Teachers' views of teenage sexual morality

Abstract

This paper examines the discourses of morality drawn on by secondary school teachers in England to describe their attitudes to pupils' developing sexual identities. Although teachers recognized their own formative role in the sexual socialization of pupils and identified homophobic attitudes among boys, they were ambivalent about how far they could intervene in homophobic bulling in school. However, they failed even to recognize the widespread misogynistic bullying of girls by boys as a problem. Teachers expressed anxieties about girls' ownership of sexual knowledge and sexual agency while perceiving boys to be sexually immature and less ‘responsible’. We explore possible reasons for teachers' neglect of misogynistic bullying and their labelling of girls as sexually precocious. We argue that the discourses shaping teachers' attitudes to sexual morality and sex education were largely embedded in a form of liberal individualism that impeded them from confronting the structurally reproduced relations of gender domination.

Notes

Corresponding author. Department of English and Media Studies, The Nottingham Trent University, Clifton Lane, Nottingham NG11 8NS, UK. Email: [email protected]

The project on Teenage Sexual Morality was funded by a £20,000 research grant from Nottingham Trent University.

We use ‘morality’ in the Durkheimian sense of ‘social fact’; that is to say, it is a socially enforced normative discourse that enables a regulation and normalization of (sexual) subjectivities.

The schools were selected to represent the wide socio‐economic spread in urban areas based on Ofsted reports and catchment areas informed by census ward statistics: a private all‐boys school, two mixed comprehensives in inner‐city Nottingham that has high levels of teenage pregnancies, and a private all‐girls' school in Kent.

Teenage sexual culture refers to the constellation of practices, including behavioural patterns, attitudes and ‘moral codes’, which inform and govern interpretations and interactions in the realm of sexuality in young people's lives.

At the smaller comprehensive school 75% of pupils were eligible for school meals and 33.2% were at the larger one, compared with a national average of 15.8% in England at maintained secondary schools. In the large comprehensive, 25% of students came from homes where English is not the first language. The smaller school contained 59% of pupils from ethnic minority families and 43% from homes where English was not the first language (the national average of pupils in maintained secondary schools for whom English is an additional language is 8%). The smaller comprehensive also had a higher proportion of pupils affected by social disadvantages, with 58% on the school's register of special education needs compared with a national average of 2.5% (Statistics of Education, 2001).

Terms such as ‘homophobic’ and ‘misogynistic’ imply personal psycho‐pathologies that can be remedied by individual counselling and pastoral care (or discipline and punishment). The widespread scale of these practices, however, suggests that they are more socioculturally endemic among teenagers.

Department of Education and Skills press release ‘Listen to young people and beat bullying—Lewis’ (http://www.dfes.gov.uk/pns/DisplayPN.cgi?pn_id+203_0046 accessed 30 July 2003).

We draw on Foucault's (1980, 1991) concept of governmentality as a field of social regulation to emphasize the way that culture functions as part of material technologies that produce particular configurations of power/knowledge through institutional practices, administrative routines and spatial arrangements (Bennett, 1998).

The House of Lords voted to repeal Section 28 of the Local Government Act in England and Wales in July 2003, following the House of Commons in March. It prohibited local authorities from promoting homosexuality. It never applied to schools, yet caused confusion for teachers about whether they could help pupils face homophobic bullying.

Research suggests that similar forms of verbal and physical abuse are ubiquitous where no equivalent to Section 28 exists; for example, at schools in The Netherlands.

See ‘The legal framework for school discipline’ (http://www.dfee.gov.uk/circulars/10‐99/discip.htm September 1999) that was in operation during our research in 2001. Also, see the more recent Department of Education Policy on Bullying in Schools, which has compulsory anti‐bullying strategies and emphasizes that sexual bullying impacts on both genders (http://www.dfes.gov.uk/a‐z/BULLYING_ba.html accessed 23 January 2002).

See the Department of Education Policy on Bullying in Schools cited in note 11.