Bullying forces gay teenagers to leave school, says expert

GAY and lesbian teenagers are being forced to leave school because they are being bullied over their sexual orientation, an expert claimed yesterday.

The BeLonG To youth project works with lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender young people but has had growing numbers of 14 and 15-year-olds seeking support in the past few years.

According to the group’s national development co-ordinator Michael Barron, an increasing number of young people are coming out about their sexual identity. But these acts of courage are challenging schools and policy-makers as homophobic bullying becomes more widespread in schools.

“It’s not just verbal abuse, we know of young people who have been assaulted and it has led to some of them leaving their school and some have dropped out of education altogether,” he said.

Mr Barron told a seminar hosted by the Children’s Research Centre at TCD that a 16-year-old teenager had to move from the west of Ireland to Dublin after being attacked in school, leaving him isolated from home as well as school.

He said the problem often comes down to a lack of specific restrictions on homophobic bullying in school policies, which may arise from hang-ups from the country’s Catholic past.

“If a school is run by the religious and the Pope makes very explicit and derogatory remarks about gay people, it’s going to trickle down to schools themselves,” he said.

“There are some situations where schools have taken disciplinary action, but sometimes very subtly, against students because of their sexual identity,” Mr Barron said.

The Equality Authority and BeLonG To will launch a campaign to stop homophobic bullying in schools next month. Mr Barron said a key target is to have school policies changed to specifically ban this kind of discrimination.

The Teachers’ Union of Ireland (TUI) revealed this week that non-national students are often removed from Social, Personal and Health Education (SPHE), a forum which teachers believe can be used to help tackle racism.

Mr Barron said SPHE teachers work to engender respect for students from diverse backgrounds, be it their nationality or their sexual orientation. He added: “Young gay people can feel unaccepted by the hidden curriculum in which the image of a sexual relationship is about ‘boy meets girl, they get married and have children’”.

Dr Paula Mayock, senior researcher at the Children’s Research Centre said homophobic bullying needs urgent attention.

* www.belongto.org