Bullying and LGBTQ Students: A Call to Redefine the Problem

• In Event: Disrupting the Mythology of Bias-Based Bullying: Queer Kids and Social Violence

Abstract

Purposes/Objectives: Anti-bullying paradigms are in need of Research, Remedy, and Repair. In the spirit of the AERA theme, this paper examines how and why the typical remedy for LGBTQ risk factors—anti-bullying programs—have failed to solve bias, silencing, and violence in K-12 school contexts. We use data from two research projects to illustrate the ways bullying discourse shapes educators’ perspectives on violence targeting LGBTQ youth. We call for redefining the problem of LGBTQ bullying to reflect a broader worldview that encompasses cultural systems of power along lines of gender and sexuality that persistently privilege specific groups of youth while marginalizing others. This shift is an effort to re-orient educators, scholars, and policy-makers to see bullying as social rather than anti-social behavior and that patterns of peer targeting are reflective of cultural norms for sexuality, gender identity, and gender expression.

Perspective(s) or theoretical framework: This research deploys sociological tools to confront and resist the popular discourses and dominant research perspectives on bullying. Most approaches to bullying research and intervention conceptualize the problem of bullying in terms of individual or family pathology. That research is shaped by a bully/victim binary where power is framed as an individual attribute and bullying is the abuse of one individual by another. Traditional approaches to bullying often aim to identify factors that increase students’ risk for engaging in bullying or becoming victims. Interventions typically involve managing aggressive behavior, intervening in individual incidents of violence, and protecting victims. These bullying discourses do not account who has access to power and prestige in the social culture of school. Bullying is not an individual “pathology” but “a form of gender socialization and a mechanism by which gender privilege is reproduced” (Pascoe, 2013, p. 87).

Data sources: The data are drawn from: (1) program evaluations of educator professional development on LGBTQ student experiences, and (2) a ten-year study of educators’ perspectives on their school districts’ implementation practices for state anti-bullying law. In both lines of research, interview participants shared their perspectives regarding LGBTQ student experiences and bullying in their respective school contexts.

Results: Interview participants’ definitions of bullying demonstrate how the individualized bullying paradigm has shaped educator relationship to queer youth, their perception of obligation to students, school interventions, and educator vernacular. Furthermore, in descriptions of the LGBTQ targeting they’ve observed, they interpret the root causes of individual students’ in-school aggression to be forces outside the school that teach kids anti-social behaviors.

Significance: Bullying is social behavior which preserves status quo power dynamics, maintains hegemonic authority of heterosexuality and cisgender identity, and polices peers to abide by the gender binary. In order to disrupt persistent and pervasive targeting of LGBTQ students, a new narrative is needed for making meaning of how and why LGBTQ students have historically been hyper-visible targets in the school environment.

Authors

• Elizabethe C. Payne, Queering Education Research Institute (QuERI)

• Melissa J. Smith, Fairleigh Dickinson University