It’s How You Look or What You Like: Gender Harassment at School and Its Association with Student Adjustment

Abstract

Several highly publicised murders and suicides of youth in the USA have been attributed to bullying at school, and have prompted unprecedented national and international attention to the issue of school bullying and harassment (Katz, 2010; Russell, 2008). In spite of public attention, it is only recently that researchers have begun to examine the motivations behind bullying. Some work shows that youth often attribute bullying to discrimination or prejudice based on perceived or actual sexual orientation (Russell et al., 2012; Sinclair et al., 2012) or gender nonconformity (Toomey et al., 2011). Some have argued that gender regulation — the enforcement and policing of norms regarding appropriate masculine or feminine behaviour based on birth sex — is at the heart of bullying and harassment based on sexual orientation and gender nonconformity (Meyer, 2008; Pascoe, 2007). A number of qualitative and ethnographic studies have described the regulation of gender and sexuality in the peer culture of contemporary schools (e.g. McCormack, 2011, 2012; Pascoe, 2007; Renold, 2001, 2002). However, little quantitative evidence documents how gender is regulated among adolescents and its associations with school experiences.