Student wins Dukeminier Award

Paper focuses on protecting LGBT bully victims

-By Lori Craig

The bullying of LGBT schoolchildren, an issue that has attracted national media attention during the past year, motivated Shannon Raj ’11 to think about how the law can help.

“There are so many difficult aspects of being a student, whether it’s budget cuts or problems at home or bad teachers or not enough resources, and I can only imagine how difficult it would be as an LGBT student to also face bullying,” Raj said. “I think there’s action that needs to be taken, and as a lawyer I think this is a unique angle from which to approach it.”

Shannon Raj

Raj’s ideas for action, in the form of a note called “Deliberately Strengthening ‘Deliberate Indifference:’ A Call to Re-Interpret School Liability for Peer Bullying Under Title IX,” have earned her the 2010 Dukeminier Award. Raj’s article will be published in an upcoming issue of The Dukeminier Awards Journal of Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity Law, and she receives a $1,000 prize.

Raj proposes a change to the standard under which schools can be found liable under Title IX for failing to protect LGBT students from bullying. Under the current standard, schools are found liable only if they react in a deliberately indifferent manner in dealing with the bully. Raj wants the courts to interpret the standard in a more victim-centric way.

“The problem is, if there are multiple bullies focusing on a single victim but the school has dealt successively with each of them, the victim is still at risk while the school can’t be deemed to have acted in a manner that is clearly unreasonable,” Raj said. “I propose that deliberate indifference is looked at from a more victim-centric point of view so that a single student won’t be victimized repeatedly. It’s about looking at the whole environment in which the bullying is taking place and considering something ineffective if it’s ineffective for a victim.”

The United States Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit has taken a stronger approach to finding schools liable under Title IX – and consequently removing federal funding – but not all other circuits are following suit, Raj said.

Raj originally wrote the note for Prof. David Cruz’s course Sexual Orientation and the Law. He encouraged her to revise and submit it to the contest.

The daughter of a Bay Area middle school special education teacher, Raj has heard about the difficulties of dealing with bullies, and recent media focus on a number of suicides by LGBT students touched a chord with Raj. In her research, she found that two-thirds of LGBT students surveyed reported feeling unsafe at school in the past year.

“I’m about to graduate law school and I feel so fortunate to have been able to go so far with my education, but this just seems like such an unnecessary obstacle that so many people are facing,” Raj said. “For a single student to be victimized is unacceptable. As lawyers it seems like these standards, where they’re not working, need to be strengthened, either statutorily or in the courts.”

Following her graduation in May, Raj will work in the Los Angeles office of Bingham McCutchen LLP.