Research Insights: Does Gender and Sexual Diversity Lead to Greater Violence in Schools?

We focus on gender and sexual diversity in the secondary school setting due to the important role that education systems play in reducing social distance between individuals. Adolescence is also a crucial stage in which individuals construct their identities, develop their personalities, and have a tendency to experiment. Moreover, adolescence is a stage in which the levels of bullying and cyberbullying dramatically increase relative to infancy or puberty. LGBT students are particularly prone to being victimized in schools, yet there has been little work analyzing whether a larger presence of LGBT students in a classroom leads to more generalized violence.