Power-over-others is certain under the microscope, yet it seems hard to get on even ground in even discussing any of these areas.
We so often seem to arrive back to using language that re-affirms power imbalances, even while we’re talking about fixing them. As women and girls, when we’re looking at each other for guidance and encouragement to make the democracy practical, quizzical looks often seem to say, “I wouldn’t start from here”.
With three daughters I’m pretty interested in what kind of world little girls are growing up in, and I’d like to share with you my thoughts about bullying and Human Rights with a story from my own experience.
I’m a mum who’s been a home-educator as well as a school parent and I’ve also had to advocate for my daughter in school over bullying. That’s how I know how hard it can be as a parent to work with schools on bullying - depending on how sincere the school is in having a good policy and in implementing it.
In our case, sadly, the school did not follow through on its promises, and became more and more defensive about its refusal to separate bullying children, which the policy states it will. In fact, although my daughter followed school policy to the letter, the school failed completely to support her and took a summary decision one day to expel her instead, and her two sisters as well.
Three years later, the matter is being mediated by the Human Rights Commission in Auckland under the Family Status category of discrimination. I’m writing this to highlight the reasons why the matter is not being dealt with on grounds of sex discrimination because it throws up some important and interesting questions.
A bit of background. We arrived in West Auckland from the UK in 2007 and put our middle daughter into the local Steiner Kindy where she got on very well, making friends and enjoying her daily routines in the wonderful natural bush environment. So well did she get on there, that when our older daughter had a problem with bullying at another school, (New Zealand statistics on bullying make sobering reading, we found out), we listened to the Steiner Manager who told us how often children came to the school due to bullying at other schools and how much better they did at the Steiner school because of individual attention and the non-bullying ethos.
So our eldest daughter did a trial period at the end of the school year in 2008 and that’s when we realised that the class she was in had 17 boys in it and once she joined, that brought the number of girls up to just five.
Not only that, but the class contained a two year age group and our daughter, along with most of the girls, were in the younger one. That meant that many of the boys in the large ‘gang’, that our daughter began immediately to report being very afraid of, were nearly two years older than her.
Over the Christmas holidays (the long summer holidays in New Zealand) we discussed the situation with our eight year old and as the new year approached, with her class teacher also, who was very keen to make sure that our ‘sensitive’ child, (as she described her), was properly looked after among the boys, whom she conceded were “boisterous”.
The communications of the staff at the school, who were very happy to have our daughter there, as well as our position within the school ‘community’, where we had been actively involved for over a year, in the very many events comprising school life, persuaded us to trust the schools assurances regarding their attitude to the well-being of children in spite of the obvious inequalities in the situation.
Unfortunately as the term got under way, it became apparent that the “boisterousness” included daily assault, both physical and mental, to the point where our child came home bruised and afraid and began to change, refusing to wear the dresses and skirts that she had enjoyed so much till then, and also refusing to brush her hair. Many of the boys had long locks which they left unkempt and our daughter began to look indistinguishable from them in an effort to fit in. She enjoyed the arts focus of the school, lots of music and building things, but was not supported to enjoy them by the lack of attention to school policies.
The story of how the school kept us in there by promising to deal with the bullying, and how they eventually, in response to an appalling lapse where a teacher left our daughter alone in the bush with a boy with an axe, who threatened her with it, is documented on the website we set up after all the girls were expelled, largely to communicate with other parents.
The story of how we discovered that there was NO Legal welfare protection for our children whatsoever in New Zealand, because this Steiner school was one of only two private Steiner institutions in the country, is documented in our project Safe To Tell, including the comedy sketch show, Beehave, which we used as a lobbying tool when the Law Commission recommended closing the loopholes that allowed private “cowboy schools” to operate. Although we succeeded in bringing the issue up into the Parliamentary debate, the Education Minister refused to make the recommended changes to benefit the 33,000 children still left unprotected in law.
Eventually through being vocal in these ways we attracted the attention of the Human Rights Commission who are currently helping us to mediate with the school on the basis of Family Status Discrimination.
Chucking out the children because the school did not like us reminding them of a) their own policy on bullying which they weren’t following and b) our own duty as the children’s parents to keep them safe, was a decision which has come back to haunt them as they’ve admitted that they had no problem with the children at all per se. Certainly, our second daughter who’d been at the school for over a year with no problem was extremely distressed and shocked to be suddenly thrown out. Steiner schools have extremely lofty ideals about the importance of children’s relationships with teachers and how the teachers must lead through being role models.
Of course some people will be reading between the lines and saying, ‘yes well they expelled your children to get rid of you” and it’ll be no surprise to you that I’ve heard that before. In fact, as a parent advocating for your children in school, should you have to do it, you’ll find yourself under attack from all sides, yet parents need to remember that they have a legal as well as a moral duty to protect their own children, and be emboldened to ask the difficult questions.
That it was the way that the bullying was not being dealt with that caused the school to move against us, is simply corroborated by the fact that our other child had been so happy there and that we hadn’t had a single problem with her or with any in the school community for over a year and nobody has ever said we did.
That’s why, in spite of boasting that they took this action against us and not the children (who they seemed to view as collateral damage), the only thing they can actually cite about us is the very sloppy and vague ‘behaviour’, with no actual examples.
The children’s self-esteem was very badly effected by the school’s actions, and due to publicity we’ve been sent many emails detailing a long history of families being badly used by this school.
I’ve also noticed a rise in other stories resembling ours, where parents’ attempts to work with schools, sometimes turns into ‘advocacy’, when schools respond defensively. Whenever you see such a thing, where power relations have taken over from working together, you must know that another agenda rather than the well-being of the child has taken over.
So I figure my experience might not be totally wasted because if others will be treading the same turf, they’ll notice the same kinds of things and that's why it's worth talking about comparators and sex-discrimination. We are moving forward in our mediation with Family Status discrimination, but I wanted to flag this up as it is an issue that could effect other parents trying to advocate for their children over bullying in schools, which, by the way, I heartily encourage parents to do, if necessary, in spite of all the flack you are likely to receive.
So as far as sex-discrimination is concerned my question is this: If bullying by a large group of boys, where girls undergo a change in their gender-identity as a result, is any kind of discrimination, why is not also, at least partly, sexual discrimination?
The answer to this question lies in the area of ‘comparitors’.
In order to prove discrimination, you have to be unable to find a subject, who is not in the group you are testing for, but who was also treated less favourably - that would indicate that it was because of your grouping, e.g .in this case ‘girls’ that you received the different treatment.
So in this case, the fact that some boys were also bullied, means that the treatment dished out to my daughter is not deemed to be ‘sexual’ discrimination even though the result on her was that she became estranged from her female self, wouldn’t wear dresses, was demeaned for displaying feminine traits and changed her sex-role behaviour in response to the bullying.
And that’s why I believe that issue of comparitors in sex-discrimination cases is a feminist issue. And it is a feminist issue that is helpfully brought up for humanity by LGTB people.
Clearly if gender is simply a category, consigned by anatomy at birth, then if one boy was bullied, that would mean that the discrimination was not ‘sex discrimination’ in that simple sense.
But when the issue of self-definition in gender, as brought up through LGBT issues, is taken into account, things look very different.
Working with the idea of gender identification/self-definition as necessitated with LGBT by definition, it becomes obvious that not only was my daughter discriminated against on grounds of sexual discrimination, but so were all the boys who were bullied for not conforming to their sex-role stereotypes.
If a boy, even a boy from an older class, would run out of the classroom and hide in the bushes to avoid being bullied by this gang of boys, (we have testimonial evidence of this) then wasn't he also experiencing sex-discrimination, since he was being bullied for his own definition of his gender identity which does not conform to the one consigned by the bullies viewpoint, i.e. how the bullies want him to behave as a boy, i.e. joining in the bullying with them in a macho “boisterous” manner - the only way to avoid being among the targets.
The bias towards a masculist way of looking at social relationships does appear to be a feature of Steiner Education. The Woods Report (“Steiner Schools in England” by Philip Woods, Martin Ashley and Glenys Woods makes frequent reference to a paper by Jill Golden ‘Narrative - The use of story in Waldorf education’, (presented at the Annual Meeting of AERA, Chicago 2006).
“On the basis of classroom observations, Golden observes how values are woven into story as teaching strategy (p4) and suggests that the male, and male hierarchy, appear as the norm in stories (p4, 6). With regard to the latter, Golden cites the retelling, by a boy and a girl, of a story of ‘Miss Equal’s Garden’ told to them by the teacher. Gender roles are reflected in the children’s accounts (the girl identifying with the careful, responsible adult female {Miss Equal} and the boy with the naughty male child – p5/6). In the paper it is suggested that the (2) girls’ interpretation of another story (about stealing) shows an emphasis on a ‘feminine’ way of meditation (p9), whilst two boys’ accounts seem to emphasise the excitement of testing the boundaries of behaviour (p9/10). The different responses to the story show an attitude to authority that differs according to gender. This research provides an interesting and critical slant on the less visible effects of the curriculum.”
Whatever the stories being told, looking at gender from the perspective of self-definition frees girls from the necessity of being part of a group called ‘only girls who are bullied’ in order for the obvious sex-discrimination to be acknowledged. By that token of course, disabled children would not be discriminated against on grounds of disability either, since non-disabled children were also bullied, yet clearly, if someone’s impairment is used to target them, they must experience disability discrimination.
LGBT issues address the rigid sex role stereotyping that says that if non-macho boys are bullied by macho boys, then nobody is getting discriminated against on grounds of sex. In gender definition, those masculinist ‘traits’ and behaviours, can no longer be seen in any sense as “belonging” to the male sex per se.
So educators who promote those masculist traits towards boys, should such prejudice be discovered could be discriminating just as much against those who are thus encouraged into being bully boys.
The current emphasis on LGBT issues of gender definition in Human Rights are important for a feminist approach to all kinds of discrimination, not just sex-discrimination, an approach that accurately reflects the human experience (stories) of those being discriminated against.
This is very helpful in dealing with bullying in its entirety because of the “power-over” nature of bullying. LGBT realities dispense with the oppositional binary dynamic entirely, with all its built in inequalities.
All bullying is about keeping that power-over dynamic intact but it’s only the insistence on looking for it from the target’s point of view, which I hope I've shown is brought forward by the realities and diversity of gender identity, that will make the real shift away from that paradigm.
The perspective provided by the hard-won experience of LGBT people is going to be very valuable in moving us past a non-feminist definition of sex-discrimination and that’s good news.
Roll on the future and the new landscape of Human Rights by our pioneering LGBT sisters and brothers. Thanks very much!
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