Most Canadian gay men bullied in school: survey
November 2, 2010
Jenni Dunning
TORONTO STAR
About 90 per cent of Canadian gay men said they were bullied in high school, according to a new survey released Monday.
It is one of the first waves of surveys to deal exclusively with homophobic bullying in high schools in Canada, although larger national reports have been done on the issue since at least 2003.
“Right now, it’s important stuff for us to look at because of recent suicides (of Lesbian Gay Bisexual Transgendered Queer teens) in the States that have gotten a lot of publicity,” said University of Toronto Professor Miriam Kaufman, who specializes in lesbian and gay youth issues.
“It’s good that this was done, but it’s also good that we’ve got other data to back it up.”
In the recent survey of about 2,200 men, completed by ManCrunch.com, a dating website for gay men, 91 per cent of Canadian men said they were bullied in high school, compared to 77 per cent for U.S. men.
Of all these men, 97 per cent who grew up in rural communities were harassed or bullied in high school, the survey found.
Also, 34 per cent of Canadian men said they tried to commit suicide as a youth, compared to 31 per cent of U.S. men.
These types of statistics with similar high numbers are common in other surveys, such as the 2009 Canadian Climate Survey on Homophobia, which compares bullying of LBGTQ teens to non-LGBTQ teens.
That study found 59 per cent of LBGTQ high school students were verbally harassed, compared to seven per cent of their counterparts.
Likewise, 25 per cent of LGBTQ students said they were physically harassed because of their sexual orientation, to non-LGBTQ students’ eight per cent.
Kaufman said these types of studies are not unusual and it is a good thing for more and more people to examine the issue.
While the Internet can pose problems while conducting surveys, such as not knowing who is actually contributing the answers, it can also have benefits, she added.
“Many people are not going to be willing to talk in person to researchers but will be willing to do something that’s on the Internet.”