New homophobia kit for schools
NSW Teachers Federation president Maurie Mulheron (pictured) has spoken out about the difficulty he has faced trying to protect his gay son from homophobic bullying.
While launching a new Gender, Sexuality and Identity Kit for members last week, Mulheron said he believed homophobia was one of the most critical issues for student welfare.
“It has caused me more pain and hurt as a teacher to see and to hear it in my school every day and to try to tackle it and try to deal with it and see what those kids were going through,” Mulheron said.
“There are far too many children whose daily life is a misery and we have to do something about it. I’ll tell you the story of a little boy who came home from school one afternoon with welt marks around his neck from being choked. That was my son.
“Every single day he suffered physical and emotional abuse — in our schools. … But what can the school do when it is so endemic in our society, is so accepted a part of the culture?”
Mulheron said teachers have a role to play to combat homophobia in schools.
“There is a principle under which I operate as a teacher — what you allow, you teach — and if you allow homophobic language and bullying behaviour directed against young people because of their sexuality and you do not challenge it as an adult, you don’t just ignore it, you become complicit in it, and as a profession it’s about time we stopped being complicit in it and become active advocates for our kids and our schools.”
Mulheron said it was not just same-sex attracted students who would benefit from reducing homophobia in schools, but also those labelled as such and marked out for bullying before they even had a chance to realise what their sexuality was.
He said he hoped teachers would work to make overt homophobic behaviour as unacceptable in schools as overt racist behaviour.
The kit includes an updated section on homophobia, biphobia and transphobia for the federation’s Teachers’ Rights manual, a Supporting people of diverse sexuality and genders in education document detailing how to foster non-homophobic and accepting environments from early childhood to TAFE, and sample anti-homophobic bullying guidelines for school principals to include in their schools’ anti-bullying policy.
The kit will be sent to every primary and secondary school and TAFE college in NSW.
The Teachers Federation’s initiative is independent of the NSW Government’s Proud Schools pilot anti-homophobia program being run in 12 high schools in the state with the support of Labor, the Coalition and the Greens.
An amazing role model of a father.
We would all love to have a father like this.
This kit is excellent news, and reinforces the work that’s been conducted in schools in recent years. The more resourced teachers are, and supported by their schools and government policy the better. The organisation I work with, the Women Partners of Bisexual Men Service, provides counselling and support groups for women who’ve entered into relationships (usually ‘traditional’ heterosexual marriages) with men who in later life come out as gay, or are discovered to be engaged in same sex activities with men. The confusion, and frankly personal devastation experienced by the women, any children, family and the men themselves can be significant. There can be loss of self esteem, depression, anxiety, suicidality, relationship breakdown financial problems.
Many of the men disclose at some stage disclose that they’ve had same sex feelings since school but didn’t have the confidence to come out and live as a gay man when they were younger. It would be far better if as as community we could take a preventative, informed and educative stance that paves the way for acceptance instead of trying to work on the repair work twenty or more years after school has finished.