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Apologetics

Bullying in our schools: what can be done?

Why Safe Schools program must be kept

March 12, 2016

Farrah Tomazin
The Sunday Age’s state political editor.

Coming out in high school can be agonising at the best of times. The first step for me involved confronting the fear of being cast out by my mates or bullied by my peers, which is often part of the territory when you’re a 16-year-old kid and suddenly viewed as “different”.

The second step was just as hard: mustering the courage to tell my staunchly Catholic mother, convinced she’d either disown me immediately or frogmarch me to the nearest church in a futile bid to “pray away the gay”. Fortunately, neither scenario eventuated.

Yet for all the angst that underpinned those years, I was relatively lucky. I was never bashed on account of my sexuality, although that’s not to say nobody threatened to try. I wasn’t kicked out of home because my family refused to accept who I was, although genuine acceptance probably took longer than I would have liked.

And despite a homophobic remark here and there, I can’t recall copping it in spades

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