Drawing on semistructured interviews with Canadian Grade 4 to 12 students, this article uses a feminist lens to explore gendered and sexualized bullying and cyberbullying among children and youth. Our findings indicate that while boys' roles and behaviors were frequently made invisible, girls were typically spotlighted, blamed, and criticized.…

The social landscape has changed regarding public knowledge, perception, and acceptance of "alternative" sexual lifestyles. In recent years, public and political discourse around issues of non-heterosexual orientations has shifted significantly. Despite many legal milestones, society has not realized complete inclusion of individuals…

Using a narrative autoethnographical approach, this article details the identity-related and social repercussions of my experiences as a former victim of social, verbal, and physical bullying in public Franco-Ontarian elementary (1986-1994) and high (1994-1999) schools. The highlighted experiences are more specifically correlated with social…

Gay-straight alliances (GSAs) have become widespread in Ontario schools and, starting in 2012, all schools are required to permit students to form GSAs. While American research suggests that GSAs have a positive impact on school safety and inclusion, there is little research on the impact of GSAs in Canadian schools. This study, based on a survey…

Homophobic harassment and bullying are persistent issues in Canadian schools despite recent initiatives to improve school climate. Among the reasons is that educators feel reluctant or ill-prepared to address these issues. The purpose of this paper is to examine how teacher education can help make schools safer by addressing LGBTQ issues and…

The isolation experienced by LGBTQ youth, who are closeted in all or parts of their lives, leads to a higher rate of alcohol and drug use, smoking, mental health issues, and suicide. National studies in the United States and Canada show that LGBTQ youth are three to six times more likely to commit suicide than their straight counterparts and that…

Two proposed U.S. federal laws would provide explicit protection for lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, and questioning (LGBTQ) students in public schools. These federal laws follow actions by many states and school districts to define and implement laws or policies to protect the safety of LGBTQ students in schools. Research during the…

James Scheurich argues that practices of policy--normalized over time through repetition--serve three purposes. They structure social problems for which policy is designed to address; construct certain people, implicitly or explicitly, as problem individuals; and shape policy solutions. Following Foucault, he offers what he calls Policy…

This study reports on a qualitative analysis of data from interviews with 15 heterosexual males ages 16-18 in Canadian high schools. Findings indicate that gay male youth often occupy lower status positions in the school's social hierarchy. Heterosexual males did not typically want to associate with gay male peers for fear of being perceived as…

The paper is a critique of discourse focused on at-risk behaviour and homophobic bullying. The paper argues that conversations around homophobic bullying must include discussions of doing equity and achieving social justice,in which the ultimate goal of constructing safe schools is achieved through the utter transformation of school culture.…

In the contemporary world, racism is a pervasive and destructive social force both in Canada and internationally, and it is on the rise since 9/11. Although a lot of people know what racism is, many do not understand it in the same way. In this article, the author discusses a number of related concepts of racism which, in abstract social…

This article provides an analysis of teachers' perceptions of and responses to gendered harassment in Canadian secondary schools based on in-depth interviews with six teachers in one urban school district. Gendered harassment includes any behaviour that polices and reinforces traditional heterosexual gender norms such as (hetero)sexual harassment,…

During the past ten years, attention on bullying has intensified among educators, parents, journalists, and educational researchers in the wake of high-profile incidents of bullying in some Canadian schools. Safe schools policies and programs have proliferated as a result. However, the issue of homophobia-a pervasive form of bullying-tends to be…

This first essay presents and reviews a collection of six videotapes produced over the past decade that focus primarily on bullying, homophobia, and LGBTQ youth. The second review details a video resource for librarians and those supportive of non-censorship of library resources to provide materials and services to GLBT&Q adolescents.

The main aim of this contribution is to describe an instrument devised to study some of the cognitive processes that occur when people interpret social events (Discrepant Story Task-DST; Smorti, 2004). In particular, this instrument analyses the narrative processes of interpretation used by an observer when witnessing progressive and…