Are Australian schools safe? And if they’re not, what happens when kids are caught in a bleak collision between ill-equipped teachers and a confected scandal? In 2016, the Safe Schools program became the focus of an ideological firestorm. In Moral Panic 101, Benjamin Law explores how and why this happened. He weaves a subtle, gripping account of schools today, sexuality, teenagers, new ideas of gender fluidity, media scandal and mental health. In this timely essay, Law also looks at the new face of homophobia in Australia, and the long battle for equality and acceptance. Investigating bullying of the vulnerable young, he brings to light hidden worlds, in an essay notable for its humane clarity. “To read every article the Australian has published on Safe Schools is to induce nausea. This isn’t even a comment on the content, just the sheer volume ... And yet, across this entire period, the Australian – self-appointed guardian of the safety of children – spoke to not a single school-aged LGBTIQ youth. Not even one. Later, queer teenagers who followed the Safe Schools saga told me the dynamic felt familiar. At school, it’s known as bullying. In journalism, it’s called a beat-up.” —Benjamin Law, Moral Panic 101 ‘This is a timely and important work’ —Steven Carroll, Sydney Morning Herald

This work attempts a comparative description and analysis, focusing on the US, the UK, and Australia on the topic of the Right, educational policy, and schooling. It adopts as its underlying theme the burning fuse in tracing the topic back to Joseph de Maistre a Rightist who fled revolutionary France to seek safety in the company of Tsar Alexander I’s Russian Empire. Here, he had much to say about school education, not for all, but rather the “deserving” social elite. During the past three or four decades in the US, the UK, and Australia, the Right has been remarkably successful in amassing political power. And in doing so, the right of politics in these countries has reshaped school educational policy and practice, a necessary step in securing the future of the Right as a political force. Moreover, even during the years the Right has been on the opposition benches in these countries, such has been the strength of their political force that governments of the Left have acquiesced to much of their school educational policy. A pioneering effort, this book asserts that to understand school educational policy in the third decade of the 21st century, we need to comprehend the politics of the Right. This book will be of interest to researchers and postgraduate students interested in Education Studies, Theory and Policy, and International and Comparative Education.

Risk Society and School Educational Policy explores the impact of risk society on policy in the US, UK and Australia through both practical and theoretical perspectives. The book develops an in-depth understanding of risk society itself, and guides the reader in applying this knowledge to the problem of how this impacts policy and practice in school education. Drawing on work by Ulrich Beck and Anthony Giddens, Rodwell explores the development of risk society as a field of interest, discussing its history, contemporary significance and links with neoliberalism, school education, and both mainstream and social media. He also examines its impact on government policies and the practical implications of how this impacts the educational experiences of children around the globe today. A book for policy professionals, researchers, academics and postgraduate students interested in Education Studies, Theory and Policy, and International and Comparative Education, Risk Society and School Educational Policy is the first international academic monograph published in the field.

This book brings together leading scholars researching the field of gender, sexuality, schooling, queer activism, and social movements within different cultural contexts. With contributions from more than fifteen countries, the chapters bring fresh insights for students and scholars of gender and sexuality studies, education, and social movements in the Global North and South. The book draws together both theoretical and empirical contributions offering rich and multidisciplinary essays from scholars and activists in the field focusing on outreach work of QSM (Queer Social Movements) in schools, queer activism in educational settings, and the role of QSMs in supporting and informing queer youth.

Bent Street is an annual publication that gathers essays, fiction, poetry, artwork, reflections, letters, blog posts, interviews, performance writing and rants to bring you 'The Year in Queer'. "Bent Street 1 - 2017" covers same-sex marriage, health an education, the meaning of queer history and progress; as well as presenting the queer imagination as it follows its own lights, digressions, yearnings, and strange associations. Joel Creasey, Jill Jones, Guy James Whitworth, Genine Hook, Tina Healy, April White, Jean Taylor, Ashley Sievwright, Mandy Henningham, Tiffany Jones, Dennis Altman, Steve R. E. Pereira, Renee Bennett, Simon Copland, Mary Lou Rasmussen, Quinn Eades, Errol Bray, Blair Archbold, Nikki Sullivan, Craig Middleton, Daniel Marshall, Nadia Bailey, Doug Pollard, Lucille Kerr, Sally Conning, Brigitte Lewis, Daniel Witthaus, Mira Schlosberg, Christopher Bryant, Michael Bernard Kelly, Jess Jones, Rodney Croom.

This book explores sexual violence and crime in Australia in the 1970s and 1980s, a period of intense social and legal change. Driven by the sexual revolutions, second wave feminism, and ideas of the rights of the child, there was a new public interest in the sexual assault of women and children. Sexual abuse was studied, surveyed and discussed more than ever before in Australian society. Yet, despite this, there remained substantial inaction, by government, from community and on the part of individuals. This book examines several difficult questions of our recent history: why did Australia not act more firmly to eradicate rape and child sexual abuse? What prevented our culture from looking seriously at trauma? How did we fail to protect victim-survivors? Rich in social and legal history, this study takes readers into the world of victims of sexual crime, and into the wider community that had to deal with sexual violence. At the core of this book is the question that resonates deeply right now: why does sexual violence appear seemingly insurmountable, despite significant change?

This book explores the experiences of LGBTQ+ parented families in school communities and provides a voice for this overlooked group who are becoming an increasingly common form of family diversity in school communities. Approaching the topic from a strength-based psychological perspective, the book presents LGBTQ+ parents’ suggestions for school improvements and supportive structures and provides empirical evidence to inform future LGBTQ+ inclusive educational policy. Research based yet practically focused, it will be a valuable resource for researchers, students and education professionals alike.

This three-volume set is a rich resource for readers in any discipline interested in understanding the global, regional, and domestic experiences of LGB people. This interdisciplinary set makes a vital contribution to understanding how LGB rights are progressing—and in some cases, regressing—around the globe. The three volumes look at the lived experiences of LGB people from varied perspectives and provide comprehensive coverage on a wide variety of topics ranging from LGB youth and LGB aging to the approaches to LGB people of different religions, including Islam, Judaism, and Christianity. Chapters focus on topics including the ongoing criminalization of same-sex sexual conduct and how international human rights law can be used to improve the lives of LGB people. Particular attention is paid to the rights of bisexuals, a group often ignored in works focusing on sexual orientation. Volume 1 focuses on history, politics, and culture relating to LGB people; Volume 2 focuses on the laws—domestic and international—governing LGB people; and Volume 3 provides snapshots of the current state of LGB experience in countries worldwide, presented by geographical region: Europe, the Americas, Africa, the Middle East, and the Asia Pacific region.

Gender and Sexuality Diversity in a Culture of Limitation provides an outstanding and insightful critique of the ways that contemporary education is impacted by a range of political, social and cultural influences that inform the approaches that schools take in relation to gender and sexuality diversity. By applying feminist poststructural and Foucauldian frameworks, the book examines the ongoing impact of broader socio-cultural discourse on the lives of gender and sexuality diverse students and teachers. Beginning with an overview of the impact of how a culture of limitation is realised in Australia, the focus moves beyond this context to examine state and federal policies from comparable societies in countries including the USA and the UK and their effect on the production of knowledges and what’s permissible to include in educational curriculum. This research-driven book thus provides a comparative, international overview of the current state of gender and sexuality diversity in schools, and convincingly demonstrates that despite some empowerment of gender and sexuality diverse individuals, silencing and marginalization remain powerful forces. This book will be of great interest to graduate and postgraduate students, academics, professionals, and policy makers interested in the field of gender and sexuality in education. It is essential reading for those involved in pre-service and in-service teacher education, diversity education, the sociology of education, as well as education more generally.

This book is grounded in the idea that words matter. It holds that how we discuss teachers and teaching in the public space shapes the way we come to regard teachers as a society; the beliefs we hold about who they are, what they do, and why they do it. Over time it also comes to shape the conditions and contexts in which teachers do their work. This matters because schooling provides one of the very few common experiences that most of us share. Teaching, in particular, provides a convenient rallying point for discussions of public policy, and beyond citizens' own school experiences, the print media makes the most significant contribution to broad social understandings of schooling and teachers' work. This book provides a comprehensive and systematic exploration of print media discourses around teachers and their work, using over 65,000 articles published in Australian print media from 1996 to 2020 as a case study. It also takes a comparative look, drawing on print media texts from other countries, namely the United States, United Kingdom, New Zealand, and Canada. It employs an innovative combination of large-scale corpus-assisted analysis and close qualitative analysis to identify and explore representations of teachers in the print media, how they are constructed and how these constructions have changed and shifted over the past twenty five years.