figures chose not to distance herself from the crisis but to enter it. Not as a commentator. As a witness. « We are tired, » she began.

One word that said more than most paragraphs written about this affair. Not angry, not accusatory — tired.

The specific exhaustion of people who have been explaining the same thing, in the same rooms, to the same audiences, for a very long time.What distinguishes Lens's statement from the surrounding noise is its deliberate refusal to remain inside the scene. She did not speak about hard techno.

She spoke about the system that hard techno, like every other sector organized around male prestige and informal hierarchy, has faithfully reproduced. « The Dancefloor is our home. Backstage is our workplace. Neither feels safe. » She described what safety has actually looked like, in practice, for women in this industry: « watching their drinks, watching the doors (…) never leaving a friend alone after she has had a drink — because they have seen, firsthand, what happens in the seconds they look away. »

In an Instagram statement, Amélie Lens deconstructs abuse myths & shows how silence, reputation & justice failure protect abusers in electronic music.

The hard techno scene's reckoning produced many reactions. Most were institutional: agencies severing ties, festivals issuing statements, comment sections performing outrage. Amélie Lens did something different.

In a video posted to her networks — visibly shaken, at moments unable to continue — and in a written statement that followed, one of electronic music's most prominent figures chose not to distance herself from the crisis but to enter it. Not as a commentator. As a witness. « We are tired, » she began.

One word that said more than most paragraphs written about this affair. Not angry, not accusatory — tired.

The specific exhaustion of people who have been explaining the same thing, in the same rooms, to the same audiences, for a very long time.What distinguishes Lens's statement from the surrounding noise is its deliberate refusal to remain inside the scene. She did not speak about hard techno.

She spoke about the system that hard techno, like every other sector organized around male prestige and informal hierarchy, has faithfully reproduced. « The Dancefloor is our home. Backstage is our workplace. Neither feels safe. » She described what safety has actually looked like, in practice, for women in this industry: « watching their drinks, watching the doors (…) never leaving a friend alone after she has had a drink — because they have seen, firsthand, what happens in the seconds they look away. »

When adaptation becomes the symbol of society's failure

This even lead to a silent language of warning glances exchanged between women in rooms where saying something out loud carries consequences, she explained « We have a "look" we give each other to warn a girl about a man because we are afraid to say it out loud. » An entire informal infrastructure of mutual protection, built not by institutions but by necessity, because institutions failed to build anything adequate. This is not a description of exceptional circumstances. It is a description of the baseline. She then did something that required more courage than the statement itself: she offered a personal account.

She had gone to the police with hundreds of messages from a man detailing, explicitly, how he intended to kidnap and rape her. He had boarded a flight to Antwerp. He had found her. Her team was present when he approached. She arrived at the police station with every piece of evidence in hand.They barely looked at it. They told her they could not do anything. They sent her home in tears.

This is not an anecdote about a failure of individual officers. It is a data point consistent with what parliamentary reports, victimology studies, and advocacy research have documented across jurisdictions for decades: the justice system does not perform, for victims of sexual violence and stalking, the function it claims to perform.

When conviction rates sit below one percent of actual incidents, when eighty-five percent of victims in the UK music industry alone choose not to report because they have correctly calculated the cost of doing so, the system is not failing. It is functioning exactly as its incentives predict. Lens understood this, and she asked the question that follows from it directly: « if even the authorities will not help when the evidence is in your hands, how are women supposed to feel safe in a club where the abuse is silent and invisible, and where the abuser is, more often than not, someone everyone already knows? »

When adaptation becomes the symbol of society's failure

This even lead to a silent language of warning glances exchanged between women in rooms where saying something out loud carries consequences, she explained « We have a "look" we give each other to warn a girl about a man because we are afraid to say it out loud. » An entire informal infrastructure of mutual protection, built not by institutions but by necessity, because institutions failed to build anything adequate. This is not a description of exceptional circumstances. It is a description of the baseline. She then did something that required more courage than the statement itself: she offered a personal account.

She had gone to the police with hundreds of messages from a man detailing, explicitly, how he intended to kidnap and rape her. He had boarded a flight to Antwerp. He had found her. Her team was present when he approached. She arrived at the police station with every piece of evidence in hand.They barely looked at it. They told her they could not do anything. They sent her home in tears.

This is not an anecdote about a failure of individual officers. It is a data point consistent with what parliamentary reports, victimology studies, and advocacy research have documented across jurisdictions for decades: the justice system does not perform, for victims of sexual violence and stalking, the function it claims to perform.

When conviction rates sit below one percent of actual incidents, when eighty-five percent of victims in the UK music industry alone choose not to report because they have correctly calculated the cost of doing so, the system is not failing. It is functioning exactly as its incentives predict. Lens understood this, and she asked the question that follows from it directly: « if even the authorities will not help when the evidence is in your hands, how are women supposed to feel safe in a club where the abuse is silent and invisible, and where the abuser is, more often than not, someone everyone already knows? »

The Myth of the Creepy Man

This brings her to the argument that matters most — and the one that is most consistently avoided, she wrote :

« Most men imagine assault as something perpetrated by a stranger in a dark alley. A recognizable threat. An other. This image is almost entirely fictional, but it is a useful fiction, because it allows the men who hold it to locate danger at a comfortable distance from themselves and from the people they know. »

The Gisèle Pelicot case — in which a devoted husband and grandfather was revealed to have drugged his wife for nearly a decade and facilitated her assault by dozens of men, several of them unremarkable neighbors and colleagues — dismantled this image with a precision that no argument could match. « The threat is not the stranger. It is the familiar. It is the friend. It is the person with whom you shared a drink an hour ago, whose behavior you witnessed and laughed off, or looked away from, or decided not to name. »

Lens named this directly: what sustains the problem is not only the men who act, but the men who watch and say nothing. The silence, the minimization, the instinct to protect reputations before protecting people.

Who speaks up?

She was careful, as she had to be, to frame this not as an indictment of men as a category, but as a question addressed to men as individuals. « Not: are all men responsible? But: when something is wrong in front of you, who speaks? Who interrupts? Who refuses to look away? »

It is the same question that Martin Niemöller's poem — written in the aftermath of a very different, and far more extreme, catastrophe — poses at its core. Not about guilt for what others have done, but about the specific moral weight of choosing not to act when action was available. This poem's power is not its comparison of crimes. It is its diagnosis of indifference as its own form of complicity. That diagnosis applies wherever indifference sustains harm.

"When they came for the socialists, I said nothing, because I was not a socialist. When they came for the trade unionists, I said nothing, because I was not a trade unionist. When they came for the Jews, I said nothing, because I was not a Jew. Then they came for me. And there was no one left to protest." - Martin Niemöller

The poem's lesson is not subtle. Silence, sustained long enough, becomes architecture — the invisible structure inside which harm continues undisturbed. We live in an era that has grown exceptionally skilled at the production of justification: for inaction, for looking away, for the quiet calculation that this particular moment is not the right one to speak.

Silence is a conscious choice

History is not kind to this calculation. Its most enduring stories — the ones worth telling — belong to the people who chose action in the face of danger, regardless of whether that danger was directed at them.

There is a conversation happening, simultaneously with this one, about what masculinity means and what it is for. It is a conversation worth having, but it risks becoming another form of evasion if it remains abstract. The answer is not complicated. Men are defined, as all people are defined, by what they do when they have a choice — and in particular by what they do when doing nothing is the easier option.

The actions of those who cross the line do not only implicate themselves. They pose a question to everyone watching : What kind of person looks away from something he knows to be wrong, in order to protect a friendship, a scene, a reputation, or simply his own comfort?

This question is not rhetorical. It demands an answer.

Amélie LensHard TechnoTechno Files

Written by Alexandre Trochut

Alexandre Trochut

The Myth of the Creepy Man

This brings her to the argument that matters most — and the one that is most consistently avoided, she wrote :

« Most men imagine assault as something perpetrated by a stranger in a dark alley. A recognizable threat. An other. This image is almost entirely fictional, but it is a useful fiction, because it allows the men who hold it to locate danger at a comfortable distance from themselves and from the people they know. »

The Gisèle Pelicot case — in which a devoted husband and grandfather was revealed to have drugged his wife for nearly a decade and facilitated her assault by dozens of men, several of them unremarkable neighbors and colleagues — dismantled this image with a precision that no argument could match. « The threat is not the stranger. It is the familiar. It is the friend. It is the person with whom you shared a drink an hour ago, whose behavior you witnessed and laughed off, or looked away from, or decided not to name. »

Lens named this directly: what sustains the problem is not only the men who act, but the men who watch and say nothing. The silence, the minimization, the instinct to protect reputations before protecting people.

Who speaks up?

She was careful, as she had to be, to frame this not as an indictment of men as a category, but as a question addressed to men as individuals. « Not: are all men responsible? But: when something is wrong in front of you, who speaks? Who interrupts? Who refuses to look away? »

It is the same question that Martin Niemöller's poem — written in the aftermath of a very different, and far more extreme, catastrophe — poses at its core. Not about guilt for what others have done, but about the specific moral weight of choosing not to act when action was available. This poem's power is not its comparison of crimes. It is its diagnosis of indifference as its own form of complicity. That diagnosis applies wherever indifference sustains harm.

"When they came for the socialists, I said nothing, because I was not a socialist. When they came for the trade unionists, I said nothing, because I was not a trade unionist. When they came for the Jews, I said nothing, because I was not a Jew. Then they came for me. And there was no one left to protest." - Martin Niemöller

The poem's lesson is not subtle. Silence, sustained long enough, becomes architecture — the invisible structure inside which harm continues undisturbed. We live in an era that has grown exceptionally skilled at the production of justification: for inaction, for looking away, for the quiet calculation that this particular moment is not the right one to speak.

Silence is a conscious choice

History is not kind to this calculation. Its most enduring stories — the ones worth telling — belong to the people who chose action in the face of danger, regardless of whether that danger was directed at them.

There is a conversation happening, simultaneously with this one, about what masculinity means and what it is for. It is a conversation worth having, but it risks becoming another form of evasion if it remains abstract. The answer is not complicated. Men are defined, as all people are defined, by what they do when they have a choice — and in particular by what they do when doing nothing is the easier option.

The actions of those who cross the line do not only implicate themselves. They pose a question to everyone watching : What kind of person looks away from something he knows to be wrong, in order to protect a friendship, a scene, a reputation, or simply his own comfort?

This question is not rhetorical. It demands an answer.

Amélie LensHard TechnoTechno Files

Written by Alexandre Trochut

Alexandre Trochut

Culture

Industry Insight

Amélie Lens dismantles Electronic Music's culture of silence

Amélie Lens dismantles Electronic Music's culture of silence