Who Can Relate?: A Rhetorical Perspective on LGBT Bullying (Final)

“Gay, lesbian, and bisexual youth are 4 times more likely to attempt suicide than their heterosexual counterparts.” LGBT bullying in high schools across the United States has become an ever-growing issue in today’s society. In this paper, I will be analyzing why so much of this harassment occurs in schools as well as what can be done to prevent it from reaching the point of suicide. Although I have no underlying knowledge of mental illness, I wonder if the bullying potentially leading to illness has to do with the lack of attention from teachers and parents or if it is caused by an outside source.

My first source is a music video for the song 1-800-273-8255. It was written by Logic, an acclaimed rapper who writes about social issues in today’s society in an attempt to change them; he also grew up in a broken home surrounded by addicts and drugs and has recently opened up about his battle with anxiety and depression. Logic is using this song to reach the ears of both adolescents and young adults who are struggling with either a mental illness, their sexuality, or just life in general. In this music video, a male, African American high school student is struggling with his sexuality. Throughout the course of this video, he has confrontations with his dad, with his partner, and contemplates suicide. In the end, he calls the number which is for the suicide hotline and saves himself. Then it fast forwards into the future where he is getting married and the viewer sees his father happy for him. Logic appeals to his audience’s emotion through the use of an unfortunately common theme in today’s society: the struggles of a gay adolescent who is feeling worthless and wants to give up on life altogether.

Most of his audience can easily relate to the boy’s feelings of loneliness since this emotion is a common side effect for people dealing with a mental illness or their sexuality. The resolution also appeals to them emotionally because it implies that if they reach out for help, life could get better for them. These appeals illustrate that suicide and mental illness in the LGBT community are not uncommon; however, many people did not call this number or continuously reach out for help before this song as shown by the increase in calls due to Logic’s VMA performance. In his performance, he sang with Alessia Cara and Khalid, two successful young artists, while suicide-attempt survivors joined the trio on stage. This display of survivors used pathos in order to give the viewers hope and to help them feel less alone. From watching this video, I have learned that LGBT issues are extremely prevalent in the United States today since Logic's focus in the video was on a gay teen; he wanted to raise awareness of this problem in an attempt to persuade the country to change their out-dated opinions on the LGBT community. I have also learned that mental illness in both LGBT and non-LGBT people is a bigger issue than I originally thought since I really had never thought about it before. Suicide and mental illness are both hard things for society to talk about; suicide and mental illness relating to the LGBT community are even harder.

Another source that I found is an academic fact sheet about mental illnesses in LGBT youth and what the consequences are because of them. Published by the Mental Health America website, this sheet was created for parents of both LGBT and non-LGBT children as well as their children’s peers in order for them to obtain a better understanding of how bullying affects LGBT teenagers mentally compared to non-LGBT teenagers. Both the parents of LGBT and non-LGBT children as well as their peers are the audience because the writer uses such words as physical well-being, happiness, sadness, and education as topics of discussion since these are important life concepts for both parents and teenagers at this age. This information is arranged in four categories which are headed with the following: “How is their mental health being affected?”; “How is their education being affected?”; “What can we do to help?”; “Help end bullying at school with the following actions:”. Underneath the first question is a small list of facts about suicide, self-harm, happiness, and sadness to help appeal to the reader’s logos as well as pathos. Beneath the second question is a list of ways that LGBT students’ education suffers due to bullying. Following the third question are three ways that schools can actively provide support for these students and under the fourth category are ways that students can help stop bullying.

These arguments about the negative effects of bullying help illustrate how fatal this act can be for LGBT students. It shows how society continues to avoid the idea of directly addressing the problem in schools and this is having serious consequences for these kids as they grow older. I have learned a great deal from this article; for example, I found that many of these kids are not receiving an adequate education because they are either getting lower grades from being harassed or missing too many days of school because they felt unsafe. This could partially be because the staff members who know about the harassment are not doing enough to stop it. It could also be because of the lack of anti-bullying policies in schools.

A third source that I found was written by Kari Hudnell, who has been a political advocate for LGBT rights for seven years, and published on the GLSEN website which is a 25-year-old national organization focused on ensuring that all students, no matter their gender or sexual orientation, feel safe and accepted in school. The audience of this article is schools in all 13,181 school districts in the United States because the author discusses anti-bullying policies on both the state and district level and what can be done to enforce them better. The information is arranged in a list of bullet points with the main idea of each one in bold. In this article, the writer uses logic to appeal to the audience by discussing statistics on topics like what percentage of districts have a protection policy for LGBT students and what percentage of districts abide by their state’s anti-bullying laws in relation to LGBT students. She also discusses how LGBT students feel safer in schools which have LGBT-inclusive district policies and that if a state has an anti-bullying law, then the odds of the districts having one is greatly increased.

Many schools do not have a strong anti-bullying or protection policy in place which means that the unprotected students are at a greater risk of harassment without consequences for the abusers. Hudnell uses logos to persuade her readers that more inclusive anti-bullying and protection policies are needed by listing specific facts about the state of these policies currently and how creating some would affect these districts and their students academically. She also appeals to the reader's emotions by writing about how LGBT students attending a school without any inclusive policies feel unsafe and often do not want to attend due to the unaddressed bullying. Hudnell's ethos also contributes to her persuasiveness because it gives the reader the sense that she is knowledgeable on the issue since she has been actively working to correct it for seven years and is even publishing her work on a credible website known for helping with the same problem. After reading this article, I have learned that anti-bullying laws are hard to enforce in school districts and that they need to be made more common in order to give both LGBT kids and non-LGBT kids a safer atmosphere to learn and grow.

Lack of public knowledge on the issue at hand, kids being too distracted by thoughts of bullies to do well in school, and a blatant disregard of LGBT safety in schools are all major problems that kids in the LGBT community face everyday. I feel that there needs to be more policies put in place to ensure the safety of these children. I also feel that mental illness needs to be discussed more often in schools so that kids will understand it better as well as acquire empathy for their peers suffering from it. Through all of my recent research, I have uncovered startling statistics and facts about LGBT bullying which could open up doors to new areas of research. One could either research if better education on mental illness would have a positive, negative, or neutral effect on LGBT bullying or how bullying policies inclusive of LGBT students could affect the amount of known harassment cases and suicide rates in schools. Although, in order to gain a deeper understanding of why bullying is so prevalent in schools and what can be done to fix it, I will have to continue my research and dive even deeper into this complex, social injustice called bullying.

Sources:

http://www.mentalhealthamerica.net/bullying-and-gay-youth

https://www.glsen.org/article/most-anti-bullying-policies-do-not-protect-lgbt-students