LGBTQ Kids, School Safety, and Missing the Big Picture: Why We Need to Rethink LGBTQ Bullying

• In Event: Bound by Bullying: Exploring the Limitations of LGBTQ Bullying Discourse Through In-Schools Experience and Research

Abstract

The “problem” of LGBTQ students’ school experiences has been shaped by discourses where “overly individualized and psychologized analyses…distort larger issues of inequality” (Pascoe, 2007, p.17) and research examining youths’ negotiations of social hierarchies is neglected (Ringrose, 2008). Interventions include behavior management and protection for victims but overlook “the role that schools play in the reproduction of social relations along axes of class, gender, race and…sexuality” (Youdell, 2005, p.250). LGBTQ identities are positioned as sites of risk and vulnerability, and LGBTQ youth are only acknowledged as victims in need of protection and care (Fields, 2013). Cultural privileging of heterosexuality and gender normativity goes unquestioned, LGBTQ marginalization is reproduced and re-entrenched in new ways, and schools avoid responsibility for complicity in LGBTQ harassment.

This paper explores educators’ stories of LGBTQ harassment and how dominant bullying discourses are shaping educators’ understandings of the needs of LGBTQ students. Data are part of a larger evaluation study on Reduction of Stigma in Schools (RSIS) —a professional development program on the school experiences of LGBTQ youth (Authors, 2010). Participants attended RSIS training, and they volunteered for semi-structured interviews about these experiences. Educators devoted significant interview time to the “state of things” regarding LGBTQ student experiences and bullying in their respective school contexts.

We argue that participants interpret LGBTQ students’ experiences and school climates through a lens that allows them to “see” overt acts of aggression but not the ways stigma and marginalization work “in the most mundane moments everyday inside schools,” or “how school processes act unwittingly to exclude particular students from the educational endeavor” (Youdell, 2006, p.13). Furthermore, “dominant ‘bully discourses’ employed to make sense of and address conflict offer few resources or practical tools for addressing and coping with everyday, normative aggression and violence in schools” (Ringrose & Renold, 2010, p.575). These “normative cruelties” (p.575) are taken for granted as normal gendered behavior. Participants’ perspectives reflect this argument that girls’ gossiping, boys’ rough housing, or “playful” exchanges of insults like “slut” and “fag” are rarely considered to be overtly aggressive behavior. Therefore, low-level aggressions—which actively reproduce normative expectations for gender and sexuality—are rarely noticed, let alone monitored. We find that dominant bullying discourses dictate what they see as actionable.

To counter this, we propose a new definition of bullying to create a more useful framework for understanding the social nature of peer-to-peer aggression and designing interventions to address the cultural roots of this aggression. This definition challenges the bullying discourse and draws attention to daily violence that often fades into the landscape of “normal” adolescent behavior. We argue that it is imperative to keep this subtle aggression in the foreground because it reflects cultural norms embedded in school or community contexts and is the mechanism through which youth regulate boundaries between “normal” and “other.” Finally, we take the position that a majority of peer-to-peer aggression in U.S. public schools is some form of gender policing, and we believe bullying must be redefined to account for relationships between peer targeting and structural inequalities.

Author

• Elizabethe Payne, Queering Education Research Institute (QuERI)