🧑‍🎓Education Discrimination

Education discrimination against LGBTQIA+ people takes place at all levels of education: primary school, secondary school, and tertiary education institutions. The discrimination they face is both interpersonal as well as institutionalised, and they reinforce each other: both interpersonal and institutional violence are causes for discrimination and violence with impunity, and contribute to the underreporting of cases.

📖 Primary & Secondary School

Interpersonal Discrimination

Institutionalised Discrimination

Interpersonal discrimination happens between individuals and can encompass verbal violence, hate speech, and sexual harassment. A majority of transgender students endure name-calling (69%) and hate speech (56%) from their peers. Transgender students also endure high rates of hate speech (22%) and name-calling (18%) by teachers and lecturers. School administrators and teachers have made rape jokes, sexually harassed LGBTQIA+ students, and forced them to see school counsellors for being “different”.

Institutional discrimination is explicit or implicit rules and regulations within schools that discriminate against LGBTQIA+ people. Official rule books for secondary school students include ‘gender confusion’ and ‘homosexuality’ as serious offences, which can subject students to stern warnings, expulsions, caning, suspensions, fines, and even being charged in court. Primary and secondary school students in Malaysia are subjected to discriminatory and gender-binary school rules and practices

SUHAKAM’s report notes that the educational system lacks any redress mechanism trusted by transgender children to discuss the unique challenges they face. This also extends to LGBTQIA+ children. It has also been observed that there is a lack of meaningful attention and response of bullying incidents against LGBTQIA+ students in school settings. The violence towards them can spill over into other areas of life and they may face cyberbullying online or outside the school compound. The following case study shows how this can have fatal results.

LGBTQIA+ students reported that they felt fearful or a lack of interest in attending educational institutions as a result of bullying, leading many to drop out of school. In addition to violating their right to education, this can adversely impact their mental health and employment prospects.

🎓 Tertiary Education Institutions

At the tertiary level, LGBTQIA+ students have encountered barriers to scholarships, jeopardising their access to higher education. Students and administrators actively create a hostile environment towards LGBTQIA+ peers, which can affect their mental health and exert pressure on them to drop out.

Case Study: Conversion Practices by Teachers

Debbie, a 19-year-old queer person, recalls being subjected to an ‘intervention’ to correct her sexual orientation by a teacher upon discovering her sexual orientation:

“I was openly being me on my private social media, and other students noticed it and reported it to a teacher. After that, the teacher, who is a Christian and really religious and everything, called me and asked for my help. I said, okay, and followed the teacher. They took me to an empty classroom. They locked the door, and turned off the light. In my mind, I was asking myself, what are they doing?

“The teacher then asked me to sit down, and asked me to pray. And I did it because they are my teacher and I am a student, and there’s fear. So, I just followed what they said. The teacher said, ‘I know about you’ and talked about the things that I have done. And I thought to myself, ‘Oh, no...how do they know?’ I was surprised. At that time, I was very feminine and gender-conforming.

“Even the way I spoke was very feminine, not like now. So, I kept quiet and did not admit to anything, although she asked plenty of questions and told me that she is aware of the kinds of photos that I post– there were photos of LGBTQIA+ people, Pride, and all of that. She then revealed to me that a junior reported it to her with my screenshots. At that time, I was so afraid. I couldn’t say anything, I just cried there. I could hear my teacher talking, but I couldn’t comprehend anything because of my fear.

“After a while, I gave an excuse and left the classroom. I kept quiet until I returned home. When I got home, I was really, really scared, but I couldn’t say anything about this to anyone, as I was afraid of people blaming me instead. I asked for help from my mum after almost a week, and she said, ‘It’s okay. You will forget about this. You will be normal.’

“But the thing is I don’t want to be ‘normal,’ and what the teacher did was wrong. A few weeks after that, I still felt that I needed help, and I reached out to my counsellor. Although the counsellor in the past had told me to return to the ‘right’ path, she felt the teacher’s action was not right, that it was not within her role, and that the teacher should have referred the case to the counsellors. The teachers are all the same, and they impose their religious values. No action was taken against the teacher. I later found out that the teacher had conducted an inquiry with my classmates about me before carrying out the ‘intervention.’

“But this is not an isolated case. When I was 13, I had also heard that the teacher had carried out a similar intervention in a dark room with two seniors in school. After the incident with me, everyone knew about my sexuality. I received stares and other microaggressions from teachers until I left school, three years later. At that time, I buried myself in my studies and exams in order to deal with everything.”

Key Takeaways

• Not only was Debbie subjected to conversion practices, but she was outed to the school against her will and suffered microaggressions from the teachers.

• Debbie could not seek support from nearly all the adults in her life: the teachers, her family, and the school counselor.

What does this have to do with remedies?

• LGBTQIA+ children need an independent oversight body, a reliable and impartial entity where they can safely report any instances of abuse.

• Complaint mechanisms must be advertised in schools. In order to encourage children to submit complaints, reduce formalities required to file a complaint, and adapt communication to the child’s age, stage of development, and individual situation.

• More information about how to create a child-friendly complaint mechanism can be found at Child-Friendly Complaint Mechanisms by UNICEF.

Source

• Child Rights Coalition Malaysia, Status Report on Child Rights in Malaysia 2019.

• Child-Friendly Complaint Mechanisms, National Human Rights Institutions (NHRIs) Series: Tools to support child-friendly practices, UNICEF/UNI11775