Bullying: An Incredibly High Number

Exclusive: One in five gay teenagers claim they have suffered homophobic bullying from teachers and other adults in school

The Independent.

Really?

The question, as always, with surveys on gay youth in schools is how were the sample recruited http://t.co/0hfnIlg3Vy
— Mark McCormack (@_MarkMcCormack) March 8, 2015

Mark is a gay academic, senior lecture in sociology at Durham University, and author of The Declining Significance Of Homophobia.

“It’s an incredibly high number,” said Deborah Gold, the chief executive of the National Aids Trust...

Quite.

Update: The research is by the National Aids Trust.

You can read the report, Boys Who Like Boys, here.

It was a self-selecting online survey - ie not very scientific and not very reliable.

Oh well, let's hope the media reprint this wonky horror story without question, as per.

Will Young: Are We Talking Crap?

I like to think I'm down with youth culture and its slang. Well, a bit anyway. I understand that the word "sick" can mean "cool", and "bare" can mean "a lot". This is pretty much the limit of my knowledge. But I do like to think I can tell the difference between words that have changed their meaning in a quirky but harmless way, and those that have a damaging knock-on effect.

The evolution of the word "gay" is a case in point. Once it meant carefree or merry. Over time it came to be used to describe a sexual orientation. Now – for many at least – it has been appropriated to mean "rubbish" or "crap". So a word that started out meaning "happy" has ended up being used to denigrate. Well, language changes, doesn't it? Many would see no problem with a shift driven by everyday speech...

Will Young in The Guardian.

I'm sure he means well, but Will Young's interventions on this subject seem like a rather embarrassing turn at the St Cake's School Debating Society.
This is but one example of a problem that's general in our culture, where somebody's somewhat banal and quarter-baked thoughts are given weight and taken seriously just because they're a celebrity.
Why ask Will? He's hardly the only gay man in the country who went to a school.

Presumably this is a slightly garbled response to Brendan O'Neill's piece on the Telegraph blog last week; Gay now means rubbish - get over it. 

"The rising use of the word “gay” to mean rubbish has coincided with increased levels of tolerance towards homosexuals among young people," O'Neill wrote. "When I was at school, we never used the word gay to mean rubbish, and yet there was a lot of anti-gay sentiment, reflecting broader anti-gay outlooks in politics and society. Today, the opposite is the case – kids are forever using the word gay to mean rubbish, yet real, genuinely prejudiced anti-gay sentiment is on the wane, both in schools and in society."*

Gay academic Mark McCormack has reached similar conclusions through his research at three British schools, presented in his book, The Declining Significance Of Homophobia: How teenage boys are redefining masculinity and heterosexuality.**

Mark writes here on the need to contextualise how such language is used; Don’t call me homophobic: the complexity of ‘that’s so gay’

Will "Nice But Dim" Young was also in The Sun yesterday.
[Edit: This is clearly now his specialist subject, he's also on Newsnight this evening. I still haven't got over his squirm-inducing appearance on Question Time...].

He suggests calling in the thought police; "It is now time to come down on homophobic language like a ton of bricks."

His Sun article is titled; 23% of young gay people will try suicide.. it's a crisis - Singer's call to end bullying language
This story was filed under Showbiz, natch.

These statistics are highly dubious*** - and, as before, we need to be extremely cautious whenever discussing gay teen suicides; there is much research suggesting ill-thought-out media coverage may actually encourage it. 

But as ever, emotionally potent Cry Homophobia! gay hysteria seems to have trumped a much-needed rational debate.

Will Young, wearing a tea-cosy, and fellow posh gay twat Milo Yiannopoulos.

Clearly BBC  Newsnight's idea of a balanced debate.

* Ironically The Daily Telegraph is the only British newspaper that still tells writers not to use the word "gay", but "homosexual".

** O'Neill acknowledges Stonewall also say this; "Even Stonewall’s own report on the widespread use of the word gay in schools admits that “most of the time it is used unconsciously and without hurtful intent”
See Stonewall's 2012 The School Report - with comments on what school pupils make of all this.
Here Mark McCormack critiques their research and their use of stats for Psychology Today; "The School Report 2012 is a missed opportunity to inform the debate on homophobia in British schools, but the greater concern is that its overwhelmingly negative tone may encourage kids to stay in the closet."

*** By coincidence Fagburn is reading a fascinating, entertaining and thoroughly depressing book on the media's love of dodgy data and statistics; The Numbers Game: The commonsense guide to understanding numbers in the news, in politics and in life. What are the chances of that happening, eh? etc etc.

Schools: Kissing To Be Clever

Eleanor Mills in The Sunday Times today has become the nth journalist to get a feature - 'Cuddling Schoolboys Kiss Homophobia Goodbye'- out of research by Mark McCormack and Eric Anderson on how homophobia is declining among teenage boys.*
The first of these - 'Straight Men Kissing More' - appeared in The Guardian over a year ago; McCormack has a book published later this month.
I don't blame them, it's really interesting stuff. 
“I noticed the difference as soon as I entered the sixth-form common room,” he tells Mills. “Boys were sitting in circles chatting; one had his feet on another boy’s lap, another dangled his arm over another’s shoulder. They were constantly touching each other and always hugged each other hello and goodbye. That would have been unthinkable when I was at school.”
Eleanor Mills helpfully points out; "His book argues that these behaviour changes are due to the normalisation of homosexuality in the culture surrounding these boys as they have grown up."
Well, duh.
She holds up One Direction as proof of how today's young men are all touchy-feely and homo-friendly.
But so were Take That twenty years ago, Smash Hits called them (approvingly) a "Girlie-bloke" pop group. 
Even so it's as obvious as rain that there has been a marked decline in anti-gay attitudes - and their acceptability - across society in the last 25 years.
And, yes, adolescent males, the most neurotically homophobic sector, are losing their "homo-hysteria", too.
Though Fagburn is with Barney Frank, who argued that most young men aren't homophobic, they just think they should be.
The problem with journalists zoning in on Mark McCormack's research is that it's a study of just three British schools, all sixth-form colleges, which arguably foster a culture where appearing "adult", sophisticated and even academic are valued among students.
Something made clear in McCormack's original title for his book, Gay Friendly High Schools. 
But is this - loaded word coming up - normal? 
A 2007 Stonewall survey had 65% of lesbian, gay and bisexual school pupils reporting having experienced homophobic bullying.
97% said they often or frequently heard homophobic remarks. 
Over half of gay pupils said they didn't feel able to be themselves at school.
And over a third did not feel safe or accepted at school.
In a 2009 Stonewall survey; "Nine in ten secondary school teachers... say children and young people, regardless of their sexual orientation, currently experience homophobic bullying, name calling or harassment in their schools."
Homophobia may be declining in significance generally - and homophobia may be seen as "gay" in some colleges - but sadly it still seems to be in rude health in many of our schools. 

* 'It’s Just Not Acceptable Any More’: The Erosion of Homophobia and the Softening of Masculinity at an English Sixth Form. Read it here.

•  The Declining Significance of Homophobia: How Teenage Boys are Redefining Masculinity and Heterosexuality by Mark McCormack is published by Oxford University Press on April 19th.

Postscript: There's an interesting tug of war going on, better documented in the US, where more school kids are coming out, and younger, and are finding more straight pupils supportive, but simultaneously, and perhaps due to this increased visibility, anti-gay bullying may be the worst it has ever been.
Witness for example It Gets Better, the rise of Gay-Straight Alliances in high schools, and all those all-singing, all-dancing mass anti-bullying, pro-gay videos on YouTube.
Here's one of the biggest videos from Cypress Ranch High School, Texas.

Update: A blog from Mark McCormack on Psychology Today - Men 2.0: Masculinities, Sexualities and Homophobia - is a good introduction to what he's arguing. Also see his comments below...

Eroding Schools' Homophobia: A Real Education

[EDIT: See comments section - To clarify, I was being critical not of any of the research, but the way it was presented in Education Guardian. I was probably too critical of and/or crabby about the Guardian piece anyway, and will write again after reading Eric Anderson's paper which he has kindly sent me].

A fine antidote to the silly piece of titillating fluff in Education Guardian yesterday comes in a fascinating interview on BBC Radio 4's Thinking Allowed today with Mark McCormack , co-author of the new research paper, It's Just Not Acceptable Anymore: The Erosion of Homophobia and the Softening of Masculinity at an English Sixth Form.
It's almost impossible to believe that this is the same research project described in The Guardian yesterday, which just read like silly season filler fare.
McCormack spent five months at the school watching and listening to male students, and it's staggering how at ease they seem with homosexuality and their own identities - the majority of boys are positively anti anti-gay.
McCormack says he compares the school's liberal ethos with those in a religious college and a school for "failed students" in a forthcoming book, Gay Friendly High Schools.
He says the results are pleasantly surprising.
So why did The Guardian make the project look so trivial and inane?