Disrupting the Silence: School Leadership, Bias, and the Urgency of Culturally Responsive Praxis in the Face of Gender-Based Violence

Abstract

School-related gender-based violence (SRGBV)remains a persistent and underaddressed issue within K–12 educational systems, disproportionately impacting girls, LGBTQ+ youth, students of color, and students navigating intersecting forms of marginalization. While policies such as Title IX establish formal obligations for schools, institutional responses to SRGBV are often shaped by silence, bias, and compliance-driven practices that fail to protect survivors or disrupt systemic harm. This chapter examines SRGBV as a leadership issue, arguing that meaningful change requires moving beyond procedural responses toward culturally responsive, transformative praxis. Drawing on interdisciplinary scholarship in educational leadership, gender studies, trauma-informed practice, and critical theory, the chapter explores how bias operates at interpersonal, institutional, and structural levels to shape whose harm is recognized, whose voices are believed, and whose safety is prioritized. Anchored in transformative leadership theory and culturally sustaining frameworks, the chapter highlights how regimes of truth, deficit-based mindsets, and performative equity initiatives perpetuate silencing and retraumatization within schools. The chapter offers an integrative framework for district and campus leaders that emphasizes critical self-interrogation, intersectionality, community engagement, data-informed accountability, and healing-centered approaches to discipline and disclosure response. Rather than presenting SRGBV as an isolated behavioral problem, this work positions it as a systemic failure requiring ethical, political, and relational leadership. By centering dignity, equity, and belonging, the chapter provides practical and theoretical guidance for leaders seeking to disrupt cultures of silence and reimagine schools as sites of safety, care, and collective responsibility.