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- Seen Sep 26, 2021
What an appauling piece of advice.
I hope you didn't think I agreed with what that Toronto cop said because I don't. I only brought it up because like this story it's a case of someone blaming victims for the faults of others (and because I was trying to add something else to the discussion so it might expand beyond just talking about schools).@Scarf: That relation to the Toronto officer is tenuous at best. The news report says that these people are being picked on specifically for their appearance. It's a well-known fact that sexual attacks aren't based on the level of attractiveness of the woman involved, so the way they dress wouldn't affect the deviants at all. However, if someone is being picked on exclusively for their appearance, and then changed their appearance, it's reasonable to guess that people picking on them for their appearance will...no longer pick on them.
I hope you didn't think I agreed with what that Toronto cop said because I don't. I only brought it up because like this story it's a case of someone blaming victims for the faults of others (and because I was trying to add something else to the discussion so it might expand beyond just talking about schools).
I don't know about you, but when I read that kids were being told to change their hair I didn't immediately think they were dying it or doing other kinds of attention-grabbing things with their hair. I assumed that since this was in England that there was a good chance their school had a dress code or a uniform and that anything these kids who were bullied were doing with their appearance couldn't be very extreme in the first place. So I took away from the article the image of a kid with maybe only a Justin Bieber style haircut being harassed. I mean, the "advice" of the teachers may have been to change their hair, but who knows what the bullies were actually targeting. For all we know it was those teachers who had a problem with the kids' appearance and assumed that was the cause.
And from the article it also sounded like what the kids describe as "bullying" the teachers may have described as "teasing" so it's just all kinds of unclear all around.
I'll agree with you certainly that if you dye your hair and get some comments on it that's nothing but you and your choice, but if things slide from "teasing" into "bullying" then it's totally inappropriate to tell the victims they need to change. Adults are supposed to keep schools safe and they can stop bullies once they know about them so there's no call for them to shift that burden to kids.
The teachers are on the right track, but I think they should give it a bit of a twist. I think that the teachers should ask the heterosexual students to act less straight, and instead, those kids can act more homosexual. The majority of the school would be acting gay, therefore there would be less bullying.
weeeeeellll I think the teachers just didn't think it through, I guess if you're being bullied for appearing gay then acting less gay makes sense in short term...but it's a baaaad idea in the long run for loads of resons. silly teachers Dx
yus, silly teachers...not evil teachers though ^^ I think their heart was probably in the right place...but maybe not their heads
They more so want to dump the responsibility of gay teen bullying upon the LGBT teens who are being bullied. They are not trying to create a solution, rather, they are avoiding taking actions into their own hands.
Buuuuuut....where exactly is the proof of that? It just sounds like you're assuming the worst of them...
I don't assume the worst of these teachers. I simply said they do not want to take any responsibility; they are basically saying it is the "gay-acting" students fault that they are being bullied. They do not have good nor bad intentions; they want to avoid mandates that will make them liable for bullying if they sit back and just let it happen.
-ty-, I think the point Neko was making is that the article said they were being picked on for their appearance, so logical short-term 'survive school' advice would be to change their appearance to not get picked on. Yes, the ideal solution is to make the bullies see the error of their ways and change and become more tolerant, but you can't automatically fault the teachers.
You said two entirely different things in two sentences; in the first one you said that people shouldn't be asked to change if they behave 'gay', but in the second one you said that if a behavior causes conflict, they are at fault for behaving in a way that causes conflict. Like I've said before in this thread, it depends on the extent of the problem and how focused it is on their appearance and honestly how "out there" their appearance is, so it's unreasonable to immediately dismiss the teachers as apathetic and uncaring.