‘The boys and girls not calling me names and the teachers to believe me’. Name calling and the experiences of Travellers in school

Abstract

This paper is about name calling and bullying of Gypsy and Show Travellers in school and the response of schools. The data discussed were gathered as part of a small‐scale study of the experiences of Gypsy and Show Travellers in school in Scotland and of the views of school and Traveller support staff. The overall focus of the study was on exclusion and perceptions of deviance. There was a difference in the teachers' views of the two groups of Travellers, with Gypsy Traveller pupils perceived as having, and presenting, more difficulties in school. However both Gypsy and Show Traveller children experienced frequent racist bullying and name calling, often not acknowledged by their school. The paper focuses particularly on this latter aspect of our research, raising issues about the ability of schools to support diversity and suggesting that approaches to bullying often fail to address both broader issues of social relationships in school and also the historical and cultural context of prejudice against Travellers. Copyright © 2001 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

‘Just be friends’: exposing the limits of educational bully discourses for understanding teen girls’ heterosexualized friendships and conflicts

“…It is also common to locate the reasons for bullying as attributable to psychological characteristics and to search for personality and family causes so both bullying and victimization become individualized and pathologized vis-à-vis what are constituted as 'neutral' or un-afflicted children (Connolly and O'Moore 2003). The bullying literature has been critiqued for its focus on psychological typologies of bullies and victims, and its failure to address the situational and socio-cultural dimensions of power along the lines of gender, class race and sexuality (Lloyd and Stead 2001;Renold 2002).…”

Toward a More Comprehensive Understanding of Bullying in School Settings

“…These theoretical conceptions and their practical applications fail to adequately take into account the situational and sociocultural aspects of power and identity and their dimensions in terms of gender and sexuality, as well as other social and cultural factors (Galloway and Roland 2004), effectively de-problematizing and simplifying complex realities in ways that have been seriously questioned by sociological research (Lloyd and Stead 2001).…”

Peer Victimization and Ethnic-Cultural Peer Victimization: Self-Esteem and School Relations between Different Cultural Groups of Students in Andalusia, Spain // Victimización étnico-cultural entre iguales: autoestima y relaciones en la escuela entre...

“…Algunas investigaciones sobre el maltrato entre iguales que incluían la variable étnico-cultural encontraron evidencias de una forma específica de victimización: el insulto o la nominación racista (Collins, McAleavy, y Adamson, 2004;Lloyd y Stead, 2001). El insulto o la nominación racista descritos en estos estudios están relacionados con diferencias en las características ét-nicas y/o el color de la piel entre los agresores y sus víctimas.…”