How the “Guide to LGBTIQ+ Topics for Primary and Secondary School Teachers” could have changed the lives of generations of children and young people in the late 1990s and early 2000s
When I watched the morning programme Jutro on TV Prva and listened to Dragan Koprivica and Mitar Šušić speak about a manual intended to help education professionals recognise and stop homophobic violence in schools, I did not feel I was hearing anything new. I was hearing the voices of an old time – the one in which I grew up. A time when children like me were not seen as children in need of protection, but as a problem to be corrected, fixed, or silenced.
I attended Marko Miljanov Primary School. When I think of it today, what I feel first is a sense of coldness and unease. It seemed like a place where it was easy to get lost, and even easier to become invisible. The first comment I remember about myself in that school was “ženski Petko”, uttered in the second grade. I did not even know what it meant. As the school years passed, the comments grew harsher, accompanied by pushing in the corridors, threats, and increasingly aggressive verbal abuse. In the seventh grade, an incident occurred that was then dismissed as children’s play. What they called a game at the time, I was only able to name properly more than a decade later – sexual violence. Those who did it to me, I believe, still do not understand their actions as such, if they remember them at all. I remember. These were the generations of “tough” boys growing up in the 1990s, in a time when displays of force were normalised.
At the time, none of this was recognised as violence. There was no language for it. There were no manuals, no protocols, no awareness that such things were happening to children who were not “masculine enough”, “tough enough”, or who did not fit expected norms. In primary school, instead of protection, I was told that I had to change – to toughen up, to be “more of a boy”. In other words, the problem was not what was being done to me, but who I was.
When I enrolled in Sergije Stanić Secondary School, I hoped things would be different. A new environment, new people, a chance to start over. But the moment I saw some familiar faces from primary school, I felt fear. I knew that the story of my, then only presumed, sexual orientation would follow me. And it did – within two weeks. Only this time, the violence was more open, more intense, and constant. It continued throughout all four years. There are events I chose to suppress, to separate from myself, and I am reminded of them only occasionally, when I notice a scar on my body. In secondary school, no one reacted. Absolutely no one. They saw the violence, they knew about it – and they remained silent.
This is perhaps the most important point that people fail to understand today when they casually speak of “ideology” and the “imposition” of topics related to LGBTIQ persons. Violence was not only in words and physical attacks. Violence was also in the silence of the school. In the absence of any adult who would say: “Stop, this is not a joke. This is not mischief – this is violence.” For me, school was not a place of protection. It was a place where I learned fear.
School eventually ended, but what it left in me did not. I withdrew, lost confidence, and spent far too long living with the feeling that I had to make myself smaller in order to be safer. When I later began to understand my own sexual identity, I did not accept it – I suppressed it. I convinced myself it was just a phase, that it would disappear if I stayed quiet long enough, endured enough, and waited. That internal struggle lasted for years, almost until my thirties. This is what society produces when it fails to protect children and young people from violence: it teaches them to be ashamed of themselves instead of those who harmed them.
When I finally began to understand what I should have been told much earlier, that I was not the problem, but the system of values that surrounded me, and the homophobia that stemmed from it, I learned to respect myself, because school had not taught me that, and society even less so.
That is why I know today that a guide like this could have changed the lives of many of us. Not because it would have magically prevented all violence, but because it stands as a reminder that schools never had the right to remain silent. Teachers would have had to react, schools would have had to act proactively, and the burden would not have been left on the child enduring violence. Perhaps that is its greatest value: not only in protecting against violence, but in enabling some children to learn much earlier to accept, value, and respect themselves.
If we had had the Guide that is being ignorantly attacked today, many of us would have believed much earlier in the most important truth: that we were never the problem, but rather a society that for too long tried to present its narrowness, prejudice, and violence as tradition, honour, heroism, and moral values.
Miloš Knežević, Development Coordinator at the Centre for Civic Education (CCE)