Do My Teachers Care I'm Gay? Israeli Lesbigay School Students' Experiences at their Schools

ABSTRACT

This empirical study explores the subjective experiences of Israeli lesbigay school students and their perceptions of the school climate. It provides descriptive data on different socio-demographic characteristics of Israeli lesbigay youth and presents the participants' experiences of school climate in the context of lesbigay issues. Further, it explores how students' characteristics, school environment, and school resources affect students' sense of belonging to school and sense of respect by peers. In order to delve into Israeli students' experiences, the authors conducted a School Climate Survey that was completed by some 300 participants—mostly on-line. Nearly half of the sample, which ranged in ages from 11 to 18, reported occasionally hearing homophobic remarks uttered by most of the teachers. One-third reported experiencing some form of harassment or violence by other students.

KEYWORDS:

• Adolescents
• bisexual
• gay
• harassment
• homophobia
• Israel
• lesbian
• school climate

Oren Pizmony-Levy is a PhD student in the Department of Sociology at Indiana University Bloomington. His research interests are Sociology of Education, Sociology of Social Movements and Mixed Methods and he has been active in the Israeli Gay Youth organization in recent years.

Amit Kamacom, PhD (Tel Aviv University, 2001), is a media anthropologist and teaches at the Communication Department at the Academic College of Emek Yezreel. He is author of numerous articles and books and has been active in various lesbigay organizations since 1982.

Guy Shilo is a PhD student in the school of Social Work at Tel Aviv University. His research interests are sexual orientation development among lesbigay youth and therapy issues concerning lesbigay population. Shilo has been working as a social worker in various lesbigay organizations since 1996.

Sari Lavee is a social worker and a sex therapist.

Among her main interest are human sexuality and relations issues. Lavee has been active in the Israeli Gay Youth organization in recent years.

A shorter version of this paper was presented at the British Educational Research Association Conference at the University of Glamorgan, UK, on September 17, 2005.

The authors would like to express thier gratitude to their colleagues Dr. Meir Menahem and Ms. Batia Pinhasi at the Israeli Gay Youth Research Forum, and Mr. Yaniv Weizman and Ms. Shirley Angel for their technical support. They also wish to extend their heartfelt gratitude to Dr. Joseph G. Kosciw at GLSEN for allowing them to adopt their questionnaire and to Dr. Brian Powell and Dr. James Sears for their invaluable commentary and support.

Notes

∗ = p < 0.05,

∗∗ = p < 0.01 (two tailed test)

∗ = p < 0.05,

∗∗ = p < 0.01 (two tailed test)

¹ Due to this minute number (n = 3) and brevity constraints, this report does not include this group in the analysis or refer to gender non-conformity, which is not sufficiently documented in Israel.

² Although this figure is somewhat higher than the entire population (Katz et al., 2000), the term “secular” is largely contested and, thus, the distribution of secular people is not conclusive.

³ Arab's actual proportion of the population is 19 percent (Central Bureau of Statistics, 2004b).

⁴ The astoundingly large number of respondents who disclosed their identity to at least one other person is certainly a reflection of who were willing to take part in this survey. They are not representative of the entire Israeli sexual minority population, whose main body remains undisclosed, unseen, and thus empirically unreachable. This sample is mainly composed of the higher echelons of Israeli society, particularly regarding their economic status. Arabs and non-secular Jews, who are generally less privileged, are certainly underrepresented. In the same vein, it should also be taken into account that since this study was mostly carried out via the Internet, computer accessibility or ownership was crucial to participation in the study.

⁵ The question did not specify any specific period of time. Also respondents determined what constituted terms such as “frequently,” “sometimes,” etc.

⁶ In these items we wanted to learn about physical assaults and to get reprots relative to verbal assaults-that is why we've asked again about verbal assaults.

⁷ We found support for this explanation when we analyzed the same model using all four groups of school's staff: teachers, principal, counselor, and nurse. In this model only teachers' coefficient was significant.

⁸ Physical abuse was reported to be less common than verbal harassment in South African schools, too (Butler et al., 2003).