Most gay pupils bullied in school – youth service

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EDUCATION COMMITTEE: MOST LESBIAN, gay, bisexual or transgender (LGBT) second-level students have suffered homophobic bullying, the Belong To youth service has told an Oireachtas Education Committee.

More than 20,000 post-primary students are lesbian, gay or bisexual, representing an average of two students in every classroom. A smaller number of students identify as transgender, according to Belong To.

Research involving over 1,100 LGBT participants, funded by the Health Service Executive (HSE), found that half were subject to verbal abuse in school because of their orientation, 40 per cent were verbally threatened by their peers, 34 per cent heard homophobic comments by staff and one-quarter were physically threatened by their peers. Sandra Gowran, director of education policy with the Gay and Lesbian Equality Network (Glen), said homophobic bullying was pervasive in schools, regardless of whether they had a particular religious ethos or whether they were co-educational or single sex.

“The bottom line is that these young people are not safe in our schools because of the extent of homophobic bullying,” she said.

Most young people became aware of their LGBT identity at around 12, but did not disclose it to another person until around 17.

“LGBT young people are part of every school . . . in Ireland yet they are largely invisible in any meaningful or positive way,” she said.

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They hugged! Lesbians expelled from high school

Back in my day, you had to wake up pretty early to get expelled from high school. You had to rise at the crack of dawn and sell drugs to the children of well-connected bankers and lawyers. You had to trudge a mile in the snow to flip off a teacher (like, repeatedly). You had to make some kind of threat, like: I’m going to blow up this stupid school. I think maybe you could also get expelled for wearing shorts above the knee. Such are the baffling, inexplicable rules of high school expulsion.

But even in my conservative Texas high school, you could not be expelled for being a lesbian. Far less for exhibiting “a bond of intimacy” that was “characteristic of a lesbian relationship” — which, by the way, sounds like approximately 86 percent of female friendships. But such was the case in California, where two 16-year-old girls were expelled for “conducting themselves in a manner consistent with being lesbians.” An appeals court recently ruled that “the private religious school was not a business and therefore did not have to comply with a state law that prohibits businesses from discriminating,” according to a story in today’s L.A. Times.

The Times story recounts the twisty tale that led a teacher (tipped off by a student) to probe the terrifying waters of MySpace, where she found such incendiary evidence as the fact that one of the students identified as a bisexual. There was also a photo of the two girls hugging. (Hugging?!?! Shouldn’t you get some kind of merit badge for that?) Seriously, the story is worth a read. At one point, the principal seems to be coming on to one girl. The tables keep turning. It’s like “Doubt” or something.

So, OK: It’s a private school that wants to uphold a certain religious ethos. (The school is associated with the same religious denomination as Republican Rep. Michele Bachmann. ) Should they be allowed to discriminate based on their shame-based ethos? I’ll leave that for the courts to decide. (A lawyer for the girls hopes to take the case to the California Supreme Court.) But at a time when our school system is so embattled — fingers crossed, economic stimulus plan — and at an age when kids are discovering themselves and in the very place you might hope adults would be trying to sheperd them into an adult world, it’s just a damn shame that a school would spend its valuable resources on this kind of witch hunt.

― Sarah Hepola See They hugged! Lesbians expelled from high school