Parental attitudes to the Australian anti-bullying Safe Schools program: a critical discourse analysis

Abstract

LGBTIQ children and adolescents experience disproportionate levels of bullying. Safe Schools, an Australian anti-bullying program, has recently been a site of public debate, with parents and their imagined concerns being central to the debate. This study investigated how parents construct gender, sexuality, and bullying, in relation to Safe Schools. Utilising Critical Discourse Analysis, we analysed 11 parent interviews and identified four broad discursive themes: heterosexual anxiety, transhysteria, the contested ecology of bullying, and resistance. Many parents feared that children will be harmed mentally and sexually by exposure to the program, and that bullying is an isolated phenomenon. These attitudes serve a social function of maintaining heterosexual and cisgender hegemony, and a psychic function of disavowing the fluid nature of subjectivity. There was also evidence of resistance to these attitudes, with many contending that Safe Schools is necessary, due to bullying being viewed as a social phenomenon informed by homophobia and transphobia. Hostility towards transgender people was notable amongst parents. The discourses identified in this research highlight the strength of current anxieties around children and sexual subjectivity and how they function to undermine the lives of LGBTIQ people, including children who would benefit most from a meaningful implementation of Safe Schools.