rapeculturerealities:

While eliminating violent acts is imperative, reducing the concept of a hostile school environment to the acts of individual (troubled) students who can be rehabilitated merely contains and manages the violence, rather than addressing its causes. When the absence of reported bullying functions as the indicator of a safe or inclusive school for LGBTQ students and families, we fail to account for the social processes at work in sustaining the patterns of homophobic bullying and the — subtle, often unintentional — ways schools help to sustain these patterns decade after decade, beginning in the early years of schooling.

We want to challenge the taken-for-granted conceptualization of LGBTQ youths’ school experiences and argue for a broader understanding that encompasses cultural systems of power — specifically along lines of gender and sexuality — that persistently privilege specific groups of youth while marginalizing others. In other words, we need to examine how U.S. culture assumes heterosexuality and traditional gender expressions to be “normal” and “right” and how such values permeate the policies, procedures, and curricula in K-12 schools, making non-traditional gender expressions and sexualities “not normal” and “wrong/bad” or “less than” and thus potential targets.

Shifting the definition of “the problem” in this way demands a different framing of peer-to-peer aggression than that which underlies the dominant bullying discourse. It requires recognition of how patterns of targeting serve the purpose of enforcing strict cultural expectations around gender and sexuality — and how these cultural expectations are being taught and reinforced by the schools themselves. Further, this shift calls for an examination of how aggression functions in youths’ pursuit of social status in elementary, middle and high school.

Because victim blaming isn’t just for rape/sexual assault victims/survivors…

(Source: sociolab)