Respect for All Review - Prejudice Based Bullying Subgroup Minutes: December 2023

 

Attendees and apologies

 

• Support and Wellbeing Unit, Scottish Government (Chair)
• Coalition for Racial Equality and Rights
• Enable
• Equality Network
• Faith and Belief Team, Scottish Government
• Hate Crime Team, Scottish Government
• Independent Anti-racism Consultant
• LGBT Youth Scotland
• Rape Crisis Scotland
• respectme
• Scottish Catholic Education Service
• Scottish Council of Jewish Communities
• Time for Inclusive Education
• University of the West of Scotland
• Zero Tolerance

Apologies

• Enquire 

Items and actions

Welcome 

The Chair welcomed members to the meeting and noted apologies. 

Review of Respect for All and role of this group  

The chair advised the group that the Scottish Government is in the process of updating its national anti-bullying guidance, Respect for All. The guidance was published in 2017 with a commitment to review in full at least once every five years. The review was due to take place in 2022 but was delayed due to COVID-19, so began in early 2023. The review is currently being taken forward by a dedicated working group.  

The chair highlighted the importance of making sure the guidance is appropriate and relevant around prejudice based bullying. The guidance also needs to be clear around distinctions between bullying and hate crime and certain behaviours that should not be labelled as bullying. 

There are a number of pieces of work running in parallel including the Gender Based Violence (GBV) Working Group and the Racism and Racist Incidents Workstream. The chair clarified that the Respect for All Review will not duplicate this work but the updated guidance does need to cover/link to these areas in enough detail to make clear to schools what the distinctions are.  

Respect for All – sections on prejudice based bullying 

The chair invited initial thoughts and comments from members on what is currently in Respect for All under prejudice based bullying. Feedback received included:

• Definition of bullying needs to explain why the behaviour does not need to be repeated.
• Glossary is helpful in showing some unwanted/detrimental conduct people might experience. However, some categories worth including are missing such as, antisemitism, islamophobia and anti-sikh examples. It is important to record these under all headings to ensure patterns are noticed.
• Needs to be a separation between legally protected characteristics and other forms of prejudice in the guidance and on SEEMiS.
• Prejudice based bullying is currently explained in the guidance as an actual perceived difference relating to a persons identity. This raises concerns as it suggests it stems from the individual when it relates to a bigger picture of societal inequalities. It would help to frame it so schools think about the preventative work and educate their pupils about inequalities.  
• Suggestion to reference power in the guidance as bullying is often enacting power on another person.
• Take a consistent approach to the structure of the document - sometimes it talks about sexism and gender, other times it mentions young carers and others homophobia.
• Misogyny is not mentioned strongly enough. It would be useful to distinguish between GBV, sexual violence and sexist bullying while linking to the GBV framework and Equally Safe at School. Zero Tolerance offered to support with wording around this.
• Structure of the guidance feels quite lumped together. It may be helpful to provide more practitioner friendly resource to help bridge the gap between national guidance and on the group.
• The definitions in the annex are broadly helpful and accurate. However a couple of updates around the presentation are required. Religious based prejudice and misogyny need to be strengthened.
• Only time faiths is mentioned is in relation to sectarianism which is unhelpful.
• Page 10 on prejudice based bullying – explain that this is coming from stereotypes, stigma and lack of representation. Need to think about how we are responding and supporting young people but also what we are doing to prevent it as a whole school ethos.
• “need to find root cause” – can expand on that with “here are some preventative measures to consider”
• Bullying based on race does not need to be in the context of relationships as the young people might not know each other. This should be addressed in the guidance.
• Intersectionality should be given its own section or highlighted in the annex.
• Under race and racism, is it worth considering making the definition more explicit to include power, interculturally as well as intracultural and racism within ethnic groups.
• “or people assume they belong to” – remove from brackets and change to “perceived ethnicity” given the treatment of Asians post-Covid.
• Need to be mindful that this guidance is not just for school.
• Transphobia is included within LGBT – sometimes there is a conflation between sexuality and gender identity and these should be separated out.
• The policy section is more helpful for those in leadership roles.
• For practitioners, their response will be impacted depending on what lens they are looking at it from. It is important to be clear in the guidance the impacts bullying can have on certain groups.
• Semantics are important. If the policy is to work then people need to understand it.
• Power imbalance is not always true. A young person might just take a disliking to another.
• Suggestion of a more visual representation of what falls under the Equality Act. Make clear who is covered legally under the Act.
• Page 38 under LGBT section – transgender people do experience this, intersectional conflation. Also no definition of biphobic in the blurb so should be updated.
• Intersex is not in the Equality Act but is in RSHP and Hate Crime legislation so need to be specific on that. Acknowledge properly the complexity of trans, lesbian, and intersex for example.
• Need to take a human rights based approach to the guidance. Under the values at the start dignity and autonomy should be in there.
• Intricacies should be considered (female body hair in terms of body image for example).
• How does the document take a family based approach when dealing with bullying? SG confirmed it would do some testing around the expectations section in the document.
• How can we more clearly define the spectrum of behaviour, hate crime and the equality act?
• Presumption against criminalising children and young people might put schools off reporting. It should be that young people have a right to justice then it should be for schools to work with Police to decide whether a crime has taken place.
• Role of campus police officers could be included in the guidance.

More widely, respectme highlighted their respectme reward which is for schools to evaluate whether their policy is making children and young people safer. respectme also advised they would share a paper from the World Anti-bullying Forum around the definition.

Next steps

The chair thanked members for their feedback and advised that SG would update the guidance and bring back to the group for further comment before taking it to the Respect for All working group.

Action: SG to update Respect for All guidance with members’ suggestions and bring back to the next meeting for comment.

AOB

No AOB was raised. The chair closed the meeting.