Today is the Day of Silence, an event organised to raise consciousness about the bullying and abuse which LGBQTIA youth experience in school. Bullying in school is a problem in and of itself. The amount of bullying centered around sexual orientation and gender expression, though, is truly horrific. There’s a lot of research done about this and I’d highly recommend doing some reading; just to throw one statistic at you, nine out of 10 LGBQTIA youth report having experienced abuse and bullying in school.
Bullying kills. This is not just about kids being kids. It is about unparalleled viciousness and horrific behaviour. It is about violence and rape and hatred. It is about school districts which stand by and do nothing while their students are literally bullied to death and people are begging for help; the ‘not my business’ attitude harms youths who are being bullied in particular because they are counting on the adults around them to do the right thing and when they don’t it is an act of betrayal. An act which can’t be made up later, when the victim is dead, I would like to point out.
The torment experienced by LGBQTIA youth in school may start with teasing, but it escalates. Sometimes it ends in extreme acts of violence. It also ends in suicide. LGBQTIA teens are four times more likely to attempt suicide than their straight, cis peers. Growing media attention is being paid to bullying and its consequences, especially when the people who end up dead are white, conventionally attractive, cis, and nondisabled, but less attention is paid to LGBQTIA youth, especially if they are brown, or disabled, or trying to transition while in high school. They, of course, are not nearly as media friendly.
There’s been a lot of attention lately about Constance McMillen, a lesbian teen who just wanted to go to the prom with her girlfriend and ended up in the middle of a civil rights case. But today’s not about proms. It’s about the right to survive, and the paltry protections afforded to LGBQTIA youth in school. While this is focused on school environments and on pressuring students, faculty, and administrators to take action to protect LGBQTIA youth, I think that we outside the school environment also have some work to do, which includes making it clear that we support comprehensive anti-bullying policies in our district schools and that we are willing to provide districts with the tools to make that happen.
Some of it stems from ignorance. Either bullying isn’t recognised because it’s subtle, or people don’t realise how extensive and harmful it is. They see some namecalling in the halls and think that’s not ok, but they don’t know what’s going on in the bathrooms, the locker room, the bus on the way home from school. Or they do, but they think that intervening may make the problem worse by focusing the attention of the bully on the victim even more. They lack the training to know how to intervene and they might not know who to go to about getting that fixed, getting the right training, getting the tools they need to help.
There are a lot of intersections here. LGBQTIA youth of colour, youth with disabilities, youth of religions which differ from those of most of the student body are already in a position of alienation. They have few friends to reach out to and few visible allies. Coming out isn’t just dangerous at school. LGBQTIA teens are more likely to end up homeless, and when you are kicked out of your home because your parents don’t like who you are, you lack the stability and the grounding which might allow you to break that cycle of bullying. The Day of Silence is about making allies more visible and getting schools to think more consciously about their bullying policies, but what happens at the end of the day when people hang up their badges and everyone goes to bed and gets ready for it to start all over again?
Ending the silence is important. People who want to specifically identify as allies are doing a brave thing, because they make themselves targets for bullying and abuse by doing so; in an environment of intolerance, people promoting tolerance are not going to fare well. It takes significant strength of convictions to come out as an ally in some school environments, to expose yourself to danger because you believe it’s important to express solidarity.
I was lucky. I went to a school where people like me were relatively well treated. A number of the students I was in school with were LGBQTIA and I know of at least three students other than myself who were definitely expressing as gender variant in school and later came out as trans*. I don’t think that things were perfect; I did, for example, experience low-level torment from students because of my gender expression, but they were a whole lot better than they are in some places. What my school needed more than anything else, probably, was an actual student association for folks like us, with speakers and educators we could talk with. We were sort of allowed to muddle through, but I know that I definitely could have benefited, for example, from learning that these feelings I experienced about my gender were not at all unusual.
The Day of Silence is supposed to be about silence and I fully support students who are engaging in it across the country. But I’m using it as an opportunity to speak, because I have a question for you: What are you doing for LGBQTIA youth in your community?
What are you doing to end the silence which extends beyond school grounds? What are you doing to address the vulnerability of homeless queer teens? Do teens who need help know that they have an ally in you, no matter what your gender or sexual orientation?