Translator: Leonardo Silva Reviewer: Mile Živković
Thank you.
Hello.
Hello. Hello.
Are you waving at me? Are you the slides person?
Yeah? If I do that... yeah? OK.
Yeah, it's been a really busy day, actually.
I spoke at the Institute of Education,
to people in education,
and then hotfooted it to Amnesty
and spoke to people on the Amnesty Teachers Program,
which was a real privilege,
and then hotfooted it here, to be here at the end of the day,
which is a real privilege as well.
So, thank you for having me here.
And I'm Shaun Dellenty,
and I am the deputy head teacher of a primary school
at Canada Water, in Southwark,
called Alfred Salter Primary School.
In addition to that role,
for the last three years
I've slowly been establishing
a small charitable organization,
which is called 'Inclusion For All'.
And what that does is it trains educators
to help them move the culture and ethos of schools
to a point where homophobic bullying and language doesn't happen.
And I'll tell you more about that in a minute.
Now, I should have some slides, please.
First, I'll start by telling you a little about myself,
just to put my life into context.
This is called 'How I Survived Homophobic Bullying
and Tried to Change the World'.
And it is very much an ongoing process,
and I find myself at the centre
of quite a unique experience right now.
I was born in 1968, in Portland Bill.
That makes me 45!
Audience: Woo! S.D.: Wow! Thanks very much!
You sound really surprised. Can you do that again?
I was born in 1968 and I'm 45!
Audience: Wooo!
S.D.: I know it's difficult to believe.
When I was about three or four,
people used to do this to me,
when they saw me, they'd go: "Oh, what a lovely little girl.
Isn't she pretty?"
And those are my sort of earliest memories of other people's perceptions of me.
And I remember when I was at primary school
and you had to have a polio jab.
And I can remember I stood in my pants,
and the head teacher, Ms. Rhodesmary,
who always had a red nose --
she would smell a little bit of vodka. (Laughter)
Ms. Rhodesmary and the school nurse, they get me my polio jab
and they pulled out the front of my pants.
And Ms. Rhodesmary went,
"I'm just seeing what's down there".
Now, with the knowledge that I have now,
I think she was checking what gender I was.
So, already, I had this kind of otherness,
this sense of otherness about me, at a very early age.
And that sense of otherness started
to sort of filter into other elements of my life.
And I spent my primary school years
not quite fitting in,
because I noticed and other people noticed
that I liked some of the books
and the clubs, and the reading materials, and the activities that the girls liked.
I also liked some of the stuff that the boys liked as well.
But what that meant was that teachers became confused
and, actually, started to say: "No, you can't do that.
That's for the girls."
And I was actually told by a teacher
not to read books that were for girls.
So, I stopped reading completely.
From a teacher!
So, I was in this sort of confusing space,
where I wasn't quite sure who or what I was.
OK. Next slide, please.
That's me, aged four, on my tractor, knowing that I'm different.
Now, I didn't have a word for this difference,
I didn't have the word 'gay',
and thank goodness I didn't have the word 'homosexual'.
What a wretched word that is!
You know? But I knew I was different.
And that meant that I spent my primary school years
and my reception and nursery years
growing up feeling like this person here,
that I was on the wrong planet.
And I deeply and most sincerely believed
that I was on the wrong planet.
And that was a genuine belief.
And I knew I was different from that early age,
because those of you that are of a certain age
will remember ABBA.
And, in ABBA, there was a blond 'wom'
and there was a mostly brunette 'wom',
and there was a bloke with a beard and a bloke without a beard.
And the game in the playground was:
'Which "wom" in ABBA do you fancy?
The blond "wom" or the brunette "wom"?'
I used to go and stand in the corner
of the playground at primary school and go,
"Ah, bugger! I like the bloke with the beard".
So I always knew that,
but I didn't have the vocabulary for it.
By the time I got to secondary school, I moved from Buckinghamshire,
where I went to primary school; then I went to Leicestershire,
a small town called Lutterworth, just outside Leicester.
On the first day walking up to the school gates,
a group of boys stopped me and they went,
"You, a queer. You're one of them".
And that was the most frightening thing
that anybody had ever said to me,
because I thought, "It's shining out me".
Maybe they knew it was true, maybe they didn't.
They probably didn't, but as far as I was concerned,
I had a big light shining out of me, going, "I'm gay".
That was the scariest thing in the world, because I thought, "If they can see it,
my parents will see it.
And if my parents will see it,
they might reject me, they might take me to hospital",
and any other number of horrible things,
because I saw that happening in the media.
So, during my secondary school years,
I was spat at, laughed at, kicked, pushed,
isolated from my peer group, egged and floured,
and told I would die of AIDS,
and I was told I would go to hell.
And I was hearing those messages not just from people at school,
but also from teachers.
And when the news came on, I was hearing it from church leaders
and from people in power.
Now, when a child is going through their formative years,
I always kind of see it as an iceberg:
you've got the bit you can see and a bit underneath,
and you want that to be solid and growing.
But my iceberg was melting and eroding,
and my self-worth and my self-esteem were just melting away.
And that is the case for a lot of children in our schools,
right now, right now.
So, my experiences in primary and secondary school,
I did have some happy times and some lovely teachers,
but, overall, that experience was extremely negative.
And what happens with all that information?
All those signals? What happens?
You internalize it. Of course you do.
It goes in.
And, as a result of that,
you start to believe it
and it starts to influence your actions
and how you live your life.
And that's exactly what happened.
Now, this was in 1987.
You know, it was that period, 1968, when I was born,
to 1987.
And I actually walked out of education.
That drip-drip cumulative "You're not welcome here,
you don't belong on Earth, you're going to hell, you'll die",
all reached the point where I thought,
"You know what? Maybe it's better if I just walk out of school
and find where I belong.
And maybe that place is actually
to take my own life.
Maybe it is to stick things in my arms.
But I'm going to find it, whatever that place is".
And I did, I walked out of school. Now, that was 1987.
Let me tell you that, because I stuck my head above the parapet
three years ago on these messages,
and I'm in the media quite a lot, and I blog, and I shout,
I'm in a quite privileged position right now.
People write to me, they tweet to me,
they e-mail me, on a weekly basis.
And I hear from people in the U.K.,
in Europe, in America,
in Africa, you name it, from all over the world,
what happened to me between 1968 and 1987
is still happening right now in our schools,
the schools that you may send your children to.
It's still happening.
And on Friday, last week,
I had an e-mail telling me
that a child in a school in Middle England
had hung herself because she'd been bullied
for being perceived to be a lesbian.
And I hear these stories regularly.
And people tell me these stories from the 1920s,
the 30s, the 40s, the 50s, the 60s,
right up to last Friday.
Now, I think that's an utter disgrace,
and I'm not having it.
But nobody seemed, historically,
to want to tackle it in schools.
Now, we know, we've got proof
that the effects of homophobic bullying
not only affect mental and physical heath --
and that should have always been enough
for anyone that was in education.
Why do we go into education?
Because we love kids!
That's enough for me!
But we now have proof
that homophobic bullying affects
"attendance, achievement, attainment".
That's standards in schools
and we know that Ofsted love talking about standards.
And school leaders dream
-- or have nightmares -- about standards.
And when potential parents go and look at our school,
they look at standards!
This has a direct impact upon standards!
But more importantly than that,
it has a direct impact upon those little unique souls in our care.
And right now, they're out there, self-harming,
and cutting themselves and killing themselves,
or being hurt and killed because of this.
Who does bullying affect, potentially?
You're asleep!
Who does bullying affect potentially?
Thank you! Everybody.
Who does homophobic bullying and language affect potentially?
Everybody. It's for everybody.
I had a teacher. A couple of years ago, she came from a course.
She'd been on a course.
And she'd been on the Tube,
and she was wearing a jumper
and some guys had threatened to beat her up for being a lesbian.
Because of a jumper.
They said, "It's a lesbian jumper" -- (Laughter)
-- whatever a lesbian jumper is.
I mean, it was green, it was mohair, you know, but it wasn't a lesbian jumper.
But it didn't matter, because she was perceived to be different.
And any of the children in our care,
in our families, in our homes,
can be perceived to be different,
and that makes them a target.
And of course, we're all different anyway!
So, that makes us all targets!
So, this is serious stuff.
And again, please.
This is Michael Causer, aged 18.
He lived in Liverpool, went to a party, had a good time,
had a few too many to drink, and crashed out.
We've all done it.
And while this kid was crashing out,
another couple of teenagers went on his mobile phone.
And on his mobile phone, they found evidence that he was gay.
And their response to that was to beat him
while he was asleep,
and he died several days later.
This is Dominic and Roger Crouch.
This is Roger here.
And Dominic, aged 15.
Roger and I did a number of Stonewall events together.
And Dominic went to school in Cheltenham.
And I think he quite liked school, but they went on a school trip.
And on the school trip, the boys decided to play
a sort of spin-the-bottle game.
And Dominic was dared to kiss another boy.
When you're dared to do something, you do it.
You don't want to play it cool by not doing it.
So he did it. (Kiss sound)
And, at that point, out came the iPhones. (Clicking sound)
And the Blackberries. (Clicking sound)
And that went back to Cheltenham.
So, when he got back to school, it started,
"You're so gay", "You're so queer", "Errr".
And it grew, and it grew, and it grew.
And then, one day, Dominic left his school,
and he went and found a six-story building.
And he stood there for two hours.
And he texted the police and he got a reply that said,
"Sorry, you're not registered for this service".
And then he jumped off.
Now, Roger, obviously devastated,
decided to try and make something positive from that experience.
He started doing talks around homophobic bullying,
like I do, and that's how we met.
And at one of those events, I heard Dominic's suicide note read.
You can imagine what that was like.
Then, one day, I was booked to speak at an event,
at Birmingham Town Hall, with Roger,
and Roger didn't turn up.
And Roger had hung himself.
Now, that family was torn apart
by homophobic bullying and language,
but there wasn't anybody homosexual in that family.
We don't think that Dominic was gay. There was no evidence of that.
So this is pernicious and it can be targeted at any of our families,
and it has been going unchecked for decades
in our school system.
And Dominic's mother has actually stressed since then
the need for teachers to be authentic at school.
Not to wave a flag,
not to define themselves by their sexuality,
but to have the same rights as their colleagues,
in terms of talking about themselves as whole human beings,
to be able to put up a photo and say,
"This is what I did on my holiday with my partner.
Yes, this is my other half, I'll bring them to the school,
so you can meet them,
and you can see me as living, breathing, 3D-alistic
authentic, happy person".
Because we know that 10% of the children that come through our schools
will emerge as LGBT themselves,
or have LGBT friends and family,
lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender,
or questioning or intersex.
They need a range of role models.
So, I will now take you on a bit of a journey,
a very quick journey of the last three years of my life.
And it's been an amazing journey.
I told you I walked out of education
and, for years, I just sort of trod water.
I went into keep-myself-alive mode.
So, I did a variety of things. I was as a civil servant.
I drove a van with mushrooms in it.
I became a town planner
and I ended up on the telly.
Actually I thought, "You know what?
If I go on the telly, all those people that bullied me can see
they didn't finish me off".
And it worked, because, on the way to Leicester,
on the bus, one afternoon,
a lad came up to me, who is not a lad now,
he was like, you know, he was in his like 30s and he went,
"You, you're Shaun, aren't you?" And I said, "Yes".
And he went, "Oh, my God! You're alive!"
And I said: "Well, yes, I'm alive
and I've got some Twiglets and a drink". (Laughter)
And he said: "No, no, no. I was one of them.
I was one of them that bullied you.
And I thought you'd be dead.
And I'm really glad you're not, and I just want to say I'm sorry".
And in that moment, you could see he'd lived with that.
He had lived with what he had done.
And he apologized, and hats off to him, you know.
I actually ended up counselling him, funnily enough.
But he overcame that.
And then I went and became a teacher.
I ended up as the deputy head of a wonderful school,
Alfred Salter Primary School.
And, in 2009, in November,
we did some questionnaires with the children and the staff
around equality issues and bullying.
And it showed us very clearly
that 75% of the children, on a daily basis,
were hearing or being subjected to homophobic bullying or language,
or the endemic use of the word 'gay' as a negative term.
"Your hat's so gay", "Your jumper's so gay",
"Your hamster's so gay", "Your parents are so gay".
"Your mom's a dike". All of that stuff.
Yeah? 75% of them.
And we went: "Whoah! That's endemic. We've got to do something".
But we went: "Hmmm.
We've got to be careful here,
because I don't want to get accused of some big gay agenda,
trying to turn everybody gay, because that's how you do it, you know?
If you stand in front of children and tell them you're gay, they're all gay!
(Laughter)
They can't produce their own, you know.
They have to recruit". (Laughter)
Whatever! (Laughter)
So, but we hesitated.
Now, if we'd go about a day or two around racist bullying,
or, you know, bullying due to disability,
we wouldn't have hesitated,
but we hesitated because none of us had ever had any training,
a big fat 0% had ever had any training on it.
We were all a bit scared about the Daily Mail
and things like that, and parents.
And, in the end, I just went,
"Do you know what? This was happening to me in the 80s,
and it can't be happening now, it just can't,
because we love our kids in our school.
They deserve better".
So I took a stand. We took a stand as a school leadership team.
And I wrote over Christmas that year a training program called Inclusion for All.
And I got 130 members of staff in,
4th of January -- they're not loving it very much:
"You'll be here. We're going to talk about gay stuff". They were like, "Oh, my God".
And I showed them a film called 'Fit',
which Stonewall did with Ricky Beadle-Blair, which is brilliant.
And then we kind of talked about it and we got all of this stuff out.
And you know what? Those people,
those people had never sat and talked about
or even used the words 'lesbian', 'gay', 'bisexual', 'transgender'
in front of other professionals.
We went on a huge journey in the training program
and it had a huge, positive impact.
And then, once we knew it was working,
I started to write to local authorities,
to the government, to Ofsted.
I started to blog, to tweet, to knock on people's doors,
to be downright annoying, quite frankly!
Not because I think we're doing anything special, or out of the ordinary.
We were just doing what every single school leader should be doing.
And the joy of it now is that Ofsted say we should be as well,
and they have started to inspect schools
and say to children, "Do you hear the word 'gay'
being used pejoratively in this school?"
"Do you hear homophobic bullying in this school?"
And as a result of that,
these messages have started to go out across the country
and now across the world.
It's growing. Enough is enough.
This stuff hurts and we mustn't have it in our schools,
for the sake of those unique souls in our care.
Thank you for your time.
(Cheers) (Applause)