According to StopBullying.gov, “more LGBTQ+ students (14%) than straight students (7%) reported not going to school because of safety concerns.” One of my closest friends in middle school told me about their experience when it came to bullying. They shared how it affected their mental health and how they had to resort to telling me about their issues instead of a trusted adult. Their experience shows how LGBTQ+ youth often experience bullying in schools, which can damage their mental and emotional well-being. This issue can be resolved by implementing and enforcing anti-bullying policies and making support groups that could serve as a safe place.
The bullying LGBTQ+ students experience can have a negative impact on their mental well-being. The Trevor Project, an organization that helps LGBTQ+ youth with crisis interventions and suicide prevention, provides data about kids who get bullied in person in high school, middle school, and within the transgender, nonbinary, and cisgender community. In middle school, where the average age of students is 11–13, 42% of LGBTQ+ students get bullied regularly. In high school, where the age range is 14–18, 30% report being bullied. For transgender and nonbinary people, the rate is 39%, and for cisgender LGBTQ+ students, it’s 28%. This paints a bigger picture to help understand how LGBTQ+ kids get bullied in different schools and at different ages. The data informs the public about how bullying can affect the student’s mental health, and it helps emphasize that bullying needs to stop and make schools a safe and happy place for all students.
Implementing and enforcing anti-bullying policies and making support groups can help and support LGBTQ+ kids. According to “Supportive Spaces Help LGBTQ+ Youth Thrive in School and Beyond,” by Laura Allen, “Student-led clubs and advocacy efforts also have been shown to improve mental health in LGBTQ+ students. Staff training and anti-bullying policies, too, can help these students feel safer at school. Together, these things can improve students’ grades and reduce their risk of depression or suicide.” This suggests that there can be a positive outcome when implementing anti-bullying policies. Enforcing anti-bullying policies overall improves LGBTQ+ students’ mental and emotional well-being.
Although many want to implement new anti-bullying policies, some argue that these newly enforced policies at school will not be effective. In the OneWorld article, “Anti-Bullying Programs: Do they Help or Hurt?” Lucy Lawrence states, “In the study of 7,000 students ages 12 to 18 who completed a survey in the 2005–06 school year, researchers found that a higher percentage of students who attended schools with anti-bullying programs had reported experiencing bullying than in schools without programs.” This shows that sometimes anti-bullying policies might not work as well as we thought. Even though schools have these programs, more students say they still end up getting bullied. It makes it seem like these programs didn’t do anything to help stop bullying but instead made it worse. It could suggest that some anti-bullying policies might not be effective in keeping students safe from bullying, which can again lead to mental illnesses. However, this is wrong, according to an article from NEAToday, “Anti-Bullying School Policies Continue to Fail LGBT Students.” The article claims, “The effectiveness of anti-bullying policies also depends on LGBT students being aware that specific protections even exist. The Gay, Lesbian, & Straight Education Network (GLSEN) found that many of these students did not know what protections were available to them, making them less likely to report incidents.” It is not the newly enforced policies that are causing the students to get bullied. It’s the fact that they don’t know there’s help for them.
LGBTQ+ youth frequently face bullying in schools, causing harm to their emotional and mental health. To address this problem, it is important to establish and enforce anti-bullying policies and create safe spaces like support groups to provide a better environment for LGBTQ+ students. When an LGBTQ+ student gets bullied, it can hurt their feelings and make them feel sad or alone. This feeling of sadness can overwhelm a student, resulting in hurting themselves or becoming mentally sick. Therefore, it’s very important that the school board makes some changes, or else this issue can blow up in their faces and be a bigger problem than it already is. If schools do not make these changes, it can increase the rate of bullying and suicide, so it’s important to let students know there are support groups that can offer help and let them know they are not alone.
