Hi,
Wondering how most people would expect this to be dealt with at primary school. Scotland, age 9, primary 5 level.
My son is in a small friendship group. Another boy in the group calls my son “gay” now and again. Not using gay as a slur/to be generally pejorative, but to mean homosexual (according to my son). Perhaps escalating a bit recently with my son being referred to as “gay boy”.
We’ve chatted to DS about it. He’s a sensitive, thoughtful boy...perhaps stands out as being quite geeky, cerebral...he has a very academic way of looking at it and says, “I don’t think I’m gay but I don’t know, I probably won’t know until I’ve been through puberty, or maybe when I’m 18”. Probably because we’ve always said partner or girlfriend/boyfriend when chats about the future come up. He also has an older cousin, now 18 who has openly talked about working out his sexuality (has Aspergers and a degree of asexuality probably contributed to his openly discussed confusion).
We’ve chatted about the phenomenon of using gay as a slur “that’s so gay”etc and made sure my son knows this isn’t ok, in case this is part of what’s going on. We’ve agreed that whether he is gay or not isn’t the issue here, but that someone is using this to taunt him.
It is a small, very rural school with only 5 boys in my son’s age/peer group.
I don’t think the kid that is doing this is generally badly behaved. He’s a nice kid, who my son considers a friend. They’ve been playing Minecraft via Xbox live through the pandemic.
I’ve thought about mentioning it to the boys mum, but she’d be mortified. And doing that kind of means I’m missing both sides of the story. So I’m thinking I just hand this to the school to deal with -they’ll have a wider overview and can maybe speak to all the kids about it rather than singling one out?
Grateful for thoughts and some idea how I should expect the school to deal with it.
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Taunting/bullying re sexuality in primary school
15 replies
Aspergallus · 01/11/2020 13:28
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