Elizabethe C. Payne and Melissa J. Smith Start Early: Addressing Gender-Based Bullying in Elementary School Posted: 07/31/2012 2:01 pm
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/elizabethe-c-payne/start-early-addressing-ge_b_1715644.html Kids learn the gender rules very young, and elementary schools are key sites for the construction and affirmation of culturally patterned gender relations. They learn that biological sex, gender, and sexuality are interrelated pieces of who we are and how we see the world, and they quickly learn that there are "normal," expected ways for these three things to fit together and "normal" ways to present themselves as boys and girls.
Education sociologist Deborah Youdell argues that this relationship between sex, gender, and sexuality works to create possibilities and set limitations on who children are "allowed" to be in schools. These rules of social interaction, expression, and identity are intertwined with the traditional gender roles associated with heterosexuality -- even in the Pre-K and early elementary years.
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We see the increase in gender policing in children as young as 9 or 10. Many bullying behaviors are acts of gender policing and much of the aggression that occurs within student social culture can be connected to gender norms.
Any child who does not live up to idealized gender performances (and these vary by peer culture) is subject to this kind of harassment. Such targeting reinforces the parameters for how boys and girls are "supposed" to look, behave, and "be" in the school environment.
Homophobic bullying is significantly rooted in gender policing. Many young boys have been labeled "->-bleeped-<-" for a love of purple sneakers, long before they may have any recognition of sexual desires (hetero or otherwise), much less have expressed them. So it is important to increase educator awareness about the ways the gender binary is used to target and stigmatize children, the ways in which classroom practices continuously reinforce the gender binary, and to ask them to think outside the "boxes" and challenge them to teach through and around their own investment in the idea of discrete genders.
