MORAL PANIC 101 | Equality, Acceptance and the Safe Schools Scandal |
| Benjamin Law |
A LITTLE LIFE
What makes a thirteen-year-old kill himself?
It was November 2016 in Guangzhou, China, and I found myself asking this question after reading the news from home. Reports were coming in that a kid named Tyrone Unsworth had taken his life in my home state of Queensland. I call him a âkidâ for a reason: Unsworth had barely hit his teens. Photographs showed a fair, freckly, curly-haired boy, a sassy moppet who danced and worshipped at the twin altars of Gaga and BeyoncĂŠ. Those who knew him told me later that he was the kid doing cartwheels at lunch; the sensitive one whoâd tell his teachers, to their faces, that he loved them. For anyone to take their life that young is gutting, but what really got me was how his mother raged that Unsworth had been bullied to death for being gay. The Courier-Mail ran a heart-bruising headline that day: âMumâs anguish: âThey ended up getting him.ââ
Unsworthâs suicide was front-page news in the state. The story was splashed across the ABC, News Corpâs metro titles and Fairfaxâs Brisbane Times. It ran on TV news bulletins across the country and was featured on the ABCâs 7.30 and international outlets in the following weeks. Curiously, though, the story didnât run in the Australian, the countryâs only national broadsheet. In fact, the Australian would never run a single word about Unsworthâs death.
My mind wandered back to the first time Iâd set foot in mainland China, half a decade ago, when Iâd spent months interviewing young gay women and men in Beijing for a book chapter. There was a lesbian who didnât even know the word for âgayâ until adulthood; a man whoâd been overprescribed antidepressants as a teenager to cure him of homosexuality; gay men and women whoâd held elaborate sham weddings to fool parents into thinking they were straight. Many told me about the times theyâd considered or tried killing themselves. When the book came out, the most common response was pity. Poor China. So backward for queers, especially compared to Australia. Yet here we were.
Another Australian at the Guangzhou conference was the writer Melissa Lucashenko. Like me, Lucashenko is queer and from Queensland; like Unsworth, sheâs Indigenous. For queer Indigenous Australians, Unsworthâs suicide was felt even more keenly.
That day, Lucashenko and I sought each other out.
âDid you read the news?â
âChrist, poor kid.â
âApparently he was gay.â
âThirteen years old, too.â
The unspoken thought hovered between us: imagine wanting to kill yourself at that age.
Thing is, we probably could.
It might seem self-centred and disingenuous, a performance of false intimacy, to grieve for someone youâve never met. But if you grew up queer in Australia, Tyrone Unsworthâs suicide felt personal. At Unsworthâs age, I attended a school where â as in most Australian schools, Iâd venture â being gay was one of the worst things you could be. Some would argue it is the worst. After all, it still has the strange honour of being the only identity ascribed to anything in the schoolyard deemed to be shit.
If you grew up queer in Queensland, your experience was likely tougher still. After New South Wales decriminalised homosexuality in 1984, Queensland dug in its heels the year after and attempted to pass an amendment to the Liquor Act banning bars from serving âpervertsâ and âdeviants.â Earning its reputation as Australiaâs âDeep North,â it was the last mainland state to make gay sex legal.
Every push for the protection of queers in Australia has been accompanied by a jeering soundtrack of loathing. For some commentators, howling down queer activists is something of a family tradition. In 1994 columnist Frank Devine wrote in the Australian of Tasmanian efforts to decriminalise gay sex, that âone must deplore the arrogance and meretriciousness of the effort by homosexuals to have [these laws] rescinded.â A generation later, his daughter Miranda would take it up a notch in News Corp metro newspapers, advising marriage equality activists to âtake our olive branch and shove it where the sun donât shine.â
In all of this, kids were assumed to be off-limits. However, by the time Unsworth killed himself, the Australian was in its tenth consecutive month of indefatigable, sustained coverage and criticism of Safe Schools Coalition Australia, a federally funded program launched in 2014 to support lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, intersex and queer school students. SSCA was inexpensive â $8 million over three years (by contrast, the National School Chaplaincy Programme cost $243.8 million over four years) â and designed to address long-documented higher rates of abuse, suicide and self-harm. Independent studies consistently show LGBTIQ Australians have the highest rates of suicidality of any demographic in the country. When it was launched, Safe Schools was largely seen as a political no-brainer. These were kids, after all.
That changed in February 2016, when the Australian ran its first front-page story excoriating the Safe Schools program. (Its headline: âActivists push taxpayer-funded gay manual in schools.â) Within hours of the story, Safe Schools was being debated in parliament. Within days, Coalition backbenchers had pledged to destroy it. Within a fortnight, Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull requested education minister Simon Birmingham launch a review. After one month, Birmingham confirmed that Safe Schoolsâ federal funding would not be renewed. That didnât mean the coverage stopped. As long as Safe Schools continued in any form, so too would stories in News Corp papers.
Like many Australian queers, by November 2016 I was exhausted by the Australianâs coverage of Safe Schools. The suicide of Unsworth â a kid who was likely driven to his death by schoolyard taunts and physical assaults â felt like the last straw. That afternoon in China, in a fog of self-righteous rage, I leapt over Chinaâs firewall and logged onto Twitter, where Australians were already posting about Unsworth. The hot takes had begun. Linking to the Courier-Mailâs story, I added my own:
Tell your kids â no matter how young â that being LGBTIQ is fine, that bullying is torture, and then demand Safe Schools.
Iâll admit it. I felt smug when it was retweeted over 300 times. Thatâll show them, I thought. Who Iâd shown â and what, exactly â well, clearly, I hadnât thought that far ahead. In researching this essay, I now see that tweet for what it is: a premature take on something I thought I understood, but actually knew next to nothing about. Iâd read a lot about Safe Schools by that stage, mostly in the Australian and its metropolitan sibling titles, but my knowledge of the program had been gleaned from stories I now realise were at best inadequate or misleading, at worst simply false. My tweet, in its own way, was a small drop in a pointless slurry of commentary about Safe Schools, built on shaky foundations, bad faith and half-truths.
Some News Corp journalists would have you believe Safe Schools involved queer activists accessing classrooms and students, without parental consent or knowledge, to teach children about same-sex attraction and transgender people. (Horrifying to some; actually sounds like something I wish Iâd had growing up.) Or maybe you heard Queensland MP George Christensen denounce Safe Schools in the Lower House for promoting penis-tucking, chest-binding and gender fluidity to primary-school kids, or for handing them tips on where to buy sex toys online. None of these things was true.
This essay is an attempt at a corrective. We know certain things about Tyrone Unsworthâs life and death. We know he posted about killing himself on social media. We know he was involved in an argument with other teenagers so violent that they broke his jaw. We know he expressed distress over his sexuality. Itâs impossible to know whether Safe Schools could have saved Tyrone Unsworthâs life. It very well could have. But what remains now is an opportunity â and arguably the ethical obligation â to take a breath and move beyond tedious queers-versus-parents, activists-versus-moralists trench warfare. To do this, we might need to acknowledge something uncomfortable: that everyone invested in this discussion wants the same thing: to keep kids safe. The conundrum, of course, is that our interpretations of what constitutes the safety of children differ wildly. While members of the Australian Christian Lobby and the anti-same-sex-marriage lobby group Australian Marriage Alliance see Safe Schools as an âextreme ideologyâ designed merely to âmake LGBTI children feel âcomfortableââ (quote marks theirs), Australian queers are impatient for change, seeing one kidâs suicide attempt as one too many.
Can we agree on a baseline, then? In his 2012 book Far from the Tree, American-British author and journalist Andrew Solomon suggests: âIt seems right to prioritise each childâs mental health over a system that makes universal predictions about what should constitute happiness or what values are healthy.â Few of us would argue against this. Yet the past two years of debate over Safe Schools have seen reporters elevate the opinions of zealots (one of whom publicly proclaimed transgender children the work of Satan) and selectively defer to medical and education âexpertsâ who have long histories of expressing anti-gay sentiments in their professional work. Subsequently, some of the most vocal backlash has come from extremists on the other side, including queer activists whoâve raided and trashed the office of a senator, and those who argue any journalist working at News Corp has blood on their hands. (For what itâs worth, I happily wrote for News Corp every week for six years.)
In all the posturing and point-scoring, vital context and nuance have been lost. Who has the time to get their head around the complicated intricacies of departmental bureaucracy when thereâs an ideological scrap to be won? Important voices have also been erased, including non-partisan medical experts, education academics and LGBTIQ youth themselves.
This essay is for people whoâve read the stories and suspect â rightly â that there must be more to it. Itâs for anyone tired of seeing Safe Schools used as a handy battleground to score points in a bigger culture war. Itâs for parents and guardians whoâve read the countless newspaper stories and are still confused. Itâs for anyone who wondered why so few Australian kids were engaged in a discussion that was, apparently, about their welfare. Itâs for anyone baffled why, in 2017, commentators are still railing against a queer âagendaâ or âideology,â something that would sound anachronistically quaint if it wasnât so nakedly hateful. But given weâre planning to spend $122 million on a non-binding survey on the rights of our citizens that will be delivered via the post, itâs fair to say weâre fond of strange anachronisms right now.
In the spirit of clearing up confusion, then, letâs start with some facts, and rewind to 2014, when Safe Schools Coalition Australia was being launched â an almost prelapsarian moment. Nowadays Tony Abbott might try valiantly to revise the past, painting Safe Schools as a program lost âdown in the bowels of the bureaucracy that the people at the top of the system arenât aware of.â But let the record show that there was a time when everyone â on both sides of politics, and including him â was seemingly happy to back Safe Schools.
THE CHILDRENâS HOUR
In retrospect, it feels fitting that Tony Abbottâs Coalition launched Safe Schools on Friday the 13th, a day associated with impending horror. Melbourne was cold and crisp that June morning in 2014 â light fog, temperature hovering at 10°C â and people were streaming into the NABâs Village complex at Docklands, plonked north of the Yarra. âVillageâ is a misnomer: if youâve been inside, youâll know it as a cavernous, corporate pit of a space, all labyrinthine escalators and cross-platform corridors jutting over impossible drops, as if an international airport had attempted to swallow a shopping mall.
Schoolkids, teachers, principals, policy-makers and politicians were headed to the Villageâs 320-seat theatrette for a quietly historic moment. Today was the inaugural National Safe Schools Symposium and the launch of Safe Schools Coalition Australia (SSCA), the first national program supporting LGBTIQ school students, a smaller version of which had been running successfully in Victoria for almost four years. Organisers were chipper about the federal injection of cash and the prospect of a national rollout. Eight million dollars over three years wasnât much, but it would do the job, and was inexpensive enough to stay uncontroversial. They even had merchandise: postcards, lanyards and pens.
Labor ministers had initiated the program in August 2013. By then the political fiasco of the RuddâGillardâRudd years meant Labor was facing annihilation. Just a week before the election, finance minister Penny Wong, education minister Bill Shorten and Laborâs candidate for Melbourne, Cath Bowtell, gathered at Fitzroy High School to announce SSCAâs funding. âSchools are already doing a lot to make sure students are safe and supported,â Shorten told the press, âbut too many young Australians still experience bullying and discrimination in schools.â
When I ask Wong if this was something Labor rushed through, forcing the inevitable Abbott government to deliver Safe Schools when in power, she gives the faintest ghost of a smile. âWell, you could turn it around and say, âLabor people believe a whole range of programs are important, and whatever we can do in the face of a hard-right prime minister to protect young people is not a bad thing.ââ By the time Abbott and his ministers stepped into office in September...