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"I just began hating myself more and more, as each year the hatred towards me grew and escalated from just simple name-calling in elementary school to having persons in high school threaten to beat me up, being pushed and dragged around on the ground, having hands slammed in lockers, and a number of other daily tortures."
-Steven Obuchowski, 18, testifying at the Governor's Commission on Gay and Lesbian Youth's Public Hearings."Last year at my high school, there was an incident which shocked everyone. Two female students were standing in the hall with their arms around each other. Students began to encircle them and yell profanities, until a group of about thirty kids surrounded them."
-Zoe Hart,17, senior at Lincoln-Sudbury High School, testifying at the Public Hearings.
Gay and lesbian youth report that they are subjected to a wide range of verbal and physical abuse in school from other students and sometimes even from teachers. This abuse can be delivered in many forms, ranging from derogatory slurs to violent beatings. School for these young men and women is far from being a safe place.
At the Governor's Commission on Gay and Lesbian Youth's Public Hearings, young gays and lesbians gave testimony about the terrorizing anti-gay violence that they face in their schools.
"We were picked on. We were called 'queer' and 'faggot' and a host of other homophobic slurs We were also used as punching bags by our classmates, just for being different."
-Chris Muther, 23, testifying at the Public Hearings about himself and his friend, Richard, who later committed suicide."I was very different from the other students and everyone picked up on it. Immediately the words 'faggot' and 'queer' were used to describe me. In Wareham, being anything but a cool jock is socially unacceptable."
-Randy Driskell, 18, senior at Wareham High School, testifying at the Public Hearings."At Eaglebrook, homophobia and hazing were rampant. I had to be adamantly heterosexual and had to make dehumanizing comments about girls or else be labeled a faggot. I had to prove my masculinity by hazing the underclassmen. Others found pushing wasn't enough and so turned to whiffle-ball bats. Once someone was rolled down cement steps in a laundry bag just for the fun of it."
Devin Beringer, 17, senior at Concord Academy, testifying at the Public Hearings.
A survey of 2,074 gay adults conducted by the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force in 1984 found that 45% of the males and 20% of the females reported having experienced verbal or physical assaults in secondary school because they were perceived to be gay or lesbian.
"One of my best friends...was only suspected of being gay. He was not, as a matter of fact. But at that suspicion, only that suspicion, he was beaten up every day at school. He was unable to attend classes many days."
-Chris Collins, University of Massachusetts-Amherst student, testifying at the Public Hearings.
Violence against gay and lesbian students in school is part of an increasing incidence of violence against gays and lesbians in the world at large.
"The most frequent victims of hate violence today are blacks, Hispanics, Southeast Asians, Jews, and gays and lesbians. Homosexuals are probably the most frequent victims."
-U.S. Justice Department (The Response of the Criminal Justice System to Bias Crime: An Exploratory View, 1987).
Massachusetts enacted the Hate Crimes Reporting Act in 1990, which provides for training of police and collection of statistics about hate crimes directed against gays and lesbians, blacks, Jews, and other minorities. However, the protection afforded adults by this law has yet to be extended to our schools.
In Massachusetts, a survey designed by the Governor's Commission on Gay and Lesbian Youth was distributed to all students at Lincoln-Sudbury Regional High School in February of 1993. Three hundred ninety-eight male and female students responded to the survey.
Students were asked the question, "How often have you heard homophobic remarks made at your school?" An overwhelming 97.5 % of the respondents said they had heard homophobic remarks at school. 49% percent of the students reported they had heard the remarks very often and 49% had heard the remarks sometimes. Only 2.5% had never heard anti-gay comments in school.
Only a handful of schools in Massachusetts have policies which protect students against anti-gay harassment; few school administrations discipline students for name-calling and harassment of gay and lesbian students.
"Schools do not adequately protect gay youth, with teachers often reluctant to stop harassment or rebut homophobic remarks."
-Paul Gibson, U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (Report of the Secretary's Task Force on Youth Suicide, 1989).
Gay and lesbian students, required by law like their peers to attend public schools, find themselves in a dangerous, unsafe environment day after day, yet despite their vulnerability, policies are not in place and teacher-training has not been undertaken to ensure their safety.
"I have spoken to teachers in schools on the issue of name-calling in the hallways and they feel they are not justified in going up to students in the hallways and saying, 'You cannot use that word.' And I ask them, if someone called an African-American student a 'nigger', would you stand around in your classroom and say, 'It's not my place to go out.'?"
-Sharon Bergman, 18, testifying at the Public Hearings.
Sometimes teachers and school personnel, in addition to students, are abusive towards gay and lesbian students. Dorothy Remur, the mother of a gay son, testified that when her son Douglas came out as gay in his senior year at Dedham High School, he faced hostility from teachers as well as students.
"The young women often caught one of the male gym teachers walking with the jocks of the school and the teacher was making derogatory hand signals towards Douglas. I realize that children can be very cruel, but when teachers and adults encourage or do not discourage mean and cruel behavior it makes me angry and very sad."
-Dorothy Remur, mother of a gay son, testifying at the Public Hearings.
Teachers may wish to stop harassment and anti-gay comments, yet they lack the backing of administration. Few teachers have had specific training which would teach them to intervene effectively, and many fear reprisals without the explicit support and backing of their administration. Consequently, gay and lesbian youth bashing continues in our schools
The messages gay and lesbian youth receive about themselves from homophobic peers and teachers are devastating. The hatred others inflict on them is often turned into self-hatred. The violence others unleash on them is often echoed in acts of self-destruction. Joyce Hunter of the Hetrick-Martin Institute, a community-based agency in New York City that provides services for gay and lesbian youth, emphasizes how abuse of these youth puts them at risk for suicide.
"Violence towards youths is also believed to be associated with violence towards oneself, manifested in the form of suicidalbehavior."
-Joyce Hunter, ("Violence Against Lesbian and Gay Male Youths,", 1990).
In 1988, Hunter surveyed violence-victimization and self-destructive behavior among 500 self-identified gay and lesbian youth. Forty-one percent of these youths reported that they had experienced violent attacks, many at the hands of classmates. Forty-six percent of the violence against these young people was gay-related. Suicidal ideation was found among 44% of those gay and lesbian youth who had experienced violent assaults.
The harassment and violence encountered by many gay and lesbian youth in schools interferes with their right to a safe and complete education. In the worst case scenario, the threatening school environment can be a contributing factor to suicide or attempted suicide by gay and lesbian youth.
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