Trigger warning for brief mentions of rape.
We have two good pieces of American legislative news for you.
First, the FBI has officially changed their definition of rape (used primarily for statistical purposes) to include male survivors and those who were raped non-forcibly or non-vaginally. Although still problematic (it does not count rape by envelopment as rape), it is a tremendous victory for the Forces of Good(tm).
Second, Senator Al Franken and Representative Jared Polis have introduced legislation that would ban discrimination in public schools based on actual or perceived sexual orientation or gender identity; schools that discriminated against students who are queer or perceived to be queer, or condoned harassing behavior against them, could lose their federal funding.
FUCK YEAH this bill.
It’s important for a lot of reasons! Most notably, nine out of ten LGBT youth are harassed in school, a third skipped school last month because they felt unsafe, and they are more likely than their peers to commit suicide. All because they choose to love someone of their same gender, or because they identify as a gender different from the one they were assigned at birth.
However, even if you are an asshole and only care about straight people, this bill is super-important! A huge amount of bullying of straight boys– especially quiet, gentle, or otherwise gender-non-conforming boys– is based on the idea that they must be “fags.” (Women get it too: there are more than a few gender-non-conforming straight women who were called dykes.) And because this bill protects people perceived to be queer in addition to us dirty queers, a huge amount of gender-policing bullshit in America’s schools will suddenly be made illegal.
So I hope we can agree that passing this bill is damn important! Senator Franken asks that people contact their Senators or Representatives (preferably by phone) once a week and ask them to cosponsor and otherwise support the bill. As always, do what you can. However, if you want to help pressure Congress to pass this bill, there are a few options:
For further information, Al Franken has a video here about the bill.
“(A lot of the fights and issues at my school arise from something someone said about someone else on facebook the night before. What exactly is the school’s jurisdiction in that situation?)”
You can just not check and allow non-friends to write on your wall/see their writing. Thus its a non-issue. It’s like complaining about losing in some game’s pvp. Don’t go in the pvp area, problem solved.
So I’m a high school teacher. I hate the zero tolerance bs- all it does is lead schools and parents to disagree in front of the kids (most parents tell their kids to defend themselves) which hurts the authority of both. It also assumes nobody involved can make a judgement call about self-defense. It doesn’t work either. There a lot of fights in high schools and to be honest, the kids getting in them don’t care about 10 days oss. It’s a vacation to them. If schools could/would involve actual legal shit for fights instead? Maybe it would be better.… Read more »
I never hit first and never defended either. I protected myself, and in last resort (they didn’t leave or they really pushed me into “fight for survival” mode) used my nails, which earned me some nickname that was possibly supposed to be emasculating, of “cat”. My brother sometimes protected me. He loved to fight, he’d win a lot too. He’s younger than me by 2 years, and the bullies were pretty much always in my classes (so pretty much always 1-2 years older than him). I wouldn’t ask him to fight or protect me though. He just felt it was… Read more »
@Schala, sorry to nit-pick, but pacifism is a philosophical stance that’s broader in context than simple non-violence. In my case I made it a point that I never hit first and I was vocal about it. That is a form of pacifism as well. I know that it is completely backwards, but people can look at not defending yourself as a form provocation. Whenever a fight was looming, my friends would always run away and leave me to fend for myself. A lot of times the fights were my friends’ fault. But I was not mad at them because of… Read more »
Schala:
Your experience with school “fights” mirror mine almost exactly. I never retaliated, I just protected my most sensitive areas (face and crotch) as best I could and waited for the beatings to end. And school staff would then engage in ritual victim-blaming, with talk about how my odd behaviour and naïveté invited and encouraged bullying and violence.
Since sometime in 2005, I stopped biting my nails. I let them grow until they break, usually. I might “trim” the thumb nails if the others all broke and the white part is about the same size as the on-the-finger part. They typically break around the time they attain 2x the finger’s nail length anyways. I like the nails themselves, much better than I’d like acrylic fake ones. But I can’t help but wonder if I’m also growing them as a means of better self-defense unconsciously (they can be pretty sharp, even if they’re filed to be round, when long).… Read more »
If you got into fights then at least you could still have friends. It established a pecking order where everyone could see that you stood up for yourself even if the other guy was a lot stronger than you. So maybe you weren’t the toughest kid in school but you were the defiant underdog who was a hero to all the other underdogs. My experience is that I didn’t retaliate, and they didn’t stop, staff didn’t care. I got told to stop provoking them. I’m pacifist, and the extent to which I fought back even back then in 5th grade… Read more »
End the ridiculous notion that being in a fight is being in a fight and everyone’s punished equally. I highly doubt this “zero tolerance” policy even works in the first place, It doesn’t… it’s the worst thing that ever happened to kids that get bullied. It was implemented while I was going through grade school and overnight it went from me being able to talk to school officials about what was happening to me to me in and around school to having the school become a mutual enemy of everyone. It pushed a lot of the overt physical violence off… Read more »
Slightlymetaphysical: I believe Ozymandia42 has announced on another thread that Orphan is banned so it is no point in directing questions at him/her.
Gay men and effeminate men (“perceived to be gay”) are acceptable targets of violence like no other. They’re receiving special protection because they need it. I agree with slightlymetaphysical concerning the idea that bullying should just be made “illegal”. (I.e. let’s invite more police presence to America’s high schools.) The fact is, as has been pointed out, bullying often occurs in a gray area and I’m worried about misuse of the justice system here. How exactly can you “prove” a lot of these gray areas? And prove it you must. Yes, Constitutional protections should extend to juvie sentences, including reasonable… Read more »
Pocketjacks, I think you’ve misunderstood me (although I wasn’t really making myself clear, so it’s probably my fault). I don’t think comforting victims is all we can do or all we should do. I think it’s the only thing (apart from maybe some extreme circumstances genuine-fear-of-violence measures) which we can or should LEGISLATE. We should totally do all those things you said as well. Just ‘Let’s make a law to make bullying illegal’ -no. For all the reasons you said. Orphan- Do you seriously think schools get more than one memo from central government A DAY? Really? And a more… Read more »
Well, even though the law is written in a gender neutral language the common perception still is that men almost never are raped. Media generally don’t report on it. Research on rape tend to come from gender studies (which not too long ago were called women’s studies just as the laws used to not be gender neutral) and that has tended to skew the questions and respondents in a way that is likely to result in an underreporting of rape of males. The changes toward gender neutrality seem to often come from the government (departments) or from the legislative branch… Read more »
@AB:
Not sure about all of Europe, but there are a few with neutral definitions:
Greece
Norway
UK
Northern Ireland
Sweden
Germany
France could be interpreted as neutrally but is iffy.
I stopped there because I’m too lazy to check all of them. Also I’m not a legal scholar, just going by a layperson’s reading.
SlightlyMetaphysical – One amendment out of how many? How many hundreds of pages of paperwork cross an administrator’s desk every day? Considered alone, sure, every administrator in the country should be fine keeping up with this, but this is hardly the only thing they’re looking at, particularly if the school isn’t particularly well-off. Why is it so hard to pass a single law requiring the school to deal with bullying, period, instead of passing countless laws which deal only with specific groups and will need constant amendment in order to cover situations which weren’t previously considered and will almost certainly… Read more »
The ‘condoning harassment’ part aside (I can see the merit in just forbidding schools to condone bullying), I think the part about forbidding discrimination needs mention too. I’ve never heard about an instance where a gender non-conforming students were discriminated against by the schools here, but harassment and discrimination of (mostly male) gender non-conformists in other venues do happen, and I think it’s especially vital to protect people from that sort of thing in places which they’re obligated to attend, such as schools. I’d write to help the bill pass if I was from the USA. If nothing else, an… Read more »
Kinda have to agree with dungone. I can’t imagine no one in the room sitting and going ‘you know, what about the other rapes, you know not rape rape, think we should count those?’. Heck ten seconds of http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laws_regarding_rape gives me a dozen better definitions. And this is the department we delegate our security to? On the other hand, the US is not the only country in the world, so what’s the picture in places like Canada(They apparently don’t even have an entry for rape, only sexual assault) or Europe where the definition more neutral. There doesn’t appear to be… Read more »
However, even if you are an asshole and only care about straight people, this bill is super-important! A huge amount of bullying of straight boys– especially quiet, gentle, or otherwise gender-non-conforming boys– is based on the idea that they must be “fags.” I think this reasoning is somewhat faulted, Ozy. Yes it’s true that some straight boys are bullied for being gender-non-conforming. I certainly was, in the 3rd grade I used to get called a “he-she”. But even in the case of straight boys and girls being bullied for being gender-non-conformist, do you really think it will be enforced as… Read more »
Some people go with the fallacy of sunk cost: I got beaten in school and it “made a man out of me”, so suck it up and become a man. Or that there wasn’t protection, so you shouldn’t have them either (and/or implying that having said protections would make them less manly).
@AnonymousDog: Well that one state bullying law with a religious exemption was pretty much proof that at least one state government has difficulties with reasonable moral reasoning. And most Federal laws are enforced by lower justification any way.(ie: the DEA is not doing minor drug busts on street corners, that’s the local cops.) Bullying is a widespread social problem that is ignored on the local level. And not just recently. School bullying has been ignored by school authorities for decades. In some places, it is supported by school authorities. This is unconscionable. I do not under stand how any moral… Read more »
While I’m sure Sen. Franken’s intentions are good, and that he is trying to address a real problem, I have to ask: Do we really need another federal criminal statute? Do those of you who support this kind of law imagine that having federal officers ( federal marshals?, the FBI?)crack down on bullys is an effective use of the federal power? Or are you so convinced that people(voters) in other states, in other parts of the country are so morally inferior that they have to be kicked into line with a federal law? If you’re convinced that bullying of any… Read more »
Orphan- You know there’s a system of communication between government at the highest level and local service provision, right? Each individual headteacher doesn’t have to research the entire thing on their own, they get guidelines and I’d guess that this legislation would, in practical terms, take the form of an amenment to those guidelines. Compared to the hell that is the curriculum, I doubt there’s anything overwhelming about ‘Also, as a part of government, you should not discriminate against people for reasons including but not limited to sex, race, orientation, religion, gender identity, etc. We particularly mean it about the… Read more »
I, too, would prefer a law that said “No Bullying, Ever, For Any Reason”. But, human nature being what it is, I also see the value of adding “Yes, that means gender and orientation too.” (and Race. And Religion or lack thereof, and a few other specific items)
I have zero tolerance for school officials who allow any form of bullying whatsoever.
PS: The reason One of America’s Most Decent Politicians Is A Comedian is that many of the rest are Jokes.
slightlymetaphysical –
At what point do schools have to keep a lawyer on retainer just to ensure they’re in compliance with all the laws?
Fewer and broader laws would be better. The more laws we have the less effective they are, if for no other reason than that nobody is capable of even knowing them all.
Keep in mind that the school officials ultimately responsible for enforcing these laws are typically elected, and not necessarily on the basis of familiarity with federal laws governing the education system.
@slightlymetaphysical: I think it would be better if it would be illegal for a school to ignore (or even take part in) any kind of bullying. A student gets harassed because they like plushies, and the teachers look away? The teachers would be guilty of breaching their duty of supervision.
Superglucose- firstly, the hypothetical law you give is superfluous. It would fit quite easily into ‘Don’t discriminate against children because of their family situations’. Secondly, there’s a very good reason why protection along grounds like race and sexuality is legislated while protection based on family situations is generally left to less extreme measures, and that reason is [insert most recent case of teachers being wilfully homophobic or wilfully ignoring homophobia here]. It has been endlessly demonstrated that schools themselves will discriminate against queer people. For there to even start to be the protection needed, it must be legislated. If there… Read more »
Yeah, you know what we need? More bills that say “It’s not ok to bully people who are X.” I fucking hate these bills because of that “who are X” bit tacked on. Oh now it’s wrong to discriminate against people who are queer, or even might possibly be queer. Oh, now it’s wrong to discriminate against women. Oh, now it’s wrong to discriminate against this group. The end game of this is scary to me. Each group that gets these laws is the trendy “these people matter NOW” sort of bullshit. Either we end up with fifteen hyperbalillion laws… Read more »