Study: Gay girls more likely to be bullied
A survey of more than 800 straight and gay secondary school students has found that while one-third of gay female students and two-thirds of male gay students — albeit from a small number — said they had been the subject of homophobic bullying, straight students also suffered from homophobic name calling and the spreading of rumours.
Dr Stephen Minton of Trinity College Dublin’s School of Education and Anti-Bullying Centre revealed the research at a conference in Norway last week.
Under the title: “Experiences of and perspectives on homophobic bullying amongst a sample of upper secondary school students in Ireland”, it reveals that gay students can also indulge in bullying behaviour, but that they are more likely to be bullied than straight students, particularly females.
The research involved asking 824 fifth-year students at nine schools to complete an English-language version of a larger empirical study that had been conducted on the same subject in Norway in 2009.
While just eight male students and 24 female students were either gay or bisexual, they and heterosexual students reported being bullied and suffering homophobic bullying.
Non-heterosexual females were “significantly more likely to report having been bullied than were heterosexual females or females in general”, according to the research.
Overall, one-third of all male students and 22.5% of female students reported having been bullied, with boys more likely to have been frequently bullied, at 10.6% compared to the females at 2.5%.
When it came to homophobic bullying, two-thirds of gay males and one-third of gay females said they had been called names relating to their sexuality, while more than one-third of gay males and one-quarter of gay females had either been the subject of rumours or had people talk about their sexuality behind their back.
Of the gay or bisexual females surveyed, almost 21% were frequently bullied. The figure for gay males was 37.5%, but Dr Minton said the sample was too small to achieve accurate calculations.
When it comes to bullying others, 37.2% of males and 11.6% of females said they had done so.
The percentages increased in the non-heterosexual category, with 12.5% of females saying they had bullied others.
As for straight students being bullied, 6% of males and 2.2% of females were the subject of rumours that they were gay, with a similar percentage reporting that people said they were gay or lesbian behind their back.
Almost 18% of straight males and 4% of straight females said they had been called homosexual.
