One

Becoming Safe

Please teach your daughters not to measure their strength by how much pain they can endure.

—SANUSI

ZENEBA IS A South African success story.¹ The twelfth grader is ranked among the top ten of her graduating class at the Wellsboro School, one of the best government schools in South Africa. When she graduates, her plan is to study medicine at one of the country’s most highly ranked institutions, the University of Cape Town.

Zeneba is Black and Muslim. Born in 2001, she was raised in a poor neighborhood right outside of Cape Town by a single mother. Her achievements would have been impossible barely twenty years ago under an apartheid system that explicitly limited the opportunities of Black South Africans. For many poor Black Muslim girls from her hometown, Zeneba’s success still is.

So, how did Zeneba beat the odds? How did she, unlike most of her peers, overcome the barriers stacked against her to achieve academic success? But to ask—and answer—that question would be to undermine Zeneba’s telling of her own story: “I don’t have the best home life. I don’t get tutored like half the students on the top ten list. They don’t have all these extra chores … The other Black student … Her home life is also harder … We have to work twice as hard.”

Being poor and being Black are not the only obstacles to education Zeneba faces. She goes on to discuss her concern with gender. “Although women are on par in terms of academics [in South Africa], there is still stigma because ultimately the social and power dynamics haven’t changed … No matter how successful I will be as a doctor, they are still going to be an incessant voice that this is the time I need to be married.” Indeed, Zeneba knows she is an excellent student, and is confident in her ability to become a medical doctor. Still, she chose to spend most of our time together in 2017 talking about her challenges at school. In particular, she talked about the barriers faced by people of her race, income, and gender, emphasizing her need to “work twice as hard” as her White and Coloured peers, and explaining the stigma of not being married like her Muslim classmates.

Zeneba is not alone in her concerns.

Her classmate Kai, “the other Black student,” is also one of the top ten students in the class. “My grades are really good. They are excellent,” Kai told me in our interview in 2017. Yet, Kai’s description of their work life echoes Zeneba’s.² “I have to study way before most people. I work after school, so I don’t have time to really do [home]work. I do my studying on the train, in class. I don’t get much sleep at home because while other people are sleeping I have to do work. I go to sleep at 10 or 11 P.M. and then wake up at 3 A.M.” Like Zeneba, Kai is also concerned about gender: “I find it difficult to identify with one of these genders. My gender is not represented at a coed school. I want my gender and my sexuality as queer and nonbinary to be represented at the school, but it’s not … I wouldn’t say school is a really safe space.”

Zeneba and Kai come from similarly poor backgrounds and are academically successful. Yet they feel a lack of safety at their school. These feelings, explained in more detail later, are strongly linked to their experiences with race, class, and gender disadvantage. Taken as a whole, their feelings and experiences make clear that academic success does not guarantee safety. Zeneba and Kai, like all students, need and deserve more than just academic success. They need and deserve safe schools.

To let girls learn, schools must first protect them.

Developing a Safe School

Prior work has defined a safe school as “one that is free of danger and … absen[t] of possible harm; a place in which all learners may learn without fear of ridicule, intimidation, harassment, humiliation or violence.”³ Unfortunately, most existing schools do not operate as safe spaces. Instead, schools typically host and sponsor dedicated safe-space programs within and around them.

Safe-space programs in school communities are typically only for girls and meet several times a week in public places like community halls and youth centers. They are run by girls or women who are slightly older and from the same community as the girls themselves. These mentors develop a loose curriculum, including topics such as sexual and reproductive health and gender-based violence. They teach “safety plans” or other life skills, such as financial literacy and civic engagement.

In addition to the knowledge gained from participating in one of these programs, girls also gain role models and a social network of peers they can trust. Trust is especially important for girls as they are typically less likely to have mutually reciprocal peer relationships compared with boys. In fact, studies conducted on South Africa reveal that 33 percent of girls do not belong to a community group, and that 43 percent of girls but only 19 percent of boys describe themselves as not having friends.⁴ Research on select safe-space programs finds that girls who have participated in them are not only more likely to report feeling more socially included but also more likely to save money and report an increased understanding of sexual violence.⁵

Still, safe-space programs are insufficient in many ways. The stigma of being a victim of sexual assault has been shown to prevent girls from reporting these crimes, despite increased understanding.⁶ Furthermore, while girls want safe-space programs, home obligations often constrain their ability to attend them, especially at locations outside of school.⁷ In summary, even though safe-space programming can potentially empower girl students to speak up and out, their community accessibility and impact on sexual violence are limited by design. Girls need safe spaces that extend beyond a temporary offsite meeting. Put another way, to encourage reporting and attendance, schools must not only support occasional safe-space programs, they must ensure that every area of the school is a safe space.

A school that is entirely safe is a school that values net achievement. I focus here on South Africa, where many students sit at the intersection of race, gender, and poverty. These students voice a need to attend institutions that protect them from the everyday violence associated with those identities. But first, to properly understand the educational experiences of Black South African girls, it is necessary to understand the history of structural disadvantage directed toward them.

Education in South Africa

That South African schools can potentially become safe spaces reflects major progress for a nation that, just twenty years ago, explicitly practiced racial and gender inequality across the education system. It was only in 1996 that the South African government extended equal education to Black Africans, and thus Black African girls, under the South African Schools Act. Before then, during apartheid, the country engaged in a bifurcated education system in which Whites benefited from the highest quality education and resources, while Black Africans were subjected to lower-quality education, detailed in the Bantu Education Act.

The Bantu Education Act was instituted in South Africa in 1953, immediately following Brown v. Board of Education in the United States in 1952, which led to desegregation in schools. The Bantu Education Act—later that year renamed the Black Education Act and then finally the Education and Training Act in 1979—was developed to effectively legalize segregation through the development of separate educational facilities for Blacks and Whites in the country. As with schools in the United States before Brown v. Board, these facilities were separate and unequal. In fact, it was reported that in 1967 under Bantu Education the ratio of teacher to student in Black schools was as high as 58 to 1 and that spending on Black education was less than 10 percent of what was spent on White education.⁸ In 1990, for every $150 spent on a White primary school child, $10 was provided by the state to a Black child.⁹

Segregation in education extended beyond secondary school. In 1959, the Extension of University Education Act was passed, which disallowed Black students from attending White universities, instead setting up “tribal universities” for Black students. As a result, White students were trained for managerial positions, but Black Africans were trained to take on inferior roles in the country.¹⁰ In short, the education system—from early education through university—served the state’s racist mission.

Single-sex schools were largely inaccessible to African students and instead reserved for Whites.¹¹ Once the South African Schools Act was passed in 1996 to reduce racial inequality, single-sex schools for girls were established as a mechanism for protecting them from sexual violence and harassment in addition to improving their knowledge of women’s rights. Still, these schools were not created for working-class girls of color. Instead, many Black girls attend formerly all-White girls’ schools.¹²

Girls were not legally denied access to education under the apartheid regime. In fact, during apartheid the number of girls enrolled in primary and secondary school was nearly equal to boys. Additionally, girls on average outperformed their male counterparts in the early years of apartheid.¹³ Yet, girls faced many gender-based barriers, including sexual harassment and tracking into subject areas based on gender stereotypes. These barriers ultimately inhibited their performance at higher levels of education.¹⁴ Female teachers also earned lower pay and worked only in nonsenior management roles.¹⁵ Altogether, while women had access to education, they struggled to advance academically and continued to occupy inferior positions compared with men in a highly patriarchal public and private economy.

Since 1996, or post-apartheid, South Africa has not only increased its educational investment in African students but has also increased its commitment to gender equality through its constitution (Section 9, specifically). Public spending on education is 6.4 percent of the gross domestic product—more than any other African country and the United Kingdom. Girls continue to attend schools at similar rates to their male counterparts at both the primary and secondary level, and they perform on par with boys in most subjects, except math. Furthermore, more girls than boys take the college matriculation exam.¹⁶

Despite South Africa’s significant investment in education and the development of liberal educational policies, however, its educational system remains one of the worst in the world. In the World Economic Forum’s Global Competitiveness Report for 2016–2017, South Africa ranked 138th out of 140 countries in the quality of education.¹⁷ In another study conducted in 2015 by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, South Africa ranked 75th out of 76.¹⁸ Although these reports applaud South African primary and secondary enrollments, they note that only 4 percent of its students earn a college degree. For women and girls, in particular, their academic achievement outcomes have been lukewarm at best. Younger girls enroll in schools at higher levels than boys on average, but they are less likely to be academically successful while enrolled. At college, women represent less than one-third of those who graduate with degrees in engineering, physics, and computer science.¹⁹ Race, gender, and poverty play an important role in explaining the low levels of academic and net achievement in South Africa.²⁰

Barriers Girls Face: The Intersection of Race, Gender, and Poverty

In the early 1990s, Kimberlé Crenshaw, a legal scholar, described the need to understand how marginal identities of race and gender overlap and in turn constrain women and girls. She named this concept intersectionality. “My objective there was to illustrate that many of the experiences Black women face are not subsumed within traditional boundaries of race or gender discrimination as these boundaries are currently understood, and that the intersection of racism and sexism factors into Black women’s lives in ways that cannot be captured wholly by looking at the race or gender dimensions of those experiences separately.”²¹

By examining the compounded effects of race and gender discrimination, intersectionality provides a more comprehensive and accurate view of the experiences in which Black women and girls find themselves in the world and, specifically, in school. Elaine Unterhalter, an academic who specializes in the inequalities of race, gender, and class, provides a useful way to discuss poverty as part of race and gender marginality through three metaphors: as a line, a net, and fuel. The line refers to efforts to measure equality by counting the number of women and men above a certain threshold (for example, the number of girls in poverty at school compared with boys). This method of measuring poverty and equality, although important for accountability, acts as a crude measure of substance. The net refers to the ways in which race, gender, and poverty are meshed into hierarchies of unequal power relations that schools often reproduce and girls internalize. Schools’ reproduction of unequal power relations, and girls’ internalization of them, are then replicated through a continued sexual division of labor in the household and at work. Unterhalter concludes that instead of seeing gender as a line, one must see it as part of a network of relationships in which race, gender, and poverty interact and intersect. It is only in this way that schools can provide the fuel necessary to transform gender relationships. Doing so requires schools to be positioned to reduce inequities—not to reproduce them.²²

GENDER-BASED VIOLENCE

Understanding how schools can reduce racial, gender, and economic inequities begins with understanding the challenges girls face once enrolled. In South Africa, for example, girls experience high levels of gender-based violence in the classroom. These range from implicit violence, such as corporal punishment and bullying, to explicit sexual violence, such as sexual harassment, rape, and abuse.²³ For example, one study revealed that nearly one in three girls reported being raped in or around their school in South Africa. Of those who reported being raped, 33 percent reported being raped by their educators.²⁴ A survey of 1,500 youth conducted in 1998, only a few years after apartheid ended, found that 43 percent of girls indicated sexual violence was “very common,” and 33 percent of those surveyed said they had personally experienced it at school.²⁵

Indeed, significant education policies have been passed to reverse these trends. In 2003, the Ministry of Education in South Africa formed the Girls Education Movement (GEM) to build knowledge and self-esteem of girls through student-led organizations, ranging from drama clubs to HIV prevention workshops. In 2007, a life orientation and skills curriculum was established in primary schools across South Africa to further instill confidence in girls within the classroom. That same year, Prevention and Management of Learner Pregnancy guidelines were established for girls who wished to return to school if they had left or had been kicked out of school for being pregnant. This policy was followed by additional guidelines, Prevention and Management of Sexual Violence and Harassment in Public Schools, in 2008. Nonetheless, recent research and reports suggest that rape and sexual abuse remain a relatively pressing concern for South African schoolgirls.²⁶

MENSTRUAL MANAGEMENT AND SANITATION

Adolescence is a particularly vulnerable time for girls. As they transition through puberty and begin their menstrual cycle, they may find access to sanitary pads and hygienic products challenging. Education about changes they are experiencing may not be readily available. In many environments where access is more difficult, menstruation is viewed as taboo or as a reason to exclude girls from activities. Being able to deal with menstruation effectively directly affects girls’ ability to achieve in educational settings. An inability to manage menstruation or talk about it with adult women may lower schoolgirls’ self-esteem and self-confidence, discouraging them from attending school altogether.²⁷

Beyond a lack of female mentors and girls’ health education, many schools simply lack basic facilities. For example, in South Africa’s public, non-fee, and paying schools, only 41 percent of students have access to flush toilets.²⁸ Accordingly, girls may feel both unsafe and uncomfortable attending school for the five or six days out of the month when they have their period. Lack of flush toilets particularly discourages disabled girls who are menstruating from attending school or simply participating in school activities.²⁹ Yet, girls who miss school are more likely to fall behind and eventually drop out. Thus, simple aspects of school infrastructure, such as access to toilets, can play an important role in helping girls succeed.

HIV / AIDS

In South Africa, 56 percent of the 6 million people living with HIV / AIDS are women and girls.³⁰ New incidences are most prominent among young women between the ages of fifteen and twenty-five, and the HIV / AIDS incidence rates for girls are higher than for boys overall. As recent as 2013, it was estimated that more than 25 percent of South African schoolgirls were infected, compared with just 4 percent of schoolboys.³¹

Dealing with HIV / AIDS affects the educational experiences of girls specifically. For example, one study found that schools in South Africa with high prevalence rates of HIV / AIDS experienced slightly decreased enrollments of female students due to a loss of support from the death of parents affected by the disease.³² If families dealing with HIV / AIDS must choose who to send to school among their children, girls are typically excluded because of their traditional roles as caretakers. For girls who have HIV / AIDS, they may miss school if their parents feel that having HIV / AIDS is stigmatizing and want their children to avoid discrimination. Instead of sharing or reporting their experiences, girls dealing with HIV / AIDS, either themselves or through their families, often drop out or suffer in silence for fear that reporting what they experience will result in rebuke from their families and surrounding communities.³³

Ironically, several studies document the power of education to reduce the probability of a girl being infected by HIV / AIDS.³⁴ A study conducted in Botswana found that participants were 7 percent less likely to contract HIV / AIDS for each additional year of school they completed.³⁵ Furthermore, the completion of primary education has been found to translate to a lower probability of engaging in unprotected sex in general.³⁶

Nonetheless, many schools in South Africa do not incorporate curriculums that teach about sexual and reproductive health. While life orientation classes are meant to discuss these issues, and do, schools report that teachers are not trained on the particular subject, so the course ends up being randomly assigned to anyone who needs an extra class to teach. This random approach to assigning a teacher to a course likely affects the way the course is perceived among teachers and students, and negatively impacts the consistency with which the course is taught. In addition, improperly framed health education can serve to further silence students if restrictive constructions of gender are reproduced and perpetuated. Certain ideas about gender—for example, that men should keep their problems to themselves and, thus, exhibit self-control, or that women’s emotions should be policed and, thus, aligned with what men have deemed acceptable—affect the success of interventions that seek to encourage young girls to speak out. Thus, even as education acts as a social vaccine for helping to reduce HIV / AIDS among girls, schoolgirls who are infected or affected need an environment in which girls do not feel ashamed to share what they are experiencing. Policies and programs such as the Girls Education Movement represent an important contribution to solving this issue, as they facilitate an environment in which achievement-oriented identities can be instilled. Yet, it remains critical for schools to act as the central space in which strategies may be developed to help girls deal with and respond to their challenges.

At the very least, schools can impart lessons on how to navigate difficult educational experiences while working to improve them. At best, schools can begin as safe spaces that provide students with opportunities to learn skills they can use to transgress in an unsafe world. In other words, safe schools can provide the conditions necessary for teaching students to navigate educational barriers. Kai and Zeneba at the Wellsboro school in Cape Town, South Africa, had much to tell me about their own achievements and the pitfalls they encountered on the way.

Wellsboro: Striving to Create a Safe School in the Western Cape

In 2014, in collaboration with members of the Human Sciences Research Council, I investigated schools in South Africa that serve mostly disadvantaged students and yet are successful in transforming them into academically successful learners.³⁷ In 2017, I returned to South Africa, specifically the Western Cape province. Known for being a relatively wealthier area in South Africa, the province boasts the second highest median household income in the country. It is also one of the most educated regions in the country, with a high school graduation rate of 80 percent. In terms of academic performance, students in the Western Cape consistently score among the highest in the country relative to students in other provinces. It is also home to one of Africa’s best universities, the University of Cape Town. Nearly 50 percent of learners from the Western Cape scored at or above the average for science (400) in data collected by the Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS) in 2015. Western Cape students are also more likely to report having books at home and their own math and science textbooks at school, and least likely to report bullying compared to any other province. While the educational level of households actually decreased by 8 percentage points between 2003 and 2015, the Western Cape still represents one of the relatively wealthier and more educated provinces in South Africa.³⁸ My investigation focuses on how a government fee–paying school in Cape Town—still a relatively privileged school—struggles to create safe spaces for girls in a changing and challenging environment.

The Wellsboro School was constructed in 2012 in response to a mandate by the government to develop an institution that would serve low-income students from across the province. The goal was to provide them with the highest level of education possible at a fee more than ten times lower than a typical private institution. In 2017, the school boasted gender parity across grade levels and even within the senior administration; it had a matriculation passage rate above 90 percent and a college attendance rate above 75 percent, with girls slightly outperforming all other genders. The school provides many resources, including smart boards in each classroom and access to computers and projectors. It is also located in one of the province’s wealthiest suburbs—a relatively safe community environment. Despite opening only a few years ago, the school is often compared to Model C—elite schools previously reserved exclusively for Whites during apartheid—due to its extensive resources and academic excellence. Accordingly, an opportunity to attend Wellsboro for a poor, Black student in South Africa is an important one.

Still, the costs that Wellsboro students absorb to attend the institution remain high. To start, most Black students come from single-parent or -guardian homes (many are raised by their grandmothers), lack access to food, live in shacks, and hold additional responsibilities outside school, such as chores and babysitting. Brock Lee, Head of Department (HOD) for English at Wellsboro, says, “I’ve visited a couple of our kids who live literally in corrugated iron space about as big as this office with five or six people, and there’s a toilet 5 meters away. Some kids don’t have electricity at home … So many of our kids are … possibly not eating for a day or two at a time.”

Unsurprisingly, these added challenges contribute to difficulties for these students in achieving academic success. For example, when Mr. Lee was asked what he believed were the keys to academic success at his institution, he responded, “I think the key to the kids that are successful are that they come from the middle class. If you were to ask every Black kid at our school how long it takes them to get to school and compare it with how long it takes the [other] kids to get to school, probably be about an hour difference.”

Mr. Lee acknowledges that the costs associated with coming to school are unequal for Black students compared with others, and yet they are expected to achieve the same academic outcomes. Recognizing this imbalance, Kai, who we met at the beginning of this chapter and who is one of the few academically successful Black students at Wellsboro, developed a petition to remove required extramural activities after school that extend the school day from ending at 3:15 P.M. to 4:30 P.M. For kids who take the train to and from school and who work every day, Kai argued, the later time has a negative impact on their ability to study and, thus, be academically successful. Fortunately, Kai’s petition passed, and the additional hour is no longer mandatory at Wellsboro. Kai describes successfully passing the policy as their proudest achievement since enrolling at Wellsboro. The success of Kai’s petition in part demonstrates the ways in which the school provides a space for students to engage in actions that ensure they have positive educational experiences.

FINDING STRATEGIES AND STRADDLING IDENTITIES

Undoubtedly, Kai’s ability to be a leader and earn excellent grades, despite all the challenges, is where most research on disadvantaged students ends. Kai’s successful academic performance would seem to indicate that the school met their needs. Yet Kai is a student balancing multiple identities, many of which are marginalized, that have acted as significant disruptions to their education. In particular, Kai has to navigate an environment that is not accepting of their nonbinary gender identification and queer sexuality. Kai recalls sitting on a committee to enact a gender-neutral policy at the school: “I had to go around to the classes to explain what the policy was about. I said … this policy doesn’t want to distinguish between genders … Like today, I felt like a boy so I wore shorts—they’ve allowed girls to wear shorts but not boys to wear skirts—and the entire class laughed, and I felt really assaulted and I felt my identity was being questioned.”

Kai’s self-identification as nonbinary is not taken seriously at the school, which in turn constrains Kai’s ability to control their own self-expression and personhood. Negative experiences such as these directly impact students’ perception of their education overall, even if they are academically successful. Ultimately, these schools need to educate staff and students to become institutions that are accepting of all genders. It is clear that Kai could benefit from the development of strategies to navigate the inevitable challenges they face in this gender-hostile and, thus, unsafe environment.

The need for specific strategies for navigating the challenges that come with straddling multiple marginal identities applies to the case of Zeneba as well. Her life contains complications outside of her academic success. In particular, she has confronted the tension of adhering to her Muslim faith and taking control of her life trajectory: “My views on certain things and my religion are complicated. If I believe and pray five times a day and do the core things, other things are accessories … The hijab is important … but it’s not the most important. It’s [about] what you put first. I put first God, my family, and then myself, and then everything else is secondary.”

Zeneba acknowledges that her perspectives on education and gender are not always linked to her religious beliefs and practices. Thus, she looks for ways to balance the two. She faces the pressure of knowing that her academic success may be undermined or challenged by the traditional roles expected of her: “My mom has seven brothers, and they will make these comments like, ‘You still haven’t cooked,’ and ‘How are you going to keep your husband?’ ” To these statements, Zeneba responds, “I would like to get married, but if that doesn’t happen, it’s not the first thing on my bucket list.”

To an outsider, it may seem as though Zeneba’s academic success and confidence allow her to navigate these tensions well. However, religion and family expectations continue to create significant conflicts that affect her educational experience. Teachers at the school are aware their girl students deal with these challenges and seek to help girls navigate them. For example, Blake Rowland, an English teacher, said, “We are teaching this play [called] Nothing but the Truth. One of the themes that it’s scrapping with is how … to grapple with respect for your culture and your tradition as well as stepping into a modern world.” He continues, “I had girls in my class being completely honest and saying, ‘My culture … my family [that] I love and respect is telling me that I have to be this particular way, but I’m being told by the media and by you and by the broader world that I can do this and this and … what am I supposed to do?’ And I’m like, ‘I don’t know’ because … you can’t just say, ‘Forget it! Be the modern woman and you don’t have to do [tradition].’ Because that is to disrespect centuries’ worth of tradition and often … valuable and meaningful stuff, and I can see that internally the cogs are turning and they’re realizing that this is ridiculously difficult.”

By putting on a play that mirrors the multiple identities and conflicting information his girl students must contend with, Mr. Rowland is providing a space for them to, at the very least, reflect on the apparent contradictions they face daily. In addition to teaching curricula that present situations similar to what the students are going through, Mr. Lee, the HOD of English, explained that the school tries to bring in woman role models who traverse the multiple identities that girls in the school represent. Mr. Lee provided the following example: “I have a friend; her name is [Tara Mills]. She’s … quite a successful actress … in quite a few films in Hollywood and lots of high acclaimed theatre in Cape Town. She came to the school in 2014, and I remember the kids were mad for her. She’s a Muslim woman.”

By bringing in a Muslim woman who can talk about how she straddles her Islamic faith at home versus in public, Mr. Lee is providing a role model who can be useful to the students and thus engaging in an important tenet of culturally relevant pedagogy—“a willingness to nurture and support cultural competence.”³⁹ The need to bring in outside role models might also demonstrate the necessity of having teachers and administrators that come from backgrounds similar to those of the students who attend the school. Teachers and administrators who share the backgrounds of the students may be better able to share how they themselves negotiate the seemingly conflicting terrains of tradition, modernity, race, gender, and poverty. Mr. Rowland acknowledges this possibility when asked about his biggest teaching challenge: “Being White,” he responds. When asked to explain, he acknowledges, “I just don’t come from their life experience.”

The students appear to find the race of the teachers challenging as well. While the school student population is majority non-White, only three of the twenty-six teachers are Black. Before 2017, only one of the twenty-six teachers was Black. Without prompting, Zeneba spoke of the impact of not having teachers that looked like her: “A lot of teachers are White. There are like three Black teachers out of twenty-six, and two came this year, and I feel very intimidated. I change how I talk … I feel like they wouldn’t be able to understand how I talk … The way they teach as well, especially the White teachers, is an advantage to non-Black students, especially in English where it’s discussion-based. Like when a Black person raises a concern, it’s like we shouldn’t get that deep into it. They dampen people[’s] voices … There is really only one teacher I can talk to comfortably.” When questioned, Zeneba notes that this teacher is Black.

Fortunately, Mr. Lee acknowledges the challenge of being “the White man telling them how to speak English,” and the students interviewed expressed that they have learned to view him, specifically, as an ally. “At the beginning of the year, I struggled talking to him [because] he is male and White,” Kai said. “But one day, I didn’t know who to talk to, and I went to talk to [Mr. Lee] and he told me I was going to get through … and that [I] have to develop a thick [skin].” Still, they largely consider Mr. Lee as an exception. In addition, although Mr. Lee and others acknowledge the difficulty of being a White male who teaches students how to straddle their multiple identities, they also admit they are unsure what to do about it. In the interim, the girl students struggle to see school as a safe space where, in the words of Zeneba, students can express themselves “openly, without fear of judgment.”

EXPERIENCING SEXUAL ABUSE, TRAUMA, AND HARM TO SELF-ESTEEM

Wellsboro students have significant encounters with everyday violence, often in and on their way to school. For example, multiple students shared experiences of sexual abuse and harassment at the hands of male peers. Zeneba recalled experiences of being sexually abused by a family friend and then a boyfriend: “I have been sexually assaulted … I have been touched by a family friend, and for a long time I didn’t know that what he was doing was wrong, and for a while I didn’t know it wasn’t my fault—from school, religion, from a lot of factors in my life … I felt like it was my fault … and it happened again later. I had a boyfriend earlier this year, and he wouldn’t take a no for an answer, and I was screaming.”

Like many girls around the world, Zeneba had not been taught that she did not deserve unwanted sexual advances, and, thus, she found it difficult to see herself as other than blameworthy. She described how school rules to “wear long skirts” to “not invite negative attention” gave her the impression that she should “feel guilty for being a woman.” In addition, she described her experiences as contributing to her fear of men: “Now, I don’t want people touching me, which is sad because I don’t want to be that way.”

Similarly, Kai described being sexually abused by two boys at the train stop on their way home from school: “In primary school, I think I was in grade 6 or 5, there were these two boys … They bullied me quite a lot. We were at the station, [and] they just felt they were entitled to my body and started to touch me in all the places I did not feel good about. I couldn’t really scream anything … They told me not to scream.”

This was not Kai’s only encounter with one of the boys. Kai said, “In grade 8 and grade 9, one of the same boys was asking me out and … I said no … and he said if he sees me in public he would rape me … I had a period where I did not go out my house. It was like a month or so because I was afraid … Until this day I still fear for my life … It’s created a lot of fear in me … and it’s also scarred me in having relationships with boys.”

The effects of these experiences on Zeneba and Kai may not be reflected in their excellent grades, but they are reflected in their lives and, thus, cannot be understated. For both Zeneba and Kai, these experiences negatively affect their perceptions of and relationships with men. They have also led to negative perceptions in regard to their self-esteem and body image. It made them feel guilty for others’ actions for which they were not responsible. How can schools work to change this?

Building Achievement-Oriented Identities at Wellsboro

Fortunately, during my research and after there were multiple policies and practices at Wellsboro that sought to improve the educational experiences of students like Kai, thereby contributing to the construction of achievement-oriented identities. These include a greater emphasis on developing a gender-conscious curriculum through Life Orientation and English classes, the establishment of a gender-neutral uniform policy followed by the proposal for a gender-neutral hair policy, and, finally, the promotion of after-school peer networks and trauma-informed counseling services.

SEEKING GENDER-CONSCIOUS CURRICULUMS

In South Africa, all learners are required to take a Life Orientation course in which they learn about important topics, such as sex education. Wellsboro utilized this course to address significant issues related to sexual abuse and rape, which were occurring in and around the school. Mr. Lee described how he set the stage for these conversations by being “open emotionally” and vulnerable. He and other teachers worked to ensure that their education materials do not perpetuate negative gender stereotypes. For example, they discussed an exercise from the required Life Orientation textbook in which students were provided a scenario of a girl student who went to a party and was raped. The exercise then asked students to provide potential reasons for why she was raped. The teachers identified this as an example of victim blaming, so they contacted the administration and publisher and were able to get the exercise removed. Even when the textbook was not explicitly blaming the victim, teachers had to manage how students responded to lessons on rape in co-ed classes, in which students may have “traditional mindsets around what it means to be a man and what it means to be a woman.” For example, when learning about rape in Mr. Lee’s course, Kai shared the following story: “We had a [Life Orientation] class. We were talking about rape, which was the first time we talked about rape … A boy raised his hand and said, ‘If a prostitute is raped, is that rape or shoplifting?’ and I went up to him after school and I told him, ‘You don’t understand what females are going through and if your mom got raped, would you like that?’ And he said, ‘Rape is rape, it just happens.’ ”

Following the incident, Kai spoke to Mr. Lee, who then assured Kai that their perspective was accurate and to continue “to stand against that.” This example demonstrates not only the extent to which unhealthy attitudes about rape take shape but also the clear need for courses in schools that provide a means of talking about topics that may be associated with certain myths, stigmas, or taboos at home.

Furthermore, while these conversations can be, and often are, hurtful at first, they may ultimately lead to a healthy discussion between students on issues such as rape and sexual abuse. Kai said that, after talking to Mr. Lee, they were able to talk to the male student and come to a better understanding on the topic of rape. Kai also mentioned that, thereafter, they were able to more easily engage in healthy discussion on other important issues.

While these conversations may not contribute to increased math scores or traditional forms of academic achievement, Mr. Lee recognizes they are just as important as those measures. In particular, he states: “I’m not doing this to get the marks for achievement. I’m doing it because we live in a culture where … a rape happens every five seconds. [There are] horrible statistics of domestic gender violence, and I see it on a daily basis … I see patterns of … everyday sexism … that I find abhorrent. My motivation for doing it is not results driven, it is socially driven.”

Students recognize Mr. Lee’s efforts to make the school a safe space where they feel protected, which is a critical first step to building achievement-oriented identities. But further work is needed to shape the school as a safe space, in particular the proposal and implementation of gender-neutral policies.

ESTABLISHING GENDER-NEUTRAL POLICIES

When Wellsboro opened, it had specific policies on how boys and girls should dress and wear their hair. Boys wore shorts and girls wore skirts; boys had short haircuts and girls tied up their hair. Before I visited in 2017, these policies were being questioned by the students and administrators alike. For example, Zeneba described how teachers “police” their clothing by “literally measur[ing] how long [their] skirts are” on a routine basis, while Kai discussed their negative experiences with natural hair worn in an afro. As Kai noted, “The teacher told me to tie up my hair because it was untidy. I have an afro … my hair is natural. I really like my hair. I didn’t tie up my hair … It grows outward, it grows up … it defies gravity.”

Students view school policies related to hair and dress as demeaning. Fortunately, the school worked to implement a gender-neutral uniform policy that was ultimately passed. It then proposed a gender-neutral hair policy that was in the process of being considered at the time of the research. As part of the decision-making process, both students and staff were assigned to a committee on the policy change, and serious discussions were had about what it really meant to ensure that the policy was “neutral.” An example of these conversations was reiterated by Mr. Lee: “As it stands now, [the hair policy states that hair] has to be natural color, can’t fall down your face, has to be tied up, has to be the same color, and boys have to wear their hair just cut down—neat and presentable … And the point was raised by another staff member that hair needs to be considerate of others … So if you have afro hair, you are basically [being told] that you can’t wear an afro. If the motivation is to let kids be free, should we have a hair policy at all?”

This dialogue highlights how the members of the school struggle to develop a policy that enables students to be free of binaries while still working to be “considerate” of others. Kai, who sits on the committee, holds true to the position that there should not be a hair policy at all by raising the question, “Why would my hair affect my grades?” In the meantime, students essentially hide aspects of themselves while trying to follow the policy in place. For example, Zeneba revealed that she wore her hijab in part to cover the blue dye she put in her hair, while Kai wore bigger glasses to cover a nose ring. Both students were dealing with the constraints of these gender-based policies and working to navigate them and transgress them altogether.

EMPLOYING SCHOOL RESOURCES

When girl students transgress gender-based polices in and outside of the classroom, they still rely heavily on the resources available to them through the school. These resources might seem disparate, from counseling services to sanitary pads. In many cases their most important resource is each other. The availability of counseling services, specifically, is consistent with current efforts to mainstream practices which recognize that kids have serious experiences with trauma, and that this trauma may be exacerbated by punitive school environments.⁴⁰ Accordingly, supporters of trauma-informed schools call for an educational structure that is responsive to these traumas at all levels.⁴¹

At Wellsboro, the availability of a counselor is essential, especially among the many students who describe themselves as coming from backgrounds where they are told to just “deal with it.” Kai, for example, had the even greater challenge of balancing achieving academic success and fighting negative educational experiences with battling anxiety and depression. As Kai said, “People are so focused on getting high grades and competition, worried on what is going on on Instagram instead of the world, and it is hard … The school does not give me strategies. It’s only about working harder and longer, which I do not like … I would force myself to study even through my anxiety and depression … My emotions fluctuate a lot … if I am too happy, then I have a month of going through a lot … and I feel numb and empty and I have suicide episodes. I have to stop putting too much pressure on myself so I do not get an episode.”

Kai’s words make clear the serious challenges of dealing with depression and anxiety in a competitive setting where students are being told that “working harder and longer” is the solution to academic success. Indeed, Kai has confidence, which acts as an important precursor to achievement-oriented identities. However, Kai and other students still need an institutional setting where they can feel safe and have specific strategies to respond to their experiences.

Kai praised the counselor at the school for giving them tools to encourage positive thinking at moments when Kai is considering self-harm. These tools include journaling about happy moments for ten minutes a day to shift their thinking. The counselor’s office, thus, is considered a “safe space” where Kai and others can share their challenges and learn how to respond to them.

In addition to counseling, Wellsboro provides another key resource to its girl students: free sanitary pads. The girl students acknowledge that “in most schools, [students] don’t have that right.” Accordingly, students at the school regularly host drives through the student organization to ensure that those who come from families where they cannot afford pads can have access to them at any time. In addition, they focus on the collection of sanitary pads, as opposed to tampons, after realizing that the use of tampons might exclude their Muslim peers, who may be concerned about “inserting something between their legs.” The students’ ability to collect resources that consider the financial and cultural cost associated with being a girl on her menstrual cycle is critical for supporting their collective net achievement.

Still, there are perhaps no relationships more important for students than the ones they have with each other. By working with one another, students make clear how their peer-to-peer relationships play a critical role in facilitating their net achievement. For example, during separate interviews, Zeneba and Kai referenced each other multiple times. As stated by Zeneba, “I see a lot of myself in [Kai]. [They] go through a lot of the same things I do … [Kai] is cool … is very vocal and also does really well in school.” Similarly, Kai describes Zeneba as “amazing.” She continues, “Some of my motivation is from her … I have learned so much from her. She is also one of the reasons I got into journaling.” Such positive peer relationships offer one more avenue of support in girl students’ educational experiences.

Does Wellsboro Combat Challenges, Protect Girls, and Create Safe Spaces?

The Wellsboro School promotes a clear, gender-conscious curriculum that contends with serious issues such as rape, offers protections such as the promotion and passage of gender-neutral policies, and supplies trauma-informed counseling services and opportunities for peer networking. The school proactively works to provide a safe space where students feel protected. The school’s actions also help them develop the strategies they need to confront challenges and transgress norms.

Nonetheless, the school admits that there is much more work to be done. For example, the school has engaged in an increasingly Eurocentric literature curriculum that primarily focuses on Shakespeare. Additionally, even with the knowledge that kids struggle with food, lights, and transportation, there have been very few specific strategies in place to provide help beyond advice that emphasizes the importance of “working hard.” The HOD and other teachers have suggested initiatives such as home visits and department cultural intelligence workshops, but they lacked buy-in because of the general emphasis on math and science at the school.

More broadly, initiatives to fix gender relations as a mechanism for creating safe spaces in all schools across South Africa continue to be stifled by a culture of silence. This culture of silence affects women’s and girls’ ability to speak about their sexual health, express their vulnerabilities, and make demands for what they need to lead healthy lives. As stated by Robert Morrell, South African scholar and executive director of the Human Sciences Research Council, “Silence is a suppressed discourse. It is thus an effect of power. Dominant discourses permit and [legitimize] certain vocabularies and values while marginalising or silencing others.”⁴² bell hooks, a leading race and gender scholar in the United States, describes the effect of this silence as “engendered by resignation and acceptance of one’s lot.”⁴³ The multiple marginal positions in which girls find themselves often contribute to the perception that they do not have the liberty to share their experiences and be taken seriously. In other words, not all students are as open as Zeneba and Kai about their negative experiences and trauma. In fact, most students aren’t open at all.⁴⁴ But why should they have to be when they attend schools that fail to provide them with the safety and security to share what they are going through?

As emphasized by advocates of trauma-informed schools, students should be able to have their negative experiences and traumas addressed and accounted for not only at the counseling office, but also in every area of the school. Furthermore, these efforts must take into account the gendered nature of much violence (girls typically experience rape and sexual assault through personal relationships), and that the traumas they produce can have specific, gendered effects (girls are more likely to report anxiety and depression).⁴⁵

Most notably, efforts to transform schools into safe spaces must be developed in concert with revised notions of achievement. In other words, safe schools must contend with the following questions: if Zeneba and Kai earn high grades but experience trauma in the process, have they still achieved? Are they still South African success stories? If not, how can measures of achievement be adjusted to account for a broader awareness of the everyday violence that students face in school?

In the end, academic achievement may be the purpose of a school in an equitable world, but in an inequitable world, a presupposition of a school is that it does not harm its students. Thus, developing a school as a safe space is a critical first step to providing all students with the protections they need to secure net achievement. Once schools are safe, they have the foundational components for being gender-equitable—feminist—institutions.