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Discussion on Bullying Turns to Real Solutions, Legal Protections

Posted Friday, December 17, 2010 in Reporting by Matt Comer

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  • Discussion on Bullying Turns to Real Solutions, Legal Protections

Angel Collie is a 25-year-old senior at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, but when he was in high school, he faced a turbulent experience in his rural hometown of Bunn, N.C. Once a straight-A student involved in school athletics, Collie’s academics took a nosedive after first coming out as lesbian and later as transgender.

“My principal once told me that if he couldn’t come to school Baptist, then I couldn’t come to school queer,” Collie says.

Students often poked fun at Collie, saying he’d had a sex change operation over the summer. His efforts at creating change and starting a Gay-Straight Alliance were blocked at every turn. Eventually, Collie’s mother stepped in, took Collie out of classes and enrolled him at the Walt Whitman School, a private LGBTQ high school that once operated in Dallas, Texas.

“I learned a lot there,” Collie says of the fully-inclusive and supportive school. “They had a lot of people coming from different places, people who had been kicked out of their schools or had similar narratives as what I’d been through.”

Now a successful college student, Collie is involved with several campus organizations and has helped to plan the campus LGBTQ student organization’s annual student conference. Despite Chapel Hill’s progressive reputation, Collie says the school still has a long road to travel toward full inclusion.

“When it comes to policies, it’s not where it needs to be,” Collie says. “It was difficult to navigate [campus] housing as a trans person. They didn’t know what to do with me, and they put me into a room by myself. I don’t think they are ready to deal with gender identity on that level.”

Chapel Hill, like the rest of North Carolina’s public university system, does have an LGBT-inclusive non-discrimination policy. Yet, Collie says, “It’s not the policy that has the most effect. I think it is the work being done by campus groups and by the [university’s] LGBTQ Center.”

He adds, “You can have the best law in the world, but if you don’t have people there holding you accountable it won’t make a difference. I think it is a struggle. The LGBTQ Center has done a marvelous job holding them accountable but there are still some areas where I think things could be improved.”

‘It Gets Better’ raises awareness, garners media attention

This fall, national media and bloggers have paid particular attention to a spate of gay youth suicides, anti-gay bullying concerns, and safe schools policies. Writers, activists, and advocacy organizations responded in their own ways, with Dan Savage’s “It Gets Better” project the most significant to date. San Francisco-based Gay-Straight Alliance (GSA) Network’s launched a similar campaign called "Make It Better."

But much as these awareness-raising campaigns are opening up a discussion about the problem of bullying targeting LGBTQ young people, the national discussion was missing substantial and in-depth consideration of concrete policies that make schools and communities safer for LGBT youth and young adults.

That lack of substantive policy coverage in news and public discourse isn’t for lack of trying. National advocacy groups like the Gay, Lesbian and Straight Education Network (GLSEN) and Campus Pride have sent out a plethora of press releases, appeared on national TV news reports and cable talk shows, and pushed vital information to print news sources across the country. And, while the press has been more than willing to repeat study figures and statistics, many haven’t taken the time to delve into discussions on real solutions. [Disclosure: This writer works as a consultant with Campus Pride.]

Fed officials remind schools to stop bullying

One of those “real solutions” was announced by the U.S. Department of Education in October. The department’s assistant secretary for civil rights, Russlyn Ali, wrote in a “Dear Colleague” letter released on Oct. 26 about newly reinterpreted and expanded guidelines on what constitutes discrimination. The letter was sent to over 15,000 schools and school districts and 5,000 colleges and universities.

Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972 “prohibits gender-based harassment, which may include acts of verbal, nonverbal, or physical aggression, intimidation, or hostility based on sex or sex-stereotyping,” she writes. “It can be sex discrimination if students are harassed either for exhibiting what is perceived as a stereotypical characteristic for their sex, or failing to conform to stereotypical notions of masculinity or femininity.”

Ali tells school administrators that some forms of anti-gay harassment or bullying based on religion may fall under the department’s jurisdiction as civil rights violations based on gender and national origin.

“School personnel who understand their legal obligations to address harassment under these laws are in the best position to prevent it from occurring and to respond appropriately when it does,” Ali writes.

Ali adds, “Although Title IX does not prohibit discrimination based solely on sexual orientation, Title IX does protect all students, including lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) students, from sex discrimination. When students are subjected to harassment on the basis of their LGBT status, they may also … be subjected to forms of sex discrimination prohibited under Title IX.”

GLSEN’s executive director, Eliza Byard, has welcomed the department’s newly-iterated interpretations of federal civil rights law. In a statement, she said the guidelines are “an extremely important reminder to all school districts of their existing responsibilities under current civil rights statutes.”

Despite her praise for the Department of Education’s recent steps to combat bullying and discrimination, Byard expresses concern that even these new interpretations might not be enough to protect LGBTQ students. “While additional, specific protections are still needed, I commend this administration for doing all in its power to protect vulnerable students,” she says in the release.

Proposed legislation to stop bullying

And Rep. Jared Polis (D-Colo.), one of only four openly gay or lesbian members in Congress, is working to do just that. He has introduced the Student Non-Discrimination Act into Congress, which specifically aims to protect LGBT students under federal law. Sen. Al Franken (D-Minn.) introduced the Senate version of the bill. Like past measures protecting students’ civil rights based on race, color, national origin, sex, or disability, Polis’ and Franken’s bills would prohibit discrimination or harassment based on students’ real or perceived sexual orientation and gender identity or expression.

Rep. Linda Sanchez (D-Calif.) has introduced similar legislation. Her Safe Schools Improvement Act would require all schools to adopt codes of conduct prohibiting discrimination or bullying on the basis of sexual orientation and gender identity or expression. In late November, similar legislation targeting colleges and universities was introduced by Sen. Frank Lautenberg (D-N.J.) and Rep. Rush Holt (D-N.J.). Their bill, named after Rutgers University suicide victim Tyler Clementi, would require institutions of higher education receiving federal aid to establish institutional policies inclusive of sexual orientation and gender identity.

But as some contemplate ways to increase protections, others are digging in their heels against making special protections for LGBTQ youth. On Oct. 20, a school board member in Arkansas’ Midland School District used extreme and vulgar anti-gay language in discussing the “Spirit Day” observance held for gay teen suicide victims.

“Being a fag doesn't give you the right to ruin the rest of our lives,” board member Clint McCance wrote on his Facebook profile [a PDF of McCance’s Facebook page is available here]. “If you get easily offended by being called a fag then don't tell anyone you are a fag. Keep that shit to yourself. It pisses me off though that we make a special purple fag day for them. I like that fags cant [sic]procreate. I also enjoy the fact that they often give each other aids [sic]and die."

McCance added, “Seriously they want me to wear purple because five queers committed suicide. The only way I'm wearin' it for them is if they all commit suicide.”

But McCance took a fairly common stance on his anti-gay rant; he couched his views within a religious framework: “I cant [sic]believe the people of this world have gotten this stupid,” he wrote. “We are honoring the fact that they sinned and killed thereselves [sic]because of their sin.”

The Rev. Candace Chellew-Hodge, an openly lesbian pastor in Columbia, S.C., and blogger for Religion Dispatches, says she’s afraid that anti-gay rhetoric couched as religious will make it hard for the Department of Education to enforce their new civil rights guidelines.

“Definitely, I think that the religious right is going to make hay on that and say that this is not bullying, that if anyone tries to stop them then you’re abridging their freedom of religion or freedom of speech,” she says.

Young people speak up, fight back

While activists and legislators hash policy progress on national or state levels, students across the country are speaking out and taking stands. Media (even here at Campus Progress) have been flooded with images of young people facing extraordinary odds while attempting to create change. But that doesn’t mean change is impossible.

Max Philp, a 17-year-old high school senior living in California’s Bay Area, says he’s involved in his school’s Gay-Straight Alliance (GSA) and is already an advocate. He’s also taken an active role with the San Francisco-based GSA Network. His school has gone beyond mere policy inclusion and taken proactive steps to curb bullying.

“My administration is definitely very progressive,” he says. “We just had a ‘Be the Change’ month dedicated to anti-bullying measures, just trying to bring awareness on the issue of bullying and the different types of bullying.”

Philp says most students at his school are “neutral” when it comes to homophobia or racism. Yet, a handful of bullies do sometimes cause trouble. When Philp was a sophomore and closeted, he says, a student who assumed he was gay shoved him into a locker and called him an anti-gay slur.

“Because I was still closeted, I was afraid to go to the administration and ask for help,” he recalls. “About a year-and-a-half later I did finally talk to my administration about it and they did talk to the person, even thought it was a year-and-a-half later.”

Philp’s mostly positive personal experiences aren’t necessarily the norm, even in such progressive places as the metro San Francisco area. He says friends of his have had tough peer relations at their schools and attempts to start gay-straight student clubs have often been met with resistance.

Local policies, education most effective

But even with such encouraging signs as more student outspokenness and national progress, one advocate says simple awareness isn’t enough to change schools’ core cultures or climates.

“So much of what happens in schools is locally determined,” says Arthur Lipkin, chair of the Massachusetts Commission on Gay and Lesbian Youth. “Though I’m happy to have these national advances, I think whatever they do nationally has to be accompanied by state and local initiatives.”

Among those, he says, are policies that not only target inappropriate behavior and provide punishment but also implement key educational components that put a face on issues many LGBT young people face.

“Those policies that go to the culture of the school, to the environment of the school and try to transform that environment” are the best types of approaches and policy practices, Lipkin says. “In doing so, they transform kids’ notions of who gay people are, rather than policies that depend only upon detection and enforcement and punishment.”

Research from GLSEN and Campus Pride provides both qualitative and quantitative data marking discrimination, harassment, and bullying on and off campus. That data seems to support Lipkin’s assertion that the addition of more rules or regulations don’t necessarily make for better schools.

“Having the rules and having serious enforcement of those rules is great, but I don’t think that’s the entire answer,” he says. “I think that just pushes the instances of bullying out of the view of people who need to detect it and enforce it. We know that kids will find ways to bully on schools buses, playing fields or lunchrooms if they know they better not do it within earshot of certain adults.”

The GSA Network’s Make It Better campaign tries to empower students by speaking up for policy changes, faculty trainings, and the establishment of gay-straight alliances in high schools. The campaign is also pushing for curriculum changes. Lipkin cautions against an end-all, be-all approach assuming “all is well.”

“There has been research in the past ... showing school safety can be linked to three factors: School policies, faculty trainings, and the presence of a GSA,” he says. That research showed that schools were safer when they had those three components.

What colleges can do to foster acceptance

Twenty-year-old University of Rhode Island senior Brian Stack and other LGBTQ and straight ally students attempted to deliver the message that accountability is important on their campus in September. At the height of national attention on anti-bullying efforts, Stack and other students affiliated with their schools LGBT student center began a sit-in. First on their lengthy list of demands was that school administrators take proactive steps to respond to incidents of hate and bias on campus.

Stack says the school has LGBT-inclusive policies, but they were never enforced: “The administration wasn’t doing enough to keep students safe or respond to any sort of incidents happening to LGBT students,” he reports. “We stood up when we saw it continuously happening over and over.”

The Rhode Island students held their sit-in for eight days. The campus community, Stack says, was largely supportive. Students involved with other campus organizations joined them or brought them food. Despite a couple incidents of verbal harassment during the protest, Stack says the sit-in went well and he’s proud he and other students were able to take a stand even when university administrators wouldn’t.

Since then, Stack says, the university has responded positively and promised to take action on many of their requests.

Massachusetts’ Lipkin says the “bottom line” is that schools continue to remain unsafe for many LGBTQ youth. A combination of policy and law changes with new LGBTQ-inclusive curricula adoptions will ensure the culture and climate changes advocates like GLSEN and Campus Pride are pushing. Such activity, though, will only happen if holistic approaches are taken.

“Bullying does have a direct relationship with academic performance,” Lipkin says. “States and schools need to be willing to take that head on.”

Matt Comer is a staff writer for Campus Progress.

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