Challenging the myths about LGBTQ+ kids and bullying: what it means to protect queer kids in schools

 

Conversations around LGBTQ+ kids in school have become dominated by the subject of bullying. Although this may be due to good-faith efforts to protect vulnerable students, Queer Kids and Social Violence demonstrates that a focus on bullying as acts of individual peer aggression fails to address the social norms that perpetuate the violence. Considering the broader contexts of bullying, this volume offers ways to engage with queer youth that are both more humanizing and more likely to create sustainable change.

 

Essays by leading international scholars analyze how bullying discourse shapes policy and practice, using in-depth case studies, research findings, and examinations of political policy to guide readers through the various forms of violence, identity regulation, and identity erasure in schools. Offering conversation-shifting interventions to respond to a difficult and frightening political moment for LGBTQ+ youth, Queer Kids and Social Violence is a rounded, empathetic picture that does queer youth justice and points the way toward safer schools for all.

 

Contributors: Ana María Amigo-Ventureira, Durell M. Callier, Cristyn Davies, Renée DePalma, Tania Ferfolja, Jessica Fields, Elliot Fonarev, Jen Gilbert, Tristan Gleason, Dominique C. Hill, Angela Ingram, Laurie Gutmann Kahn, Cris Mayo, Mollie McQuillan, Aoife Neary, C.J. Pascoe, Victoria Rawlings, EJ Renold, Jessica Ringrose, Kerry H. Robinson, Dorte Marie Søndergaard, Cris Townley, Jacqueline Ullman, Boni Wozolek.

 

 

Retail e-book files for this title are screen-reader friendly with images accompanied by short alt text and/or extended descriptions.

Draws directly on insights from teens to reframe our understanding of bullying in the age of social media and why anti-bullying campaigns have been unsuccessful in combating it.
 
Fitting in and standing out in high school is an eternal rite of passage for youth. Increasingly, these struggles to establish and maintain hierarchies are labeled under the umbrella of “bullying.” This form of conflict is considered such a significant problem that all fifty states have passed anti-bullying legislation, and many schools engage in prevention programs. Despite these efforts, bullying rates haven’t decreased. Why is that? Today’s teens face a unique challenge: social media.

In The Tolerance Generation, sociologist Sarah Miller explores how youth grapple with bullying in the digital age and the industry designed to prevent it. Based on two school years with students at a Northeastern high school, Miller calls “Township,” the book chronicles how adolescents navigate conflict in an increasingly digital society, all while their educators promote tolerance. Charting teens’ lives as they are affected not only by bullying, but also by sexting exposures, school shooting threats, and viral cancel culture, their stories illustrate the amplifying pressures social media places on youth and why bullying prevention efforts fail to help them. The school’s anti-bullying campaigns are engineered to address individual instances of explicit conflict, but not to change the culture that contributes to and constitutes bullying, nor to help students who are most likely to be targeted. Miller captures school practices that fail to address bullying as a systemic problem, while she shows how students’ online lives are inextricable from a culture of exclusion and harm.

However, by following teens on a variety of platforms, she also documents another realm, where adolescents develop their own bullying prevention strategies using the very tools adults blame for bullying. Here, youth harness digital culture to go beyond tolerance, using social media as a site for education, conflict resolution, and resistance. Ultimately, Miller establishes that to prevent bullying, schools must address the structural factors that marginalize students and offer tools for creating a true culture of care that supports youth both at school and online.