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Challenging homophobic bullying in schools: the politics
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Challenging homophobic bullying in schools: the politics of progress –
International Journal of Law in Context 7(2), pp. 181-207
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Challenging homophobic bullying in schools:
the politics of progress
Daniel Monk
School of Law, Birkbeck, University of London1
Abstract
In recent years homophobic bullying has received increased attention from NGOs, academics and
government sources and concern about the issue crosses traditional moral and political divisions.
This article examines this ‘progressive’ development and identifies the ‘conditions of possibility’ that
have enabled the issue to become a harm that can be spoken of. In doing so it questions whether the
readiness to speak about the issue represents the opposite to prohibitions on speech (such as the
notorious Section 28) or whether it is based on more subtle forms of governance. It argues that
homophobic bullying is heard through three key discourses (‘child abuse’, ‘the child victim’ and ‘the
tragic gay’) and that, while enabling an acknowledgement of certain harms, they simultaneously
silence other needs and experiences. It then moves to explore the aspirational and ‘liberatory’
political investments that underlie these seemingly ‘common-sense’ descriptive discourses and
concludes with a critique of the quasi-criminal responses that the dominant political agenda of
homophobic bullying gives rise to. The article draws on, and endeavours to develop a conversation
between, critical engagements with the contemporary politics of both childhood and sexuality.
Introduction
Homophobic bullying has become a legitimate object of social concern within civil society. In recent
years it has been explicitly addressed not only by numerous non-governmental children’s rights
and sexual health organisations2 but also by government policy and guidance documents3 and,
albeit not explicitly, in statutory provisions.4 It is also an issue that crosses political and
traditional moral divides as supportive expressions of concern have been made not just by the
Liberal Democrats and the Labour Party5 but also by the Conservative Party (2008, p. 9) and
1 Earlier versions of this article were presented at a seminar convened by the Birkbeck Institute of Gender and
Sexuality and the Thomas Coram Institute, Institute of Education (April 2008) and at the Socio-Legal Studies
Conference (De Montfort University, 2009) and the European Sociological Association Conference (Lisbon,
2009). I am grateful to the participants for their insightful comments. Special thanks are also due to
Professor Leslie Moran and Helen Reece for their encouragement and detailed and constructive comments
on earlier drafts.
2 See, for example, Blake and Plant (2005), Save the Children (2008), CRAE (2009), Terence Higgins Trust (2009),
Claridge (2008).
3 DfES (2002), DfES (2003a; 2003b), DCSF/Stonewall (2007), DCSF (2009). See also: (last visited 18 November 2010).
4 The Schools Standards and Frameworks Act 1998, Section 61 (now section 98 of the Education and
Inspections Act 2006) refers to ‘encouraging good behaviour and respect for others on the part of pupils
and, in particular, preventing all forms of bullying among pupils’ as factors to be taken into account by
head teachers and governing bodies in designing and implementing discipline policies. As homophobic
bullying is referred to explicitly in guidance documents relating to bullying, it can consequently be argued
that the statutory references can also be interpreted to include this form of bullying.
5 The 2010 general election manifestos of both the Liberal Democrats (2010, pp. 35, 73) and the Labour Party
(2010, Chapter 3:5) made explicit references to tackling homophobic bullying.
International Journal of Law in Context, 7,2 pp. 181–207 (2011) Cambridge University Press
doi:10.1017/S1744552311000061
religious bodies6 (Catholic Education Service, 2007; Church of England, 2010) – organisations with
little (or a relatively short) history of sympathy to lesbian and gay issues. It was also deemed
significant enough to warrant an explicit reference in the current government’s Coalition
Agreement.7
The mainstreaming of the issue, the fact that the concern is expressed as an unproblematic
‘common-sense’ good, represents a success for lesbian and gay rights organisations – in particular
Stonewall – for whom the issue has been a key plank in campaigns relating to young people
(Hunt and Jensen/Stonewall, 2007). Moreover, the reliance by campaigners and policy-makers on
the extensive academic literature8 about the issue can be understood as a successful example of
research impact.9 For it could be argued that ‘evidence-based’ research has revealed a problem;
that this knowledge has been widely and effectively disseminated; and that this has led to the
introduction of policies that will result in an improvement in the wellbeing of children’s lives.10
The aim of this article is not to test this hypothesis. It does not attempt to demonstrate, either way,
the potential impact on real children. Rather, the aim here is to examine the discursive means by
which the issue has become perceived as a legitimate issue of concern; in other words, to identify
the ‘conditions of possibility’11 that have enabled homophobic bullying to become a harm that can
be spoken of.
A key starting point for this line of enquiry is to think of ‘homophobic bullying’ not simply as
a neutral descriptive label for factual incidents but as a more complex phenomenon. In other
words, that the act of naming a wrong or a harm and the identification of perpetrators and
victims is a productive process that is contingent on a complex concatenation of cultural
and political factors. This perspective serves to shift the focus away from the ‘homophobic bully’
and instead towards the expressions of concern about homophobic bullying. In doing so it seeks to
question whether the coupling of ‘youth’ and ‘homosexuality’ by the mainstreaming of this
concern represents a ‘liberated’ and fearless break from traditional homophobic narratives of
seduction and abuse.12 And, in doing so, it questions whether the readiness to speak of
homophobic bullying represents the opposite to prohibitions on speech (such as the notorious
Section 28 of the Local Government Act 200813) or whether it itself contains or relies on more
6 Catholic Education Service statement re: Education & Skills Select Committee report on bullying (26 March
2007). Statement issued in response to the House of Commons Education and Skills Committee Third Report
of Session 2006–07 on bullying: (last visited 18 November
2010). Church of England (2010) Frequently Asked Questions: ‘Do CoE schools encourage homophobia?’
(last visited 18 November 2010).
7 The agreement states that: ‘we will help schools tackle bullying in schools, especially homophobic bullying’
(HM Government, 2010, p. 29).
8 See, for example, D’Augelli, Hershberger and Pilkington (2001), Ellis and High (2004), Hunter (2008), Molloy
and McLaren (2004), Phoenix, Frosh and Pattman (2003), Rivers (2001a; 2001b), Rivers and Duncan (2002),
Rivers and Noret (2008), Trotter (2006), Warwick, Goodrich, Aggleton and Chase (2006), Watkins,
Mauthner, Hewitt, Epstein and Leonard (2007).
9 Indeed, the fact that there is much literature about homophobic bullying but almost no critical engagement
with the agenda itself serves to reinforce the unquestioned nature of its premises. A notable exception is Ellis
(2007).
10 This account, moreover, fits well within an academic context where demonstrable ‘impact’ has become a
criteria for the evaluation of research.
11 The notion of ‘conditions of possibility’ refers here to Michel Foucault’s understanding of discursive
frameworks of knowledge as those grounded in and made possible by a particular historical epoch
(Foucault, 1980).
12 Weeks (1985, p. 224).
13 Section 28, which prohibited the ‘promotion’ of homosexuality by local authorities, was repealed on 21 June
2000 in Scotland, and on 18 November 2003 in the rest of the UK by the Local Government Act 2003 s 122.
182 daniel monk
subtle and implicit heteronormative14 assumptions and premises. In asking these questions, this
project draws on a shift in focus from scholars of the politics of sexuality who, like Stychin for
example, suggest that it is ‘time to turn the glare of analysis away from the conservatives and
towards the reformers’ (2003, p. 26).15
It is important to make clear from the outset that asking critical questions about homophobic
bullying, placing it in a broader political and cultural context, and thinking about it primarily as a
discourse as opposed to simply a harm, does not suggest that the real-life experiences of young
people are being taken in any way less seriously. Nor is it to suggest that demands for
intervention and both national and local action are necessarily misguided. On the contrary,
enquiring into the speakability of homophobic bullying raises the question as to what happens and
what is enabled when this discourse becomes the key plank for challenging homophobia in schools.
Bravmann argues that a problematic, but dominant, trope in many gay and lesbian political
narratives, in particular historical accounts, is that:
‘a politics of visibility is an adequate and self-explanatory form of resistance to the very processes
that construct the “invisibility” these projects aim to counter.’ (1997, p. 128)16
In exploring the unquestioned progress of visibility (and speakability) this project is one that takes
seriously the injunction from the feminist legal scholars Diduck and Kaganas that:
‘While giving a voice to any previously disempowered or marginalized constituency is important,
and listening to children is long overdue, we must be alert to the discourses through which that
voice is heard and interpreted.’ (2004, p. 981)
Homophobic bullying is heard through a concatenation of numerous discourses and this article does
not claim to be comprehensive. It starts by identifying three key discourses: ‘child abuse’, ‘the child
victim’ and the ‘tragic gay’. It then moves to explore the aspirational political investments that
underlie these seemingly descriptive discourses and concludes with an examination of the quasi-
criminal responses that the dominant political agenda of homophobic bullying gives rise to. In
doing so, the article draws on and endeavours to bring together critical understandings of the
politics of both childhood and sexuality.
‘Child abuse’
Homophobic bullying, however defined, is not new. Consequently, it is possible to talk of the recent
concern as representing a ‘discovery’ and in this respect there are informative parallels to be drawn
14 For a definition of this complex but frequently used concept see Berlant and Warner: ‘the institutions,
structures of understanding, and practical orientations that make heterosexuality seem not only coherent —
that is, organized as a sexuality — but also privileged. Its coherence is always provisional, and its privilege
can take several (sometimes contradictory) forms: unmarked, as the basic idiom of the personal and the
social; or marked as a natural state; or projected as an ideal or moral accomplishment. It consists less of
norms that could be summarized as a body of doctrine than of a sense of rightness produced in
contradictory manifestations . . . One of the most conspicuous differences is that it has no parallel, unlike
heterosexuality, which organizes homosexuality as its opposite. Because homosexuality can never have the
invisible, tacit, society founding rightness that heterosexuality has, it would not be possible to speak of
“homonormativity” in the same sense’ (1998, p. 548).
15 See also Brown (1995).
16 See also Reilly (2007).
challenging homophobic bullying in schools 183
with earlier ‘discoveries’ such as domestic violence and child abuse. Two distinct points will be made
here. The first explores the contingency of the ‘discovery’ of harms and the second the contingency of
the notion of harm itself.
The notion of ‘discovery’ refers to the significance of the political context within which feminist,
children’s rights and lesbian and gay activists and campaigners have enabled harms to be spoken of
and understood as social ills that demand public action (Parton, 1985, Part One). In this way, it
represents a shift in awareness of a violence and relations with that violence. The ‘discovery’ of
domestic violence and child abuse both effectively challenged the idealised representation of the
family as the ‘haven in the heartless world’. In a similar fashion, homophobic bullying challenges
the idea that the ‘school years are the best years of your life’. The latter proverbial truism was
arguably always more an adult reflection on adult life and an instruction to children, but in both
cases these crude statements reflected ideological myths that legitimised silences in order to
reinforce cultural norms.
Whereas the reluctance to acknowledge the dangers in the home served to uphold an ideological
investment in a patriarchal norm of the family, the reluctance to acknowledge homophobic bullying,
and indeed bullying in general, can be seen to reflect the investment in schooling per se as a site of
production of a particular norm of childhood17. Finch reminds us that ‘there are very good
reasons for doubting whether any type of educational provision can be regarded as solely and
unambiguously for the benefit of its recipients’ (1984, p. 85), and in the nineteenth century the
reconstruction of children from workers to pupils was not always embraced by children or their
parents (Hendrick, 1997, pp. 39–42, 45–47). But the silence and collective amnesia about this
attests to the extent to which the school has become perceived, like the family, in universal
ahistorical terms as an almost ‘natural’ a priori institution.18 That this perception has at times
been complicit with the silencing of speaking of the harms within the school is clear from the
influential child psychologist John Bowlby’s explanation of the causes of school phobia. In 1973,
he stated with confident authority that:
‘there is widespread agreement that what a child fears is not what will happen at school, but
leaving home . . . almost all the students of the problem conclude that the disagreeable
features of school, for example a strict teacher or teasing or bullying from other children, are
little more than rationalizations.’ (1978 [1973], p. 301, emphasis added)
This statement seems strikingly at odds with the current speakability of homophobic bullying, and
bullying generally, within schools. But whereas there has been a clear shift in relation to the school,
the impact of parental homophobia on children, which is arguably at least as, if not more, significant,
remains an issue that is not addressed by organisations like Stonewall and children’s rights
organisations. And the fact that the ability for public concern about the effects of homophobia
can be entertained in the school but not the home attests to the fact that the speakability of
concern is contingent on its location.19 In other words, in seeking to explain why homophobia in
the school space has become open to widespread political criticism, it is necessary to look beyond
a concern about the wellbeing of children.
17 As Walkerdine comments, ‘it was generally agreed’ that it ‘brought about the idea of childhood as something
separate’ (2009, p. 113).
18 This is particularly evident in the work of the child psychologists Donald Winnicott and John Bowlby, for
whom the child’s initial journey to the ‘the school’ is invested with the a priori naturalness akin to a
child’s journey to ‘the mother’ or ‘the father’; see Monk (2004).
19 There are clear parallels here with legal challenges to physical chastisement which similarly continue to
distinguish between the home and the school; see Fortin (2009, pp. 329–34).
184 daniel monk
Taking a long view here is informative. For whereas the dominant postwar child psychologists’
masking of child harms within schools cohered with political and social shifts unrelated to
children’s needs (Finch, 1984, p. 85; Monk, 2004), so too does the new-found ability to do
otherwise. While it is important to avoid simplistic causal explanations, it is possible to see the
new concern, if not enabled, at least not unconnected to broader political and socioeconomic
shifts in the perception of schooling. In particular, the increased questioning of the public interest
in education and its reinscription as a private rather than a public good (Kymlicka, 1999; Chitty,
2009), the political construction of parents no longer as passive recipients but as consumers
supported by the rhetoric of choice (Harris, 2007), increases in home education as a legitimate
option and, more broadly, the cultural impact of the phenomenon of school shootings (Warnick,
Johnson and Rocha, 2010), have all in different ways rendered the school potentially dangerous,
open to question and at odds with the earlier constructions of it as an unquestionable and natural
good. Significantly, they serve too to explain the dichotomy referred to above between the
speakability of homophobia within the school and the home, for these broader shifts in many
respects have served to reinscribe the home and parental child relations as safer places. Albeit that
the changing perceptions of the parental role in education, while enhanced within political
discourses, do not in any way represent a straightforward increase in parental autonomy or rights
(Monk, 2009).
Extent and definition are key issues in the literature about homophobic bullying and here too
important parallels can be drawn with domestic violence and child abuse. For surveillance and
the accumulation of knowledge of a subject are a crucial part of the process of ‘discovery’; they do
not construct a problem but, rather, reflect already problematised issues. As Hunter argues in the
context of the history of education:
‘the role of social statistics is not so much to represent reality as to problematize it, to call into
question, to hold it up for inspection in the light of what it might be, to picture its
reconstruction around certain norms of life and social well being – norms derived of course
from the social, economic and political objectives of government.’ (1996, p. 154)
In this vein, when Archard asks the question, ‘Can child abuse be defined?’, he acknowledges the
extent to which attempts to do so are never in any way neutral exercises but inherently political
and social. Archard acknowledges Gough’s concern that, ‘at worst an over intellectual questioning
of the meaning of abuse implies that abuse does not really exist’ (1996, p. 13, quoted in Archard,
1999, p. 75) but he concludes that:
‘the increasing versatility of the concept of child abuse – its ability to pick out more and more
types of wrong done to children – has only been purchased at the cost of its increasing
vacuity, its lack of any distinctive content possessing clear evaluative connotations.’ (1999, p. 88)
This concern is critical when reading the literature about homophobic bullying. The campaigns by
Stonewall refer to homophobic bullying as being ‘endemic in schools’ and cite statistics that 65–98
per cent of pupils experience it at one time or another (Hunt and Jensen/Stonewall, 2007, p. 3).20 Yet
these statistics are based on an extremely broad definition of homophobic bullying. One that
20 The language used here to describe the extent – ‘endemic’ – is also significant. Moran, in the context of
homophobic hate crime, argues that ‘the exceptional is figured in the suggestion that this violence
represents a crisis and an epidemic. Epidemic stands for novelty. This is not so much the novelty of the
appearance of homophobic violence, but the novelty of its characterization as disorder and the novelty of
an awareness of the scale of this violence’ (2004, p. 935).
challenging homophobic bullying in schools 185
stretches from, at one end of the spectrum, extreme repeated systematic violence, to, at the other
end, overhearing the word ‘gay’ being used in a pejorative way, being socially excluded and
experiencing a sense of being different. Significantly, the empirical literature which is cited to
support these statistics, while not downplaying the significance of homophobic bullying, also cites
comparative studies with very different results and, as explored below, is more cautious about
causal claims made as to the effect of homophobic bullying (Rivers, 2001a; Warwick et al., 2006).
This selective statistical representation coheres with and appeals to the broader cultural shifts
within which schooling itself is increasingly perceived as a dangerous space. More particularly, it
attests to the extent to which the homophobic bullying agenda utilises and is spoken of through
the dominant image of childhood as vulnerable and one premised on the status of the child as
innocent victim.
‘The child victim’
Empirical research about homophobic bullying frequently identifies causal links between
homophobic bullying and alcoholism, suicide, low school attendance and a variety of emotional
disorders (Rivers, 2001a; Warwick et al., 2006). Mirroring in this way the literature on child abuse,
it enables homophobic bullying to be included discursively within this ever-expanding category.
This is strategically important, for under the label of child abuse, homophobic bullying is
represented as an unquestioned wrong, a legitimate and, crucially, a depoliticised harm and one
therefore able to garner widespread sympathy (Parton, 1985, Part Two).
One of the reasons why this discursive categorising of homophobic bullying achieves this status
is because it draws on familiar images of the child as innocent victim. And these images reassure as
much as they appal. As Patricia Holland has argued:
‘Without an image of an unhappy child the concept of childhood would be incomplete. Real children suffer
in many different ways and for many different reasons, but pictures of sorrowing children
reinforce the defining characteristics of childhood – dependence and powerlessness. Pathetic
images of children create a desired image in which childhood is no longer a threat and adults are back
in control.’ (2004, p. 143, emphasis added)
This perspective represents a provocative challenge to the work of certain aspects of children’s rights
agendas and it is not unreasonable to question why, strategically, it matters. In other words, if the
effects of homophobic bullying are suffering and unhappiness and emphasising this interpretation
of the literature in campaigns brings the issue to a wider audience, why should this be an issue of
concern? A key argument here is that it matters because enabling the speakability of homophobic
bullying through the imagery of the child as victim renders silent other concerns.
The most notable silence is about sex. One of the most striking aspects of the homophobic
bullying agenda is the extent to which it speaks of lesbian and gay youth through a desexualised
discourse. For example, the Stonewall website page that addresses school issues is dominated by
homophobic bullying but has no mention of young people’s needs for information about safer sex
and education about HIV.21 Similarly, the Conservative Party report More Ball Games (no pun
intended) supports tackling homophobic bullying, but in the broader context of a nostalgic
support for children to play more sports (Conservative Party, 2008). As Ellis argues, the approach
adopted here is ‘a plea for tolerance that doesn’t speak about what is to be tolerated’ (2007, p. 23).22
21 See (last visited 18 November 2010).
22 See also Ingham (2005).
186 daniel monk
While challenging homophobia in schools and providing information about HIV are arguably
distinct, this does not explain the silence. Both bullying and access to information about HIV can
be understood as basic human and children’s rights (Harris, 2005; Veerman, Talsa, Druzin and
Weinstein, 1999; Packer, 2000). And the harm suffered by the absence of the latter is arguably as
significant as the former, if not more so, as recent UK statistics about HIV infections indicate that
gay teenagers are increasingly the most at-risk group.23 Consequently, the argument here is that
the distinction between challenging bullying and providing information about HIV is not an
obvious or neutral one, but rather one that is indicative of the extent to which the homophobic
bullying agenda coheres with and is contingent on the ‘reassuring’ image of the brutalised child.
For to speak of safer sex would require speaking of sexual agency, pleasure and choice, and in
doing so would challenge the ideal of the child as ‘innocent’ and non-sexual (Stainton Rodgers
and Stainton Rodgers, 1999; Waites, 2005). This silencing is not new, as Piper has observed, in
tracing the origins of the dominant norm of childhood sexual innocence and its relationship with
the development of welfare policies:
‘There is a sense in which the price paid by children over the last 150 years for the presumed
benefits of child welfare legislation and provision has been their “de-sexing”.’ (2000, p. 40)24
‘The tragic gay’
While the child as victim resonates with dominant constructions of childhood, in the context of
homophobic bullying there is a double victimhood. For what is striking from the research, in
particular from accounts of its effects, is the extent to which the image of the lesbian and gay
child mirrors the dominant image of the homosexual in 1950s popular discourses: depressed,
lonely, isolated, suicidal (Rebellato, 1999; Cook, 2007). And while critical engagements with the
discourse of the child as victim demonstrate how that image reassures and reinscribes a social and
cultural binary (in that case between adult and child), the gay victim also provides an image of
the homosexual as a reassuringly distinct and tragic ‘other’ from that of the heterosexual.
Victimhood as the basis of the call for tolerance enables religious groups to distinguish between
protecting the sinner and condemning the sin. And the extent to which conservative and religious
groups’ recognition of homophobic bullying reflects a highly limited shift in thinking was clear
when the Conservative Party and the majority of Bishops in the House of Lords successfully
opposed provisions in the Children, Families and Schools Bill 2010 to extend the provision of sex
education in such a way that would have ensured that information about HIV and discussions
about sexuality would have been more firmly embedded in the curriculum.25 Moreover, as
Quinlivan argues, identifying lesbian and gay youth as at risk ‘allows them to be classified as
fitting within a deviant model which argues that they “need help”’ (2002, p. 25).
23 The National Aids Trust (NAT) notes that ‘There has been a worrying increase in diagnoses amongst young
gay men’ (last visited 18
November 2010); see also statistics from the Terence Higgins Trust (THT): (last visited 18 November 2010).
24 While policies introduced by New Labour acknowledged the reality of sexual activity amongst young people,
it did so primarily to reduce teenage pregnancy and to advocate delay; see Monk (2001). Moreover, the Labour
Party 2010 Manifesto stated that it would provide support for parents who wished to challenge ‘aggressive or
sexualised commercial marketing’ and ‘ask Consumer Focus to develop a website for parents to register their
concerns about sexualised products aimed at their children (2010, para. 6:3).
25 Children, Families and Schools Bill 2010, clauses 13, 14. While the Bill was enacted Conservative opposition
ensured that these provisions were dropped during the ‘wash-up’ period prior to the General Election.
challenging homophobic bullying in schools 187
Victimhood also has a reassuring role within lesbian and gay political discourses. Bravmann, in
developing a critical queer historiography that disrupts a linear progressive narrative, quotes
D’Emilio’s assertion that gay liberationists of the 1960s and 1970s constructed a mythology that
‘until gay liberation, gay men and lesbians were always the victims of systematic, undifferentiated,
terrible oppression’ (1983, p. 101, quoted in Bravmann, 1997, p. 26). This political move is reflected
in Stonewall’s representation of contemporary school life as overwhelmingly one of hardship and
of bullying of ‘endemic’ proportions. But there is an unremarked tension here, for this very
representation was criticised in recent research commissioned by Stonewall about young people’s
responses to images of gays and lesbians in the media; a key finding being that the representations
focused too much on the negative aspects of gay lives – to the point of caricature – and failed to
present positive images (Stonewall, 2010).26 Once again the paradoxical uses of symbolic
representations indicates the contingency of narratives about young gays and lesbians.
It is important to emphasise that the point here is not that real suffering does not exist but the
extent to which the dominance of the tragic image is a condition of possibility for the speakability of
homophobic bullying and the extent to which it effectively silences other voices and reduces the
experience of lesbian and gay young people to one of passive victimhood.27 The reality of young
people’s sexual activity is one such silence but others can be detected that relate to the causal
claims made about homophobic bullying.
Ian Rivers, the leading empirical researcher in the area, whose work is relied on by Stonewall and
campaigning groups, recently argued that:
‘despite the nature and severity of bullying participants experienced at school, many overcame it
successfully . . . [there was] little evidence of long-term anxiety or indeed insecurity within
intimate relationships . . . and that given some of the positive outcomes found, researchers
should begin to focus more intently upon coping strategies and resilience and seek to
determine why some former victims of bullying successfully negotiate adulthood while others
do not.’ (Rivers and Cowie, 2006, p. 38)
A similar point is made by Blackburn (2007) in relation to developments in the USA. What they both
suggest is that much of the research in this area looks for harm and that the stories not only of
resilience but also of those who do not experience homophobic bullying are never mentioned by
campaigners.28 Two possible alternative narratives that give voice to more complex subject
positions can be identified; first, through a rethinking of the causal linkage between homophobic
bullying and educational attainment and, second, by exploring the concept of shame.
Educational attainment
Existing research frequently identifies the gym and physical sports as the most uncomfortable and
feared space for lesbian and gay young people (Rivers, 2001a; 2001b; Rivers and Duncan, 2002;
Warwick et al., 2006). But we are not directed towards thinking about the least feared space. If
asked, it might be that the library would be identified as the safest place. If so, it might complicate
26 Examples of typical statements by young people in this report are: ‘They never seem to be happy’ (William,
aged 13, p. 7); ‘TV gives the wrong view of gay people because every storyline is about them being beaten up
and discriminated against. They are never accepted by their family’ (Ishani, aged 16, p. 7).
27 Indeed, it is in part a recognition of the problematic discursive power of ‘homosexual victimhood’ that,
arguably, informs much of the recent queer historical scholarship that endeavours to complicate these
earlier dominant narratives of the past, see Bravmann (1997), Cook (2007), Houlbrook (2005).
28 A similar point has been made in relation to the experiences of children post-divorce; see Smart, Neale and
Wade (2001). My thanks to Helen Reece for making this link.
188 daniel monk
the dominance of ‘tragedy’ in the context of educational attainment. Much of the literature identifies
low educational achievements and school refusal (truancy) to be a result of bullying. The confident
statements that homophobic bullying is ‘endemic’ could give the impression that lesbian and gay
youth are, consequently, particularly disadvantaged in education. But other statistics give a
significantly different impression. Research undertaken by SIGMA in 2008 found that the
proportion of homosexually active men in post-compulsory education was higher than the
national average (Weatherburn, Hickson, Reid, Jessop and Hammond, 2008, para. 2.4).29 And, this
finding is congruent with the data from the first National Survey of Sexual Attitudes, which
suggested that homosexually active men had been in full-time education longer than other men
(Johnson, Wadsworth, Wellings, Field and Bradshaw, 1994, p. 209). The aim here is not to set up a
competing claim to truth about the real educational attainments of lesbian and gay youth, nor
indeed to challenge the suggestion that there is a relationship between homophobic bullying and
educational attainments. An attempt to explore with any rigour the connections between sexual
orientation and educational outcomes would need to address the complex intersections of gender
and, most crucially in this context, socioeconomic background. Consequently, in introducing the
other ‘evidence’ here, the aim is simply to complicate the representation of tragedy.
Educational statistics that demonstrate that girls do better than boys in examinations are loudly
proclaimed on a seemingly annual basis. These statistics are, of course, crude, and mask complex
social and political narratives (significantly there is never any mention of sexual orientation,
which begs the question about the educational attainments of young lesbians).30 But it is their
power to produce and signify a very particular and restricted notion of a ‘crisis in masculinity’
that dominates (Collier, 2001). The statistics referred to above, that, equally crudely, could suggest
that gay men achieve better educational attainments than heterosexual men currently receive no
such attention, and yet they too could problematise dominant masculinity.
It is interesting to note that such a ‘conclusion’ would not be new, for, from the late nineteenth
century, American medical discourses routinely identified homosexuals as being intellectually gifted
as a compensatory result of their homosexuality (Franklin, 2003). Again, the point here is not that this
approach is in any way a more accurate picture; on the contrary, this medical model simply
reaffirmed a scientific belief in the unnaturalness and abnormality of homosexuals. The point
here is that any attempt to speak of the educational attainment of a highly unheterogenous group
as an indicator for the experiences of that group demonstrates the extent to which the ‘facts’ are
used to confirm rather than to inform a discursive construction. Consequently, the relative silence
about alternative narratives of educational attainment are, it is suggested, not simply the result of
a lack of methodological rigour, but rather attest to an investment within contemporary lesbian
and gay politics in the gay child as tragic victim.
Shame
The concept of shame can also be utilised to complicate the dominant narrative of tragedy. Shame is a
complex concept that is understood in different ways across a number of disciplines (Probyn, 2005).
In the context of homophobic bullying it has been identified as one of the detrimental effects
(McDermott, Roen and Scourfield, 2008). McDermott et al. make the important point that shame/
pride discourses establish a binary, which ‘appears to allow for only two subject positions: the
successful, proud-self who can cope with homophobia; and the failed, ashamed-self who is
29 See also Weatherburn, Davies, Hickson and Hartley (1999).
30 There is an extensive literature about this; see, for example, O’Flynn and Epstein (2005), Epstein, Maw, Elwood
and Hey (1998), Youdell (2005).
challenging homophobic bullying in schools 189
distressed by homophobia’ (p. 822).31 Excluding the possibility of shame and pride co-existing, or
neither being present, this binary, ‘tends not to allow for more nuanced and complex
manoeuvring within these discourses to subject positions which may be proud in some spaces,
but less so in other situations’ (p. 822). This is an important distinction that to some extent echoes
Rivers’s suggestion that responses to homophobic bullying are more complex than the ‘evidence’
suggests. But the argument here raises a more fundamental question by suggesting that shame is
not simply a negative outcome, evidence of the harm caused by homophobic bullying, but a more
complex emotion and sensation and, crucially for this argument, not one from which lesbian and
gay childhood can, or necessarily should, be removed, overcome or liberated.
This use of the concept of shame draws on the queer theoretical approach of Munt, who reminds
us that ‘the foremost shame narrative of Western culture’ is The Fall of Adam and the expulsion from
Eden and that:
‘the ensuing rejection by God instigates Man’s individuation; his self-consciousness occurs because
of his separation. This is the vacillation of subjection and individuation.’ (2007, p. 80)
She argues that a proud, defiant sexuality is ‘premised on an uncomfortable historically discursive
shame’ and that:
‘In any personal trajectory, the growing consciousness of same-sex desire must, in a Western
context, give rise to feelings of difference and exclusion . . . The presence of shame has been
repressed in the discourse of homosexual rights in an unhelpful way, in order to gain greater
agency, we must learn to revisit its ambivalent effects.’ (p. 95, emphasis added)
The argument here is that attempts to remove, outlaw or silence shame-inducing practices through
expansive definitions of homophobic bullying is an example of rights discourse overlooking the
productive role of shame. Definitions of homophobic bullying are broad, and the focus here is on
the lower end of activities. Name-calling, identifying oneself and being identified as different, and
experiencing difference as exclusion and as uncomfortable – these practices share much with the
emotion of shame. The blush of recognition as different (whether or not self-identified as ‘gay’ or
‘lesbian’) might sometimes be a painful sensation, but one that plays a role in identity formation.
Silencing the speakability of this experience of shame as anything other than a form of violence,
as abuse or harm, coheres both with the notion of the child as innocent victim and with a particular
construction of ‘liberated’ gay identity, noted above, which is dependent on the uniformed oppressed
pre-liberated representation. Moreover, it mirrors broader fears that underlie contemporary attempts
to construct childhood spaces as harm- and pain-free (Gill, 2007; Guldberg, 2009). This utopian desire
is not surprising; as queer theorists Bruhm and Hurley argue, ‘Utopianism follows the child around
like a family pet’ (2004, p. xiii). But, in the context of ‘shame’, by way of stark contrast, the playground
represents here a paradise, an Eden, pre-The Fall, pre-Shame: a space premised on welfarist
understandings of protection but within which children are denied productive individuation,
denied self-consciousness and the ‘blush of recognition’, and one that reinforces homogeneousness.
A political agenda
Revealing the contingent representations of lesbian and gay youth through which homophobic
bullying is made speakable (and its silencing of alternative narratives) demonstrates how the
31 The use of shame here resonates with the concept of internalised homophobia discussed below.
190 daniel monk
agenda is concerned not solely with addressing harms inflicted on children but is intimately
interlinked with broader political strategies and imaginations of the future. In the context of
historical scholarship, Bravmann argues that:
‘we need to look at how images of the gay and lesbian past circulating among us animate the
present and to read lesbian and gay historical self-representation as sites of ongoing
hermeneutic and political struggle in the formation of new social subjects and new cultural
possibilities.’ (1997, p. 4)
Reading contemporary debates about homophobic bullying as a ‘history of the present’, this
perspective can be applied here. Indeed, homophobic bullying is a particularly rich site for this
form of political meaning-making, located as it is at the intersection of discourses of education
and childhood. The perception of education as the key tool for unlocking individual potential and
for creating a fairer society remains an article of faith within liberal and progressive political
paradigms (Finch, 1984; Hendrick, 2003), and the predominant social construction of childhood is
one of ‘not-yets’, ‘becomings’, ‘empty vessels’, always to be understood as something in the future
and for the future of society as a whole (Jenks, 1996; Lee, 2001; James, Jenks and Prout, 1998).
Research about homophobic bullying is inherently and inevitably a political project. Yet while
issues such as gay marriage and gays in the military are campaigns that have been exposed to
lively critique within the LGBT community and academic literature, there has been very little
similar debate about homophobic bullying, located as it is within the ‘benign’ emancipatory
liberal discourses of education and future-focused discourses of innocent and universal childhood.
In identifying and making visible the aspirational political implications, the focus here turns first
to imaginations and representations of a post-homophobic time, and second to an examination of
the role that collective memory plays within advanced or post-liberal societies where therapeutic
correctness functions as a key form of governance.
The liberated gay?
One way of exploring the broader political and emancipatory role of the homophobic bullying
agenda is by identifying exactly what homophobic bullying is understood to be the cause of.
What this line of enquiry reveals is that while there has been a demonstrable shift in political and
public attitudes, to the extent that it is now homophobia that is identified as the problem and not
homosexuality, at the same time there is in important respects no change as to what is
problematised, merely the cause. For, drawing implicitly on a child developmentalist model,
homophobia takes on, with a twist, the psychoanalytical role formerly played by the Freudian
concept of ‘arrested development’. ‘Arrested development’ famously sought to explain what made
a person homosexual. For lesbian and gay rights campaigners this very question is highly
problematic, as the innateness of homosexuality is both an article of faith and strategically
essential for human rights claims within a liberal political paradigm (a position explored by
numerous queer critiques). Yet the argument here is that ‘arrested development’ has not been
rejected but reformulated. Development into successful normal adulthood is not ‘arrested’ by
parental or maternal attachment, but rather by homophobia itself. In other words, the
developmental question now is not, ‘What makes someone homosexual?’, but instead ‘What
makes someone behave in a way that fails to conform to heteronormative behaviour’. It is no
longer homosexuality that can be cured but the attributes and behaviours of those whose lives
have been blighted by homophobia. As Harwood argues, this ‘post-pathological’ intelligibility of
homosexuality, ‘superficially appears not to situate homosexuality as mental illness, but rather
situates mental illness as the risk wrought by homosexuality’ (2004, p. 102). What is at stake here
are imaginations of what it might be to be a ‘liberated’ gay. While never addressed explicitly, this
challenging homophobic bullying in schools 191
emancipatory projection can be identified within the empirical literature about homophobic
bullying and in a variety of other cultural texts.
Rivers and Cowie’s work calculates the impact of homophobic bullying against assessments of
‘psychopathology in adulthood’ – a concept that, amongst other things, is evaluated by relationship
status and duration of relationships (2006, p. 29). This seemingly neutral psychological assessment
is emblematic of a form of child developmentalism which has been subject to sustained critique
by numerous theorists of childhood. Underlying their critiques, often informed by Foucauldian
insights about the power of a depoliticised psy-expertise and knowledge, is a willingness to question
the norms against which psychological functioning adulthood is evaluated. As Walkerdine argues:
‘The subject is not made social, but rather the social is the site for the production of discursive
practices which produce the possibility of being a subject’ (2009, p. 19).32 Consequently, while
Rivers, as quoted above, argues that research should explore in more detail why some victims of
bullying appear able to ‘successfully negotiate adulthood’, what is left unanswered are critical
questions about what that ‘successfully negotiated’ adulthood might look like and who defines it.
These critical perspectives have a particular resonance with queer theorists such as Eve Sedgwick,
who demonstrated how the removal of homosexuality from the catalogue of psychological disorders
has been followed by the discovery and inclusion of new (‘DSM recognised’) pathologies (1991). What
is significant in this context is the extent to which these neutral scientific perceptions cohere with
dominant political discourses new-found concern with homophobia. Rivers and Cowie’s (2006)
use of relationships as an indicator of ‘successful adulthood’ is particularly relevant here.
Within new ‘psychological disorders’, the inability to form ‘stable’ adult relationships is
frequently a key component and this problematisation coheres with the widespread political
support for the Civil Partnership Act 2004 (CPA). For support was frequently premised, often
explicitly, on the view that it would enable and support lesbian and gays to establish stable
relationships. Indeed, some Conservative politicians have explicitly linked their support for the
CPA with expressions of regret that the attitudes underlying their earlier support of Section 28
may have prompted promiscuity amongst gay men.33 As Stychin argues in relation to the CPA:
‘there is a message within the Act . . . that the encouragement of the rights and responsibilities of
civil partnership through law will provide a disincentive for “irresponsible” behaviour. In the
context of New Labour politics, irresponsibility seems to include promiscuous sex, relationship
breakdown at will, and the selfishness of living alone (or perhaps even living with friends and
acquaintances).’ (2006, p. 30)
This approach is also adopted by some marriage-equality advocates within the LGBT community.
Duggan argues that ‘many have couched their advocacy in language that glorifies marital bliss,
sometimes echoing the “family values” rhetoric of their opponents’. As an example she quotes the
Roadmap to Equality: A Freedom to Marry Educational Guide, which states that: ‘Denying marriage
rights to lesbian and gay couples keeps them in a state of permanent adolescence’ (Duggan, 2004).34
What is significant here is that while the failure to allocate rights is linked to pathological
32 See also Harwood (2004) and Talburt (2004).
33 See, for example, an interview with Conservative Party Chairman Francis Maude MP (2006): ‘Tories’ Gay
Stance was “Wrong”’, BBC News, Thursday, 9 February 2006. Available at (last visited 19 November 2010).
34 Another recent example of this approach from within the lesbian and gay community is the fact that
promiscuity was described as being a ‘negative’ portrayal in the report of the representations of lesbians
and gays in the media, as opposed to ‘suffering’, which was described as ‘negative but realistic’ (Stonewall,
2010, p. 3).
192 daniel monk
development, this is not an uncomplicated form of passive victimhood, for the demand of
responsibility with rights both acknowledges and demands action on behalf of the new rights
holders. As Rose argues, ‘Citizenship becomes conditional on conduct’ (2000, p. 335).
Stychin’s analysis of debates about the CPA went beyond sexual practice to incorporate broader
economic calculations and the extent to which ‘stable relationships’ cohered with neoliberal
discourses about the privatisation of care. Echoes of this can also be identified here. Rivers’s
assessment of psychopathology in adulthood also includes employment status and this linkage
reinforces Ellis’s observation that concern about homophobic bullying cohered neatly with New
Labour’s managerialist calculations and broader education reforms premised on clearly
identifiable outcomes and audits of economic citizenship. In this vein, he asks rhetorically:
‘Is it a coincidence that recent policy and guidance from both a neo-liberal government and from
the voluntary sector focus on how risky and disruptive identities might be managed safely to ensure
the production of auditable outcomes? (2007, p. 23, emphasis added)35
Alongside concerns about promiscuity, other cultural texts also provide insight into the extent to
which the rejection of homophobia coheres with pathologising understandings of non-conformist
practices. For example, a causal link is often identified between the experience of homophobic
bullying as a child and an adult preference for sado-masochistic (SM) sexual activity. In the
documentary Pleasure and Pain, flashbacks to being bullied at school are linked to sexual
submissiveness – the depravity of SM being perceived as a direct result of the bullying (Sullivan,
2003, p. 154). Significantly, here, and in other contexts,36 it is the submissive role that is the
remarked upon and pathologised position. And the silence about the desire to dominate attests to
the extent to which psychological perceptions of normality are informed by cultural norms – in
this case of a particular construct of masculinity.
The empirical literature on homophobic bullying frequently reveals that sports and changing
rooms are the most feared places within the school (Rivers and Duncan, 2002; Warwick et al.,
2006). And, as referred to above, the Conservative Party’s policy document about children was
entitled More Ball Games, in order to present a reassuring image of normal stable childhood. But,
in this context, what is noticeable is that other cultural texts present a tantalising representation
of a post-homophobic world within which the playing of sports features highly – in order to
present a reassuring image of a ‘liberated’ normal stable homosexuality. An example of this is two
soap operas, Eastenders on BBC1 and The Archers on BBC Radio 4. In both of these programmes, the
public broadcasting company, in an almost Reithian educational role, portrays their resolutely ‘out
and proud’ gay characters playing sports alongside the heterosexual male members of their
respectively urban and rural communities (Christian playing five-a-side football in the former and
Adam cricket in the latter), and both are star players in their teams.37
A telling silence here is that popular media representations of lesbians – of which there are far
fewer – never emphasise sporting prowess. Such a portrayal would, of course, conform to a
35 In the context of economic citizenship it is interesting to note that the only reference to lesbians and gays in
the Conservative Party general election manifesto was to tax benefits for those in civil partnerships (2010,
p. 35).
36 Franklin, in his analysis of the famous trial of Leopold and Loeb, reveals how medical discourses pathologised
Leopold’s desire to be a ‘submissive slave’ to Loeb as evidence of his emotional and sexual depravity (2003,
p. 139).
37 That the playing of sport – and playing well – functions as a key motif for the portrayal of confident post-
homophobic identity is similarly demonstrated by the fact that annual international LGBT Human Rights
conferences are now coupled with Out Games – a sporting competition.
challenging homophobic bullying in schools 193
stereotypical image of adult lesbians or, in children, of tomboys (Cockburn and Clarke; 2002;
Halberstam, 2004). Consequently, the portrayal of a lesbian in a media drama ably playing sport
has none of the ‘liberatory discursive power’ that it has with a gay man. In other words, liberation
in this discourse is profoundly heteronormative, linked as it is to binary gender conformity.
The coupling of sporting prowess with ‘liberation’ is not new. Most striking is the extent to which
it mirrors constructions of Jewish masculinity. The similarities here are far from coincidental. As
Gilman has demonstrated, for much of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, ‘Jew’ and
‘homosexual’ were virtually synonymous and interchangeable categories of social and sexual
difference (Gilman, 1993, pp. 36–48, 132–68). Significantly, as with homosexuality and
homophobia now, the causal link made between the unliberated, weak and feminine male Jew
and anti-semitism was frequently espoused by those explicitly concerned with challenging
anti-semitism.38
That both individual and collective ‘liberation’ is linked to (and conditional on) a particular
performance of masculinity is not surprising. Sedgwick reminded us long ago that ‘the gay
movement has never been quick to attend to the issues concerning effeminate boys’ (1991,
p. 20).39 Similarly, Weiss comments that ‘the celebration of effeminate flamboyance – femininity
in the face of “male power” – is precisely what is excluded from homonormativity gay activism’
(2008, p. 92). Linking this silence with broader political strategies, Bell and Binnie argue that:
‘When sexual dissidents make use of rights-based political strategies to demand citizenship, they
must conform to a prevailing model of acceptability that is “privatized, de-radicalized,
de-eroticized, and confined”.’ (2000, p. 3)
There is then a paradox: failure to conform to particular ideals of behaviour are read as indicators of
the harmful effects of bullying, but, at the same time, freedom from bullying is evaluated against an
ability to conform to those same ideals. Nevertheless, queer perspectives that seek to reveal these
tensions do not discard homophobia or deny that it causes real harm and suffering. Moreover,
they sometimes offer simply an alternative causal reading of its effects. So, for example, embracing
sado-masochism and celebrating promiscuity (Sullivan, 2003, 151–67; Thompson, 1995) and
rejecting the hyper-masculinity of many forms of contemporary gay male culture (Muñoz, 2009,
pp. 78–79) are often provided as evidence of ‘liberation’ from heteronormativity.40 The aim here is
not to attempt to arbitrate or judge these competing truth claims but to be attuned to their
discursive power and, in particular, to make visible the political dynamics underlying
homophobic bullying agendas which are masked by developmentalist modes of thinking and
investment in the child as future.41
‘Responsible’ memories?
One might reasonably ask whether in highlighting the existence of homophobia in schools and
developing strategies that enable it to be acknowledged by policy-makers it is necessary to engage
38 For example, Elisha Friedman argued in a US medical journal that Jewish predominance in scholarly and
mercantile pursuits was the result of anti-semitic exclusions (1923, pp. 352–53, quoted in Franklin, 2003,
p. 143).
39 Another recent example is the finding that femininity is perceived as ‘negative’ in a report of the
representations of lesbians and gays in the media: (Stonewall, 2010, p. 6).
40 For a particularly nuanced overview and analysis of the debates and ‘productive’ tensions between ‘gay’ and
‘queer’ and ‘assimilation’ and ‘transgression’ see Stychin (2005).
41 See Lesnik-Oberstein and Thomson (2002) for an analysis of how queer theory premised on challenging
heteronormativity is deeply wedded to psychoanalytical discourse.
194 daniel monk
with conflicting imaginations about an idealised post-homophobic world. The argument here is that
it is, for if homophobic bullying is made speakable through discourses of heteronormativity, then
those outcomes become the form through which its success is evaluated. In other words it can
lead to a pathologising of behaviours – ironically those that often signify resistance to
homophobia. Moreover, this form of pathologising is a particularly invasive form which resonates
with broader shifts in governance within contemporary advanced liberal societies (Rose, 1999).
Garland argues that ‘where the state once targeted the deviant for intensive transformative action,
it now aims to bring about marginal but effective changes in the norms, routines, and the
consciousness of everyone’ (1996, p. 454). Reece has analysed this form of governance as a form of
‘(post) liberalism’. This concept is distinct from both conservative morality and laissez-faire
liberalism as it imposes a demanding model of ‘responsibility’ to the extent that it demands that
the individual internalise responsibility rather than simply conform to hierarchical juridical
commands. Within this model, Reece argues that ‘psychological norms have replaced social
norms, and therapeutic correctness has become the new standard of good behaviour’ (2003,
p. 217). For Rose, this represents a form of ‘government at a distance’ which, through concepts of
‘empowerment’ and ‘self-esteem’, serves to mask strategies of control:
‘the beauty of empowerment is that it appears to reject the logics of patronizing dependency that
infused earlier welfare models of expertise. Subjects are to do the work themselves, not in the
name of conformity, but to make them free . . . High self-esteem is linked to the power to plan
one’s life as an orderly enterprise and take responsibility for its course and outcome.’ (2000,
pp. 334–35)
These broader insights into this shift in governance clearly cohere with queer theoretical concerns
about the conditions of inclusion within civil society. For therapeutic correctness requires
individuals to explain and to account for their failure to conform to traditional relationship
models, their sexual ‘perversions’ and, indeed, their unhappiness, by connecting with childhood
trauma. The relatively recent predominance of the expression ‘internalised homophobia’ as a
widely understood phenomenon within both pyschotherapeutic circles and LGBT communities
more widely, not only attests to homophobia as an external force to be challenged but also,
implicitly, places a burden on the individual to unravel and question its negative impacts.42 As
Kitzinger argues, ‘Instead of going to heterosexual therapists to be cured of our homosexuality,
now lesbian and gay men are supposed to seek out lesbian and gay therapists to be cured of
internalized homophobia’ (1997, p. 211).
In this context it is significant that much of the research on homophobic bullying draws on adult
lesbian and gay accounts of their childhoods (Rivers and Cowie, 2006) and, similarly, to note the
preponderance of queer theorists drawing on their own personal narratives (Warner, 2004; Muñoz,
2009, pp. 67–73). In these narratives memory plays a crucial role. Carol Smart, drawing on the
work of Misztal (2003), argues that we need to ‘grasp the chameleon nature of memory’, that it,
‘works in unstable ways, notwithstanding that it almost always appears to have the status of the
most authentic and most signifying act of identity creation’ (2007, pp. 40–41). In foregrounding
the fact that ‘even individual memory is social’, she argues that ‘Memories can change to suit an
42 For a nuanced critique of this concept see Williamson (2000). The aim here is not to dismiss the potential
benefits of psychological perceptions or calculations, but rather to identify, as Adam Phillips argues, the
ways in which, at least explicitly, psychology concerns itself far more with disavowal and lack than it does
with affirmation and world making. Moreover, as Phillips argues, ‘if we are living in the age of the
specialist, then psychoanalysis can be useful as a critique of the whole project of wanting authorities’
(1995, pp. xx1 and xiii).
challenging homophobic bullying in schools 195
audience or to fit a newly crafted identity’ (2007, p. 41, emphasis added).43 The aim here is not to
discount memories but to be attuned to their productive role and their dependence on the
availability of language and dominant discourses and, in particular, to look beneath individual
accounts to reveal the collective political meaning-making inherent in the project of naming,
challenging and resisting homophobic bullying.
Lawful violence: institutional homophobia and the criminal gaze
In this final section the focus shifts from the bullied to the bully. In contrast to the construction of the
‘responsible victim’, here we find a return to the subject of traditional hierarchical forms of control:
the demonised criminal other. Yet, while the role of the state in this context is more direct, more
explicit, it, similarly, is heard through ‘common-sense’ narratives that have the effect of masking
the political.
‘Bullying’ and homophobia
A key way in which the homophobic bullying agenda is depoliticised is through the discourse of
bullying itself. History is significant here, for while homophobia in schools has been written
about in earlier periods (particularly in the context of Section 28), the fact that bullying is now
the key focus remains unremarked upon. The argument here is that the coupling of ‘homophobic’
with ‘bullying’ is not straightforward, but, rather, a linkage that plays a productive role in
determining the construction of the harms focused on and the legitimacy of the means used to
challenge them.
Bullying is spoken of not just in the context of children, but also in relation to adults’ lives,
particularly in the workplace. In recent years there has developed what is fair to describe as a vast
industry defining, deploring and highlighting the ills of bullying (Smith, 2005; Rigby, 2002).44 It is
beyond the remit of this article to attempt to explore the genealogy of bullying as a discourse.
That said, however, an attempt to do so could locate its ascendancy within the broader
developments of neoliberal individualistic governance, the increasing dominance of psy-discourses
and, of particular relevance here, a reinscription of the political as primarily private. The
workplace provides a good example of this. In the vast majority of incidences now labelled as
bullying, the bully is the employer; indeed, a report by the Institute of Management suggested
that bullying was part of the new management credo (2000). A political response would be to see
such relationships as reflecting broader structural inequalities within the workplace and society
more generally; in other words, as a labour relations issue.45 Read through the narrative of
bullying, however, and this political potential is lost and the issue is individualised as the bully is
constructed through a pathological gaze. This is not to suggest that psychology, broadly defined,
has nothing to offer in explaining why a particular individual might behave towards colleagues or
staff in a particular way. But it is important to be attuned to what is at the same time silenced
through such an account.46
If homophobic bullying is caused by homophobic bullies, consequently is individualised, what
gets overlooked are structural forms of homophobia. Many of these are implicit and subtle; in
other words the opposite to explicit juridical prohibitions such as Section 28. Examples are the
43 See also Talburt (2004).
44 See also (last visited 18 November 2010).
45 A report by the Institute of Management suggested that bullying was part of the new management credo
(IOM, 2000).
46 For example, research undertaken by the TUC suggests that the groups most likely to be bullied are women,
ethnic minorities and people with disabilities (last visited
18 November 2010).
196 daniel monk
emphasis on parental involvement in sex and relationship education and the privileged space (and
contingent definition) of biology within the curriculum (Monk, 1998). Beyond the formal curriculum
numerous commentators have long identified the existence and observed the impact of the ‘hidden
curriculum’ in relation to heterosexism and gender more generally across almost every aspect of
school life (O’Flynn and Epstein, 2005; Kehilly, 2002).
One aspect of the ‘hidden curriculum’ is school dress codes. These have a particular relevance in
this context as they are highly gendered and conforming to gender stereotypes is identified in much
of the literature as being a critical factor in homophobic bullying (Phoenix et al., 2003). The Equalities
and Human Rights Commission recently argued in relation to school dress codes that because
trousers are conventional dress for women and jewellery is equally conventional dress for men,
‘there is a strong argument that it would be unlawful sex discrimination to deny’ these forms of
dress for children in school.47 Such an argument has yet to be tested, but on the basis of increased
support for school dress codes, and stricter application of them, coupled with an extreme
reluctance of the courts to intervene in ‘educational’ matters, it is unlikely to succeed (Monk,
2005). Indeed to describe dress codes as an ‘informal’ aspect of education can be misleading as
they are understood to be a key aspect of school discipline and one that can warrant the ultimate
penalty of permanent exclusion.
That government and individual schools’ commitment to rigorously enforcing gendered dress
codes can co-exist with an explicit commitment to challenging homophobia, despite the repeated
evidence of the connections between heteronormativity and gender performance, demonstrates
the highly restrictive manner in which challenging homophobic bullying is heard.
Bullying narratives – individualistic, depoliticised and, increasingly, drawing on pathological
explanations of inappropriate behaviour – cohere and lend themselves with great ease to a
criminal law paradigm. Critical legal commentators have for many years examined the ways in
which legal causation is distinct from factual causation, to the extent that the former goes
backwards – which is say that it starts with the harm, identifies the individual perpetrator and
then stops – and that in doing so it does not ask or enquire and does not need to examine broader,
political cultural factors that influenced the behaviour of the perpetrator. In this way, like
bullying discourses, it simplifies and individualises, requiring simply the identification of a victim
and a perpetrator (Norrie, 2001, pp. 134–40).
Furniss has argued in favour of criminal law responses to bullying in order to challenge the extent
to which ‘teachers may see bullying as an inevitable part of growing up’ (2000, p. 17). Moreover,
echoing long-standing debates about domestic violence and the physical chastisement of children,
she argues that:
‘By treating attacks on adults as worthy of a serious response, but attacks on children as not, this
sends out the message that the bodily integrity of children is not as important as that of adults.’
(p. 24)
Criminal law is not, however, the only form of legal redress: provisions under the European
Convention of Human Rights and the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child can be
interpreted to create positive obligations on the state to prevent bullying; civil law claims can be
brought by parents and children based on the duty of care of schools to pupils; and quasi-criminal
law sanctions in the form of school exclusions can be used against individuals (Harris, 2005).48 Yet
despite these different forms of legal interventions, in reality it is the quasi-criminal form of
47 (last visited 12 August 2010).
48 For comparative approaches see Ananiadou and Smith (2002).
challenging homophobic bullying in schools 197
redress that is the most accessible. The case of Bradford-Smart v. West Sussex CC in 2002 extended a
school’s duty of care to taking reasonable steps to prevent bullying within the school and made
clear that this was an educational as well as a health and safety issue.49 But in practice it is
exceptionally difficult to satisfy the doctrinal requirements that there be evidence of the breach of
duty and a causal connection between the breach of duty and the harm. Furthermore, where the
harm is psychological it is necessary to show that it takes the form of a clinically recognised
mental health problem. The contrast between the difficulties facing a child or parent attempting
to bring a school or teacher to account in a civil action and the remarkable ease with which a
school can discipline a pupil is stark. The underlying similarity is that in both contexts the courts
can be seen to err on the side of schools, for it is as hard for parents to challenge an exclusion as it
is to bring a claim for negligence. What is significant here is that both legal doctrine and practice
reflects and bolsters the inherent tendency of the bullying narrative to focus on an individual
perpetrator and in doing so shift the focus away from institutional and more complex structural
understandings.
It is possible to view the intervention of law as a form not only of individual redress but also as
justice for all lesbian and gay children. A right to be free from homophobic bullying in this way fits
neatly with rights-based discourse. There are significant parallels here with lesbian and gay
campaigns for the recognition of homophobia as a form of hate crime. While demanding
widespread support – often of an unquestionable ‘common-sense’ nature – this recourse to law
and, once again, the criminal paradigm, like campaigns for gay marriage, and gays in the military,
has not been without its critics. Before turning to these critics it is informative to locate these
developments in both the local context of the school and in broader criminological debates.
School discipline
The only statutory reference to bullying is in the context of school discipline,50 and this focus has
been clearly espoused in recent political statements. For example, in More Ball Games the
Conservative Party suggest that in tackling bullying there should be increased use of exclusions
and firmer use of parent contracts (2008, p. 10). Moreover, in the 2010 general election both major
parties argued in support of head teachers’ extensive disciplinary powers; the Conservative Party
stated that it will ‘stop them being overruled by bureaucrats on exclusions’ (2010, p. 51), and the
Labour Party, under the heading ‘Zero Tolerence of Poor Behaviour’, stated that it will ‘bring order
and discipline back to young people’s lives’ (2010, Chapter 3:5).
In these political responses there is no mention of institutional homophobia. Moreover, the
repeated calls for zero tolerance in relation to bullying reveals how homophobic bullying is made
speakable in this way through its ability to cohere with a conservative law and order discourse. As
a result the significant race and class dimensions of exclusions (Parsons, 1999; Parsons and Harris,
2001; Parsons, 2009) and the impact on poor parents (almost always the mothers), who through
parenting contracts are increasingly held responsible for their children’s behaviour, are overlooked
and silenced in this account (Gillies, 2005; Gewirtz, 2001). As Harris argues, the disciplinary
response to bullying risks the ‘complete abandonment of the perpetrators of bullying who . . .
often have mental health or behavioural problems themselves’ (2005, p. 57).
Law and order
The inability to reduce the use of exclusions and increased assertions of the necessity for ever more
draconian school discipline in schools resonates with broader criminological developments.
49 Bradford-Smart v. West Sussex CC [2002] ELR 139.
50 The Schools Standards and Frameworks Act 1998, Section 61 (now section 98 of the Education and
Inspections Act 2006).
198 daniel monk
The criminologist Rutherford describes increased penality as a form of managing social
behaviour as the re-emergence of the ‘eliminative ideal’. An ideal which ‘strives to solve present
and emerging problems by getting rid of troublesome and disagreeable people with methods that
are lawful and widely supported’, he argues, ‘sits all too comfortably with contemporary pressures
for social exclusion, with notions of a culture of containment’ (1997, pp. 117, 132). Expressing a
similar concern, Bauman refers to an emergence of the notion of ‘disposability’, and argues that
the possibility for harsh sanctions rests upon ‘twin assumptions: a clean-cut territorial division
between the “inside” and the “outside”; and of the completeness and indivisibility of the
sovereignty of the strategy-selecting power inside its realm’ (2003, p. 137).
Rutherford argues that the eliminative ideal provides a seductive but dangerously false sense
of collective certainty and security,51 and that challenges to this trend need to address both
the instrumental and the expressive dimensions of the eliminative ideal. The expressive dimension
owes much to Durkheim’s classic rejection of utilitarian explanations of punishment; that it is
never ‘a rational social defence against harm done or threatened’ but, ‘a passionate reaction, a
matter of feelings’. While his subsequent application of this idea has been much critiqued, this,
still bold, assertion is particularly pertinent here and, indeed, recognising the emotional
dimension of penality coheres with much of the critical thinking about homophobia as hate
crime.52
In keeping with her argument that it is important to be attuned to the ambivalent effects of
shame, Munt argues that:
‘Shame puts us in our place, but the spaces of subjectivity are not wholly fixed or predetermined;
shame’s loss carries uncertainty, but it also presages a desire for reconnection. It is this desire for
re-attachment that has the precarious potential for violence or love.’ (2007, p. 103, emphasis added)
The potential for violence in the context of challenging homophobia consequently coheres with calls
to utilise both school discipline policies and the criminal law as a political tool in the demand for
rights and protection by the state. Murphy and Hampton argue that:
‘criminal law institutionalizes certain feelings of anger, resentment and even hatred that are
typically directed towards wrong doers, especially if we are the victims of those wrong doers.’
(1988, p. 63, quoted in Moran, 2004, p. 940)
Moran, in examining the implications of this in the context of demands for hate crime legislation has
sought to make visible and encourage reflection on the ‘alliances that lesbian and gay men are
making with law and order’ (2004, p. 942)53 Visibility, naming and recognising the violence of law
is critical here. For penalising hate crime and, in this context, school disciplinary action against
homophobic bullies, as acts done in the name of law and order are emptied of, and indeed
perceived as the opposite of, emotions and disorder. As Moran argues:
51 Garland similarly argues that punitive responses are frequently ‘barely considered attempts to express popular
feelings of rage and frustration’, but are at the same time ‘a form of denial which appears increasingly
hysterical’ about the state’s limitations in respect of crime control (1996, pp. 459–60).
52 For a detailed analysis and an apologist for Durkheim’s perspectives on social solidarity and crime, see
Cotterrell (1999).
53 Nancy Fraser (1995) has explored in depth the tensions inherent in developing a critical theory of recognition,
one which identifies and defends only those versions of the cultural politics of difference that can be
coherently combined with the social politics of equality.
challenging homophobic bullying in schools 199
‘as dimensions of retribution, they become civilised by being made in the image of reason and
rationality and are thereby made to disappear. Through this process they take their place as a
part of law’s legitimacy.’ (p. 925)
It is important to acknowledge here that this act of legitimation equally masks the ‘homophobic
violence’ of head teachers rigorously enforcing gendered dress codes: ‘law’s violence becomes good
violence’ (p. 925). But, in relation to the disciplined, excluded, punished ‘homophobic’ pupil, the
legitimate violence of law serves to not only mask its own homophobia but positions it elsewhere,
outside, onto an ‘uncivilised other’. And once again it is important to recognise that school
discipline and exclusions, as with criminal justice generally, has a hugely disproportionate classed
dimension (Parsons, 1999). As Munt observes, in what she describes as ‘shame logic’:
‘Violence is transposed onto these marginal spaces in a discursive shift that empties middle class
life of any accountability . . . Dominant discourse has long conflated non-normative subjectivities
with criminality and threat; indeed, there is a kind of discursive contagion operating in which
shame is infectiously displaced.’ (2007, p. 99)
This concern resonates with current debates about the construction of Islam as the ‘uncivilised other’
to secular liberal human rights; and here again school dress codes have been a critical site for this
conflict (Motha, 2007; McGoldrick, 2006). That liberal agendas in the name of human rights have
served to cohere with and play a role in increasing hate underscores Brown’s question: ‘What
kinds of attachments to unfreedom can be discerned in contemporary political formations
ostensibly concerned with emancipation?’ (1995, p. xii). This concern suggests that it is worth
reflecting, at the very least, on the fact that mainstream concern with homophobic bullying
coheres with concerns about Islamic fundamentalism.
‘Attachment to unfreedom’ can also be detected in the attempt to contain and control the use of
the word ‘gay’ being used within schools. Much of the literature on homophobic bullying emphasises
its use as a derogatory term (Rivers, 2001a; Matthews, 2001; DCSF/Stonewall, 2007; Winterman,
2008)54. Incidences of this are used to assess the extent of homophobic bullying in schools and its
apparent widespread use in this way is consequently a key factor in the ability to present
homophobic bullying as being ‘endemic’ and thus plays a role in extending the category of ‘abuse’.
The aim here is not to deny that young people may experience it as hurtful, and far less to deny
that speech itself can be harmful. Rather, the argument here is that it might not always have that
impact and that attempts to curtail speech may have contradictory effects.
Many young people, including young lesbians and gays, confronted with the use of the word ‘gay’
as a derogatory term suggest that they ‘don’t mean it in that way’, and that it does not reflect a
negative view of lesbians and gays. The silencing of this account reinforces the concern that the
homophobic bullying agenda, while premised on research with young people, looks for harm and,
like much research with children, fails rigorously to engage with the ‘life-world’ of young people
themselves (Blackburn, 2007). Acknowledging the complexity of children’s experiences has
practical implications, for, as Blackburn argues, ‘when youth claim multiple subject positions,
they are better able to identify, name and work against oppression’ (p. 50). Being sensitive to the
ability of the word ‘gay’ to have different and contextualised meanings is important. As Butler
argues, drawing on Austin’s concept of performative utterance, the context-specific meaning of
speech is a critical factor to take into account in evaluating the uses of censorship (Butler, 1997).
She also makes the strategic argument that any attempt at censorship, legal or otherwise,
54 See also ‘Challenging Homophobic Language, Stonewall Education Guide’ available at (last visited 20 November 2010).
200 daniel monk
necessarily propagates the very language it seeks to forbid (pp. 129–33).55 A similar argument, by
Jacobs and Potter, is made in relation to hate crime generally. They argue that it mobilises new
prejudices and ‘exacerbate[s] rather than ameliorate[s] social schisms and conflicts’ (1998, p. 144,
quoted in Moran, 2004, p. 945).
Mindful of the dangers of ‘investment in simplistic violent hierarchies of politics as either
progressive or reactionary’ (Moran, 2009, p. 312), and in recognition of the ambivalent impact of
hate crime, Moran has argued that ‘using violence as a resource to make a claim on the state
becomes a way of gaining back the control that has been lost through violence itself’, that law can
play an important educational role and that it need not promote the status quo but ‘offer a
significant challenge to its heterosexism’ (2004, p. 942). In a similar vein, Grabham suggests
alternatives to readings of identity-based legal rights claims as always an investment in
powerlessness and injury, arguing that:
‘subjects make an impression on law when they make rights arguments, and these impressions
circulate within law as traces of the hurt and trauma that they have experienced . . . They may
not be expressly counter-cultural, but they do give rise to a “public culture”.’ (2009, p. 199)
Identifying potential concerns about lesbian and gay engagement with law and order agendas (in this
context demands for recourse to disciplinary responses to homophobic bullying) is, consequently,
not to argue against these forms of engagement, but rather to suggest a need for reflection about
them, in order to question the implicit political alliances that underpin them and to locate lesbian
and gay political agendas within broader social and economic structures.
Conclusion
‘Children are forced to solicit our anxieties, our delights, our ethics, our love, or really any form of
our attention, especially when politics and moral values are made an issue.’ (Cobb, 2005, p. 119)
The increased attention to and concern about homophobic bullying is a welcome development. And
this article should not be read as an abstract criticism of the necessarily messy and pragmatic business
of influencing policy-makers. Rather, its aim has been to raise a different set of questions.
Highlighting how the twin constructions of victimhood – the innocent child and the tragic gay–
dominate both academic and political narratives about homophobic bullying is not to deny real
harm but to reveal the conditionality of what, on the surface, appears to be an inclusive progressive
politics. The political is similarly revealed by identifying how concerns about lesbian and gay
children operate as a site for broader aspirations, imaginations and contestations about a post-
homophobic world and the ways in which these contestations require a form of active citizenship
in accordance with the subtle shifts in governance in post- or advanced liberal societies. Finally,
bringing the notion of victimhood together with an examination of the disciplinary (quasi-
criminal) responses, questions have been asked about the political alliances and broader social
developments that underlie seemingly ‘common-sense’ narratives of harm and causation. The fact
that, in relation to legal responses, the emphasis is exclusively on disciplinary measures is far
from straightforward, but, rather a reflection of precisely the way in which the harm is
constructed and how it is produced by and within broader political narratives.
55 In a similar way, in examining the implications of a particular form of recognition politics, Fraser argues that
‘the practice of affirmative redistribution, as iterated over time, tends to set in motion a second – stigmatizing –
recognition dynamic, which contradicts universalism’ (1995, p. 85).
challenging homophobic bullying in schools 201
It is too early to tell how the issue will be addressed in the future, and the very real shift in
mainstream thinking about sexuality, which this article does not underestimate, demonstrates the
potential for change. But it may be that the very means by which the issue has been made
speakable could limit more radical developments. In recognition of the fact that schools were
scared to touch the issue of homosexuality in any way, one of the earliest documents about
homophobic bullying was entitled Playing it safe! (Warwick, Aggleton and Douglas, 2001). In some
schools much has changed, but this article suggests reflection about, and questions what the costs
are, of the progressive agenda itself ‘playing it safe’.
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