‘If I’m getting beat up, then I’ll tell someone’ – understanding young people’s reticence to report racism to teachers in Scotland

Scottish schools have seen a near tripling of recorded racist bullying incidents to 1,198 documented reports in 2022 (crer, 2022) and research amongst Scottish teachers suggests practitioners feel ill-equipped to challenge racism in education settings (Hay, Davies and Sapouna, 2024). Global research indicates that global ethnic majority (gem) young people often express apprehension in reporting racist bullying due to disparaging responses from teachers and the popular belief that bullying is ‘normal’ (Sapouna, de Amicis and Vezzali, 2022). Understanding the factors that influence young people in Scotland to withhold or report racism to practitioners is fundamental in developing anti-racist school approaches.

From March to December 2024, 14 gem young people aged 12 to 18 were recruited as co-researchers across Scotland for a doctoral study. Implementing an arts-based approach to data creation and facilitating a collaborative analysis process, young people worked with the lead researcher to identify prevalent themes in cultural coping with racism – one of which being the reticence to report.

Applying Lazarus and Folkman’s (1984) transactional model of stress and coping, reporting is conceptualised as both an emotion-focused and problem-focused approach. Reporting is frequently understood as a problem-focused means of seeking external intervention (Baker and Berenbaum, 2007), however, young people within this study further highlighted their reticence to report incidents as a means of seeking emotional and social support from practitioners. Co-researcher’s perceived severity of racist incidents often suggested a normalisation of racism that deterred them from reporting to schools for either support (emotion-focused coping) or intervention (problem-focused coping). This was further compounded by the resounding sentiment that nothing to effectively tackle racism will be done, even if the incident is raised. Together, these narratives of normalisation and inefficacy significantly impact the likelihood young people will report racism in school.