The Behaviour Summit held in Wellington this week needed to focus more on bullying and intolerance - instead its agenda was dominated by what to do with students with behaviour disorders, says an LGBT youth project representative at the meeting. A major international report released in December last year ranked New Zealand second worst among 37 countries for bullying in primary schools with rates more than 50% above the international average. However, expert presentations at the Summit focussed on interventions aimed at the 5% of students with severe behaviour problems and the challenges they pose to teachers and to themselves. The New Zealand AIDS Foundation, Nathan Brown, who is the Programme Leader of queer youth development project Out There!, was a participant at the Summit. "The Summit's organisers seemed to medicalise the causes of bullying by blurring behaviour disorders and bullying together," he explains. "If they had allowed young people on the receiving end of bullying, such as students who are perceived to be gay or lesbian, to participate in the Summit there might have been more discussion about how to actually make schools safer for them." A whole-school approach A report from the Office of the Children's Commissioner that was presented at the Summit proposed that whole-school approaches be used which aim to support positive behaviour by changing the school culture. Out There! promotes this as the best means of addressing homophobia and transphobia in schools. "Support of a whole-school approach is excellent but I was disappointed that there were no ideas about how schools could develop students' understanding and appreciation of diversity as called for in the Curriculum. If a whole-school approach is to be successful then a central aspect must be to encourage all students to accept and value diversity and difference," adds Brown. Examples of initiatives promoted by Out There! which can form part of a whole-school approach to reduce homophobic bullying include staff diversity awareness training, school processes that help identify homophobia in the school rather than ignore it, a student diversity group to organise school wide campaigns and a comprehensive health programme that covers sexuality and gender diversity. Pink Shirt Day, an international day of action against bullying, was actively supported by Out There! recently as an anti-bullying initiative that schools and students can support to send a clear message to students to think again before bullying a peer. Meanwhile, education minister Anne Tolley has defended the Summit, stressing that is was not specifically about violence and bullying, but a discussion of a range of behaviours which can impede learning. She noted however that positive learning environments needed to be "free of student bullying and harassment".
Credit: GayNZ.com Daily News Staff
First published: Wednesday, 18th March 2009 - 6:20pm