I think there's a couple disparate contributors to the chaos this year..
A) Scareactors are.. "empowered" - i'm not sure that's the right way to describe it - to report things thanks to a lot of press attention last year about injuries and assaults for entertainment during the event. I'm not at all the type to blame the victim, but I've also met the average scareactor. These are not people who could survive the normal day to day park operation and the amount of crap guests heap on regular TM's. Not all of course, but enough special snowflakes that i could easily see it getting out of hand and over-reporting for every bruised ego or imagined slight.
B) The event workers aren't regular TMs. They were hired last month or so and wont be there next month. Again, many couldn't handle a normal park guest contact shift. Fed the "protect the scareactors! no more incidents!" cry from management and you've got clueless folks being ultra overzealous while also missing the actual legit incidents due to inexperience.
C) No guests at the TM preview. This event usually culls the herd of TMs and their Guests who are willing to go to the event an act like idiots. One swoop and off they go in bulk. Without the guest portion of the event, fewer came, fewer acted a fool, but there's still the same ratio as any other year in the population. Now we get to deal with them throughout the run of the event until they're official caught. This contributes to A and B.
Illustration:
Regular park actor, doing a regular shift. Dumb guest grabs their butt. Regular actor removes the perv's hand, smiles for the photo, whispers to the greeter they work with multiple times a week for many months - that greeter radios the lead for the current actors on set and follows said perv until security can get them. Actor and handler go back stage and fill out forms, complain a bit, give statements, go back to work on their next set and contemplate if expulsion and banning is enough or if they want to press charges.
Scareactor who only works the event gets a butt-grab. Either waits until the end of set to say anything to anyone (which can be much later) or storms off set and has to be found by coordinators to find out what happened. Assuming they're even in the area. Can't really fault them for slow reporting, because they're mostly unwatched when out on sets and live by this "other scareactors will help" sort of code of conduct. The assigned handlers have, from my experience, proven useless and can be found having a snack or talking to their friends during a set. "The guest was wearing a hat! A red one!" Ya know, 30mins after the encounter... so all guests in the park with red hat are now suspects. Scareactor cries about being violated for a few hours while missing sets and getting paid for it (this sounds insensitive, but i've seen people milk thing far more trivial in the big scheme of life.) Any guests with red hats are reported by the rumor-mill excitable attendants and harassed by security. They never find anyone who they can prove actually did it. The aforementioned guest is actually wearing an orange visor and off groping someone else for a few more nights.
Extreme examples, but sadly plausible and why the issues persist an multiply.
Okay, now I’m offended by this.
A large percentage of scareactors are regular TMs that do regular shifts during the year. Ops are selected by department managers from regular TMs. It may not be the majority, but it’s enough to count. So, right there your presumptions are incorrect.
Scareactors have ALWAYS been encouraged to report abuse, and abuse has always happened. In Catacombs, I personally averaged four a night. I’m 6’1”, 210 lbs, and would only report it if I was actively abused, ie grabbed or punched. One guy I reported was an NFL player who wrenched my neck. The house itself would report about five an hour. I was the only person who missed a set in that house the entire run and that was one set because Security wanted to know if I wanted to press formal charges against the NFL player.
In Screamhouse in 2002, we averaged about the same. In fact that year, one girl was punched three times in one night across (across 2 sets). She was 18 years old and a first year scareactor. After getting punched twice, she went back on set to get punched again. All three times it was grown-ass men doing the hitting. She came back the next night.
So to imply that the protecting of scareactors is new (or that the abuse of scareactors is a recent thing) is insulting. There are about three hundred scareactors working a night four eight hours scaring at least 5,000 people an hour. By saying “average scareactor,” you talk like 100 performers are taking half the night off because people are mean.
Scareactors regularly put up with actual, physical abuse on a routine basis. The ones who can’t hack it typically don’t last past opening weekend. If you haven’t scared or had conversations about scaring with more than one or two people, stop talking out of your ass.
Scareactors don’t report abuse without a reason. And the process is “this happened, that person did it, I want them trespassed, I’m going back on set.” Don’t act like you know anything about this process, because it’s apparent that from your perspective scareactors should grow a pair and appreciate to get groped or assaulted by assholes.