A campaign to increase safety for gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender students and teachers in schools will be launched at a national conference in Wellington, New Zealand, June 11 and 12, 2005.
The campaign, known as Safety in Schools for Queers (SSQ4), is being organized by numerous groups including The New Zealand AIDS Foundation, Rainbow Youth, the Human Rights Commission, the Post Primary Teachers’ Association, Out There and the Family Planning Association.
SS4Q spokesperson Sarah Helm told New Zealand's Scoop a recent study found that 34 per cent of non-heterosexual students did not feel safe in school most of the time. “This is one of the biggest human rights issues facing the queer community – young people’s right to go to school and be treated with respect and dignity,” she said.
That study of 10,000 secondary students further reported that 13% were being “bullied” at least once a week. Some young people had been physically abused and spat on.
The conference will cover issues with the curriculum, policies and teacher training, as well as establishing diversity groups in schools.
“Diversity groups or gay/straight alliances have been tremendously successful in increasing queer students feelings of belonging in a school,” Helm said.
One speaker at the conference will be Australian gay activist Rodney Croome. He will speak on the positive changes which have been made in recent years within the Tasmanian state education department.
“Tasmania has an anti-homophobia and anti-trans-phobia policy, and all of their staff and students are going through anti-homophobia training. It might sound surprising, but New Zealand is a long way behind Tasmania on this issue,” Helm says.
Of course, mistreatment of gay and lesbian youth in schools is also a problem in the United States.
A jury in San Diego yesterday awared two gay students $300,000 in damages for harassment they suffered at their school. The jury said that Poway District High School, north of San Diego, failed to provide a safe environment for LGBT students.
365 Gay News reports that during the trial Joseph Ramelli and Megan Donovan detailed a litany of events including physical abuse at the hands of other students. They were verbally threatened and Ramelli was spit on, punched, kicked and his car was vandalized. Ramelli told the San Diego Superior Court jury that the taunts started during his freshman year and increased in the upper grades. "It makes you feel insecure," Ramelli told the court. "It breaks you down…You start seeing that it isn't just words. It starts meaning more and more to you, especially as you start figuring out who you are." The two students testified that the situation at the school became so intolerable they opted for home-schooling in their senior year.
Donovan also testified she had been mistreated and denied a position on the girls’ varsity softball team because she is a lesbian.
School officials took "minimal or no action at all" when the incidents were reported, plaintiffs Attorney Bridget J. Wilson said. When Donovan and Ramelli complained, they were accused of exaggerating and fabricating events, Wilson told the jury.
Wilson said that the only steps the school did take were counter productive. “All of their solutions involved removing the gay kid, getting the gay kid, having someone follow him around, having him pass through classes late, having someone accompany him here or there – it does nothing to change the climate on the campus,” Wilson told the Gay & Lesbian Times. She agrees that changing peoples individual opinions would be difficult, However, she said, “You could do some systematic work with the campus on making sure that it’s absolutely clear that hate behavior is not tolerated that focuses on respectful behavior."
The lawsuit stated that Poway administrators had encouraged both students to leave the school to participate in home study programs. As a result, Wilson contends Donavan and Ramelli were deprived of a standard high school experience. “That’s the problem … we believe gay and lesbian kids are entitled to have a real high school experience, not one where they’re increasingly isolated from their fellow students in lieu of being protected … Ultimately both of these kids, and I don’t think these kids are different than other kids who’ve experienced harassment, ended up in home-schooling, which I think pretty clearly limits their options,” said Wilson.
"They (Ramelli and Donovan) are thrilled with the verdict," Paula Rosenstein, another lawyer for the plaintiffs, told the North County Times Wednesday afternoon. "They feel heard, which is important." Rosenstein said that her clients did not want to sue the district, but they, their parents and their attorneys received no response when took their complaints to the district. “All along all they wanted was the harassment to stop so they could go to high school, so they could get an education," Rosenstein said. Sources: San Diego Union Tribune, Gay & Lesbian Times, 365 Gay News, Scoop (New Zealand), Rainbow Youth, Stuff (New Zealand), North County Times (Escondido, CA), NBC7/39 (San Diego)
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