School Support and Absenteeism Among LGBTQ Students in Four Latin American Countries

• In Event: Building a global understanding of LGBTQ youth and schools: Asia, Latin America, and Eastern Europe

Abstract

School discrimination and violence against children and youth with non-normative sexual orientation, gender identity and expression (SOGIE) is an issue of concern across the globe. International institutions and civil society organizations have called on the international community to build comprehensive education sector responses to homophobia, lesbophobia, biphobia and transphobia.

Previous studies have shown that the existence of diverse forms of school support is associated with positive outcomes for students with non-normative SOGIE, among them, the presence of supportive school staff members, the existence of gay-straight alliances, the implementation of SOGIE-inclusive curriculums, and the adoption policies to reduce SOGIE-based school harassment. This paper explores the relationship between the presence of supportive school staff members and levels of absenteeism among students with non-normative SOGIE in Brazil, Mexico, Peru and Uruguay.

Using individual-level data from the 2015-2016 National School Climate Surveys fielded in those four Latin American countries, in a multivariate regression model, I found that the presence of welcoming staff members was correlated with reduced levels of absenteeism caused by feelings of unsafety or discomfort among students with non-normative SOGIE. This relationship remained constant when analyzing the samples from those four countries in a concatenated dataset and when analyzing them separately, with the exception of the Uruguayan sample, which only showed statistically significant results in a bivariate regression model.

This paper also explores the hypothesis that the importance of having supportive staff members in educational settings could vary depending on the students’ gender identity. According to previous studies, students with non-normative gender identities, including those who identify as trans, gender fluid and non-binary, are more likely to leave school compared to those who identity with the sex they were assigned at birth.

To test this assumption, I differentiated my relationship of interest based on the students’ gender identity, obtaining mixed results. Findings from the concatenated dataset evidenced a stronger association between having supportive staff members and levels of absenteeism for students with non-normative gender identity than for cisgender students. However, when analyzing each national dataset separately, only the results from Mexico and Peru provided suggestive evidence of a difference in the relationship of support to absenteeism by cisgender/non-cisgender status.

Although such results are not conclusive, they align to some degree with the results of previous analysis, so the hypothesis that non-cisgender students receive greater benefits than their cisgender peers from having supportive school staff members should not be discarded, but rather it should be explored in further research. Implications of these findings for policy and practice with regard to SOGIE issues in education for the Latin America region will also be discussed.

Author

• Juan Pablo Delgado, Amicus DH
  Presenting Author