Practices and Policies to Address Violence Against Sexual and Gender Minority Students in Schools: A Scoping Review

Background and Purpose

Sexual and gender minority students experience disparate rates of violence (Cantor et al., 2019; Kosciw et al. 2020). These experiences of violence have negative impacts on mental health and educational outcomes. Violence prevention and response efforts frequently take place in educational settings; however, little research exists about best practices to address sexual and gender minority students’ unique victimization experiences. To address this gap, our scoping review aimed to: (a) identify policies/practices concerning violence prevention and response for sexual and gender minority students in educational contexts, (b) identify evaluation outcomes reported for such policies/practices, (c) identify promising practices for sexual and gender minority students in higher education; (d) document lessons learned from identified manuscripts.

Methods

We conducted a scoping review following Arksey and O'Malley’s (2005) systematic process for search, extraction, and synthesis. Our search included four groups of terms: (1) sexual and gender minority, (2) schools and educational settings, (3) sexual and other types of violence/aggression, (4) policies, programs, and practices. Included documents (a) focused on an educational population (students, teachers, administrators, etc.), (b) included an intervention (class, course, program, policy) to prevent or respond to violence against sexual and/or gender minority students, and (c) took place in an educational setting (middle school, high school, post-secondary institution). For articles meeting inclusion criteria, we extracted information relevant to the intervention and sample population. Of the 1,732 references identified, 61 detailed a violence intervention for sexual and gender minority students in an educational setting.

Results

Our review noted several trends among interventions aimed at reducing violence against sexual and gender minority students, including a focus on psychoeducational trainings, adapted school practices through institutional/internal policy, and affinity group meetings (dominantly Gay Straight Alliances). Most interventions took place in high schools (n=44), with fewer in middle schools (n=20) and even fewer in post-secondary institutions (n=12). Consistent with the emphasis on secondary schools, bullying was the most frequent intervention target (n=39), followed by harassment (n=17). We found limited interventions aimed at reducing violence against gender minority individuals specifically. Most interventions were not designed to be received by a particular subgroup (e.g., interventions for sexual or gender minority students), and an approximately equal number focused on students only and on both students and educators. Overall, there was a lack of evidence-based practices, with only fourteen interventions reporting evaluation outcomes.

Conclusions and Implications

The review identified several opportunities for future research; namely, there were comparatively few interventions designed for post-secondary institutions, limited evaluated/evidence-based practices, and lack of focus on addressing violence against gender minorities. These gaps bring the quality and availability of interventions to reduce violence against sexual and gender minority students into question. Additional work is needed to develop interventions that account for these student’s experiences of myriad forms of violence, expanding beyond the bullying focus in middle and high schools. Policies and practices protecting sexual and gender minority students are critical to ensuring that students feel valued and supported within educational settings.