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A review by punkinmuffin
Moral Panic 101: Equality, Acceptance and the Safe Schools Scandal by Benjamin Law
5.0
Late to the party on this one. Published in September 2017, Benjamin Law performs a thorough post-mortem on Australia's National Safe Schools program. In the process, he not only debunks the outrageous claims of social conservatives who campaigned against the program, he calmly documents the origins of Safe Schools, its creators and champions, its resources and the howlers used against it. Most importantly, Law brings everything back to the people who have the most at stake: LGBTIQ children. LGBTIQ people "have the highest rates of suicidality of any demographic in the country." That any child would want to kill themselves is desperately sad. The fact that bullied children can and do succeed in ending their lives is horrific.
As Law writes towards the end of his essay, "People have become so frightened of phantom hypotheticals lately that we're asking the strangest questions, with little bearing on reality. That has paralysed us and distracted us from asking the simplest and most important questions of children: What do you need of us? And how can we help?"
As Law writes towards the end of his essay, "People have become so frightened of phantom hypotheticals lately that we're asking the strangest questions, with little bearing on reality. That has paralysed us and distracted us from asking the simplest and most important questions of children: What do you need of us? And how can we help?"