Because this is a bit of a warren, I decided to try to find some links between the Scottish government and PIE. I thought I’d start by researching Patrick Harvie https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patrick_Harvie
According to his Wikipedia he was a patron of ‘Parents Enquiry Scotland’.
Here are the minutes of a local government meeting where Anne Patrizio (Parents Enquiry Scotland) gives evidence together with James Rennie (Stonewall Youth Project) for the repeal of Section 28
http://archive.scottish.parliament.uk/business/committees/historic/x-lg/or-00/lg00-0801.htm
I am going to copy and paste their evidence here, I haven’t scrutinised it yet:
The Convener: We now have with us, from the Stonewall Youth Project, Jamie Rennie and Anne Patrizio—is that correct?
Anne Patrizio (Parents Enquiry (Scotland)): Yes.
The Convener: I apologise for keeping you waiting. People took much longer than we anticipated. You may say a few words to us, by way of introduction, and then I shall open the discussion for questions.
Jamie Rennie (Stonewall Youth Project): Thank you for inviting us to attend the meeting today. I would like to introduce myself and my colleague before we present our evidence and answer your questions.
My name is Jamie Rennie and I am the manager of the Stonewall Youth Project, a unique example in Scotland of a service-providing agency that deals specifically with the needs of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender young people. The project works with hundreds of young people each year through its phone line, group work and face-to-face support services. It is also a lead member of the Lothian Association of Youth Clubs and currently holds the chair of that organisation.
My colleague, Anne Patrizio, is the organiser of Parents Enquiry (Scotland)—a separate organisation that provides support to parents of LGBT young people through a network of volunteers, all of whom are parents whose children are gay. Parents Enquiry (Scotland) is a wholly voluntary organisation that is run from parents' homes. Anne can say a few words about that organisation.
Anne Patrizio: About 30 parents throughout the UK are involved—four of us in Scotland—and we use our own phones. People can phone us at any time. Parents phone us when they are very distressed and have no idea where to go for information. We befriend them, sometimes for several years, and help them through the difficulty of finding out that they have a gay, lesbian or transgender child.
Jamie Rennie: As you would expect, we would like to focus on the aspects of the bill that are concerned with section 28 of the Local Government Act 1988.
In our submission to the committee, we have quoted young people and their teachers quite a lot to illustrate how young gay people and the issues
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that concern them are dealt with in schools and the councils that oversee those schools. The submission does not contain the research and statistical data that demonstrate much of the trauma that many young gay people go through on their journey into adulthood.
I would like to make four points concerning that research. Recently, three independent academic surveys took place in Edinburgh. They showed that 60 per cent of gay people say that they were bullied at school as a result of their sexuality—an alarming figure, I hope you will agree. Only 6 per cent of schools have an anti-bullying policy that is either gay-sympathetic or gay-specific. Of the young people surveyed, 20 per cent confessed to inflicting serious self-harm or to attempting suicide as a result of bullying. In a recent survey of 200 young people by our project, 20 per cent had been homeless at some time as a result of homophobia.
Although section 28 has been viewed by many parents and others as a safeguard, in our opinion it has assisted in the destruction of many young gay people's lives. We should be honest with ourselves when we talk about the Keep the Clause campaign—when many parents say, "Keep the clause," they are really saying, "I would like my child to grow up to be heterosexual."
We believe that choice has little to do with sexuality. The opinion of the British Medical Association is that sexual orientation is set before puberty. That brings into question the concept of promoting homosexuality. It has been said that we may as well try to promote left-handedness among young people as to promote homosexuality.
Section 28 presents our youth with the message that young LGBT people are second-class citizens in the eyes of the law, and—if they are gay themselves—that they are inferior to their classmates and therefore less deserving of the Scottish education of which we are all so proud. We feel that the section has cut two ways into the fabric of our society, alienating some and prejudicing others.
We hope that the Executive's new wording will remove the venom from the wound that the section has created. Leaders will have to make a genuine effort to ensure that the new wording, along with any guidelines that might be put in place, are not interpreted as an old section 28 with a new name.
Anne Patrizio: I have been a teacher in special education for 20 years. Under education legislation in the early 1980s, children had to be educated according to their needs. We had a carefully worked out sex education programme that encouraged self-esteem, that told children how to say no, and that gave all the health and more general information that you would expect.
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My son, who is gay, had no education at school that helped him. He knew when he was six that he was different; he was 23 before he told us that he was gay. He had had 17 years of wondering what was going on. For the latter seven to 10 of those years, he knew that we were not anti-gay, but he also knew that, because of the prejudices in society, we would have a difficult life. It took us quite a while as a family to come to terms with it. Even though we were not homophobic, it was very frightening, because we could not help our child. We did not know where to turn for help. Eventually, we turned to the Lothian Lesbian and Gay Switchboard.
Because the issue cannot be discussed at school, young people learn about it in pubs and clubs. They are at far greater risk now than they were when we had very safe, well-thought-out guidelines that allowed the children to discuss all their problems in a safe environment. That is very important. The parents who phone the switchboard are in deep distress; several of them have had nervous breakdowns because they do not know where to turn. If the issue could have been discussed over the past few years, the parents would not be in the state that they are in. Anyone can have a gay child. If homosexuality could be discussed in schools now, when the children grew up and had gay children they would not go through the torment that the parents who phone us experience.
Jamie Rennie: That concludes our introduction.
Donald Gorrie: In the last paragraph of your paper you refer to "the lack of direct consultation with young people on this issue", which I think is important. Do you have a vehicle at the local level through which we could consult, without waiting for an annual youth parliament? Are there groups of young gay people who could tell us what they thought about things?
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Jamie Rennie: There are two sides to that. First, the Scottish Youth Parliament will be meeting in Dundee this weekend, and it would be interesting to see what the young people who meet in that forum think about this issue. Secondly, around the country there are a number of support groups for young gay people. Many of them have tried to contribute to the debate, but I am not aware of their having had an opportunity to come together.
Although many people have had an opportunity to contribute to the debate, there has not been a proactive effort to seek the views of young people—not only young gay people, but young people in general—on this issue. Much has been said about parental rights, quite rightly, but I do not
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feel that the views of young people have been taken on board.
Johann Lamont: Those who argue for the retention of section 28 to protect young people would say that a school's anti-bullying policy is sufficient to prevent homophobic bullying, and that no school should allow bullying, regardless of its cause. Is there something missing from schools' broad anti-bullying policies because of section 28? How would you deal with the argument that a good school would not allow bullying anyway?
Jamie Rennie: It all comes down to practitioners. In a second, I will ask Anne Patrizio whether she has any experience of this problem from her work. Before I came to work in the youth sector I taught for a period, and I feel that teachers who have the responsibility of overseeing and minimising the amount of bullying that happens in schools are missing the education that would help them understand the issues that young gay people face.
The City of Edinburgh Council must be congratulated on introducing guidelines that are very progressive and proactive, and on seeking to monitor specific incidents of homophobic bullying in schools. If that could be replicated throughout the country, it would go a long way towards raising the profile of the issue. The reason that not much has been done and that so many young people continue to present us with incidents of bullying is that we do not have hard evidence to back up the anecdotal data that we collect.
Johann Lamont: Is there any evidence of schools being unable to deal with bullying of youngsters who live in households where a parent is living with a partner of the same sex?
Jamie Rennie: That certainly comes up, and when it has, schools have dealt with it—although everything depends very much on the staff in schools. However, often victims are doubly victimised, because they are expected to change their behaviour.
An organisation in Edinburgh called the Lesbian Mothers Group has had to confront this problem on a number of occasions. It has been suggested that same-sex couples should minimise their interaction with schools, so that they do not draw attention to the fact that their child comes from a household in which there is a same-sex couple. Similarly, in relation to young men and women who are bullied at school, it has been suggested recently at an East Lothian school that a young man should arrive at school five minutes late, leave five minutes early and spend lunch time in the library to minimise the victimisation that he suffers.
Bristow Muldoon: The previous group that gave evidence, the Scottish Council for Single
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Homeless, referred to a report that the Stonewall Youth Project was working on in relation to homelessness among young gay people. I know that you have not finalised the report, but can you tell us what your preliminary findings are with regard to the degree to which the inability of local authorities to tackle issues about homosexuality adds to the problems of homelessness faced by young gay people?
Jamie Rennie: The research report to which the previous witnesses referred is an action research pilot project over 12 months, which will move into its second phase as of the beginning of next month.
The first phase focused on gathering data about housing and housing issues from young people who access the Stonewall Youth Project and on recording their knowledge. It found that 20 per cent of those who accessed us had been made homeless as a result, in their opinion, of being lesbian, gay, bisexual or transgender. We have not been able to ascertain how authorities are going to deal with that; that will happen in the second phase.
We are pleased to say that Scottish Homes has supported the project and is looking to support us in providing levels of training to local authorities. Once again, City of Edinburgh Council has become a progressive organisation and has recently changed, or amended, many of its policies and procedures to be inclusive of gay and lesbian issues.
The Convener: My experience of working with parents of drug addicts is that they think they are alone. I suppose that is what happens when you get phone calls. Parents think that they are the first people to whom this has happened.
What do you understand, in the existing terms used in section 2A, as the promotion of homosexuality? What does that mean?
Anne Patrizio: I find it confusing, because you cannot make somebody gay. It is meaningless and frightened staff in the schools in which I taught. My son is mixed race and adopted, and when he had trouble being bullied in relation to that, the schools knew what to do, for example, by teaching about Christmas in many lands. However, when he was older and gay, there was silence because they did not know what to do.
The Convener: Was it your understanding that they thought that if they pursued the matter and talked to him, they would be promoting homosexuality?
Anne Patrizio: Yes, or they did not know how to deal with it because it does not come up in teacher training. It certainly never came up in mine, although I think that Stonewall does a bit more
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now.
The Convener: I noticed that one of the quotes in your submission to the committee is
"there are no gay kids in our schools".
That is an interesting quote. Does Jamie Rennie want to add anything about his understanding of what promotion of homosexuality is?
Jamie Rennie: I am not aware of how to promote homosexuality and would probably be the last person who would want to do so. A lot of young people say: "Why do people think that it is a choice? Why would I choose to be four times more likely to be the victim of a violent attack? Why would I choose to be picked on by society? Why would I choose to be this way when all the messages that society sends out say that being gay or lesbian is difficult and may result in violence, harassment, lower job prospects and a whole range of other things? Why would I choose that? I do not think that it is a choice."
The quote that I mentioned—I will not say which area it was from to protect the source—was
"there are no gay kids in our schools".
It referred to the entire council area that the worker had mentioned. That quotation is from a teacher who works in a school in the area and who did not wish the department to be named as they felt that it would come back on them.
While I do not see how it is possible to promote homosexuality, it is possible to promote tolerance and understanding, which should be the cornerstone of Scotland's education system.
Colin Campbell: As a former head teacher who was opposed to bullying of all descriptions, I did not think that it mattered why a child was being bullied. Bullying was a sufficient offence in itself and had to be dealt with in an inimitable way.
The new paragraphs that the Executive is proposing to include in section 26 of the Ethical Standards in Public Life etc. (Scotland) Bill talk about
"(a) the value of stable family life in a child's development; and
(b) the need to ensure that the content of instruction provided in the performance of those functions is appropriate, having regard to each child's age, understanding and stage of development."
Are you quite comfortable with those paragraphs?
Jamie Rennie: We are fairly and broadly happy with them. We had one suggestion—we felt that the needs of the child should also be considered in order to ensure that young people who are not heterosexual—not only those who are gay or lesbian but those who feel that they have specific needs—could lever education authorities into
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providing them with a good quality education.
However, the wording is broadly non-specific as far as sexual orientation is concerned, and we would endorse the sentiments that all school materials should be appropriate. There should be some form of vetting to ensure that all the constituencies of teaching staff, young people, their parents and other people connected to them feel comfortable using those materials.
Colin Campbell: As you have some reservations, I expect that you have experience of some teachers who are not as tolerant, reasonable and forward looking as you might like them to be.
You will understand that there is another side to the argument and that there are people who wish to keep the section who take the view that the Executive's proposals are the thin edge of the wedge and that promotion of homosexuality could become outrageous. Are you satisfied that that is not the game plan?
Jamie Rennie: I am certainly not aware of any organisations stockpiling explicit material, awaiting the opportunity to flood Scotland's schools with it. Given the fact that our budget is so low, we could not afford to send a letter to every school in Scotland, never mind a load of leaflets.
Young people have many well-meaning allies, no matter what sort of discrimination may exist within the education sector. The provision of guidance from the top that says that Scotland's education system should be available to all, regardless of race, gender or sexual orientation, would be a progressive step. The wording of the Executive's proposals does not hamper that.
The Convener: As there are no more questions, I thank the witnesses for attending. I apologise again for making them wait.