When Anna Kilbride told a classmate she would not have sex with him because she is a lesbian, he responded that he would “fix” her by breaking into her home and raping her.

Growing up as a disabled, openly queer teenager in a conservative Phoenix suburb, Kilbride was no stranger to bullying or sexual harassment. She said she was frequently teased at school and called slurs, including by the boy who threatened to rape her. Another boy groped her in middle school.

“The Sunday school staff had the audacity to blame it on what I was wearing,” Kilbride told LOOKOUT. “I was wearing a shirt with Sailor Moon on it, and leggings.”

After the threat of corrective rape — intended to “cure” lesbians of their lack of attraction to men — Kilbride’s mental health plummeted. She said the student was on the same bus route as her and knew where she lived. She began refusing to go to school and considered self-harm, as she had after being assaulted.

Her parents wanted to report the threat to local police, but Kilbride said the school allegedly told them it would expel her if they did. It ultimately made little difference. Kilbride soon dropped out of school and was admitted to a psychiatric treatment center in Surprise.

Kilbride’s experience is far from unique. Research on the experiences of LGBTQ+ K-12 students in Arizona is limited, but the studies that do exist paint a troubling picture of LGBTQ+ students’ safety in the state’s education system.

In 2021, more than one in 10 LGBTQ+ youth in Arizona reported being physically assaulted at school because of their sexual orientation, according to the LGBTQ+ advocacy organization GLSEN. That figure rose to one-in-four when students were asked about physical harassment. 

The 2015 U.S. Transgender Survey also found that 24% of transgender Arizona respondents who attended K-12 schools said they had been physically attacked because of their gender identity, while 8% reported sexual assault motivated by their gender identity.

To understand the breadth of the problem, LOOKOUT spoke with advocates, researchers, teachers, parents, and students about discriminatory harassment and violence against LGBTQ+ students in Arizona’s K-12 schools. We also requested records from four school districts — Scottsdale Unified, Peoria Unified, Tucson Unified, and Phoenix Union — showing how often physical and sexual violence incidents were reported in social worker logs.

The records do not identify whether the students involved in those incidents are LGBTQ+, as Arizona school districts do not consistently track victims’ sexual orientation or gender identity in school safety incident logs. Instead, the records provide a broader picture of assault and bullying among students that coincides with LGBTQ+-specific victimization.

Our reporting found that:

• Scottsdale Unified recorded nearly 400 student safety incidents involving bullying, harassment or violence during the 2024-25 and 2025-26 school years. More than 150 were assaults, and nearly 70 involved sexual conduct or harassment.
• Social workers recorded little to no response time for almost all of those incidents. Of the nearly 400 cases, only 10 had any response hours logged — nine bullying incidents and one assault. Most received just one hour of documented response.
• An Arizona proposition that would restrict restroom and locker room use for transgender students could affect the school climate for gender-nonconforming youth. Research from other states has found increased harassment and victimization associated with similar restrictions.

LOOKOUT attempted to reach staff of school districts for comment, but emails either bounced back or were no longer being used. We also attempted to contact people by cell phone, but did not get a response back. 

The forces behind the crisis

Studies show LGBTQ+ students can be reluctant to confide in authority figures about harassment or assault, and that adults often do not take action when students come forward. That can be especially difficult when the incident involves sexual violence, which children may already struggle to discuss or report.

“If your school counselor is somebody who is potentially anti-LGBTQ … it’s likely they’re not going to be giving resources for LGBTQ+ organizations, and so even being able to reach students is an issue,” said Carrie Eutizi, a sexual violence response coordinator with the Arizona Coalition to End Sexual and Domestic Violence.

“I don’t trust teachers anymore, really. I hate school, I hate work. I hate other kids. I hate this, I hate that. I hate pretty much everything except my friends."
- Violet DuMont, 12, who was harassed and bullied at her school after being open about her transition.

The result is that LGBTQ+ students can face harassment at school while also being unsure whether the adults responsible for their safety will intervene. Researchers said Arizona’s policy environment is part of the backdrop for why students may be hesitant to come forward about being victimized, as well as why peer victimization occurs in the first place.

The Movement Advancement Project, a nonprofit think tank that tracks LGBTQ+ rights and other democracy-related issues, describes Arizona as having a “particularly hostile policy environment” for queer youth.

That environment, according to reports from MAP and the Human Rights Campaign, includes laws restricting discussions of LGBTQ+ topics in schools and a lack of requirements for schools to explicitly enumerate sexual orientation or gender identity among protected classes in anti-bullying policies. Researchers say these policies, along with the public debate surrounding them, can shape the climate in which LGBTQ+ students go to school.

“It’s not just about the negative legislation being passed, it’s also about it being debated (and) the way that broader rhetoric is affecting people’s social interactions,” said Tessa Juste, a MAP policy researcher and author of its youth report. “It creates a permission structure to further stigmatize an already stigmatized community.”

Parents of trans youth say bullying starts at the top

Often left out of the conversation, they say politicians and other parents are to blame for harassment.

LOOKOUTGeri Koeppel (she/her)

Transgender students face particular risks

In November, Arizona voters will decide whether to approve the “Protect Girls Sports in Arizona” measure, which would require all students at schools with athletic teams — regardless of whether they participate in sports themselves — to use restrooms, locker rooms and showers based on their sex assigned at birth.

A 2019 Harvard study published in the medical journal Pediatrics found that transgender and nonbinary students in grades seven through 12 experience alarming rates of sexual assault in schools: Among 3,673 students surveyed, as much as a quarter of trans boys and nonbinary people who were assigned birth as female reported experiencing sexual assault in the span of a year. Nearly 20% of trans girls also reported assault. 

Most importantly, the study found that transgender students whose schools restricted their use of restrooms or locker rooms aligned with their gender identity were more likely to experience sexual assault than those without such restrictions.

Arizona doesn’t have a bathroom ban for transgender students. But a parent of a transgender boy who wished to remain anonymous for the safety of her family told LOOKOUT that when her transgender son attended middle school in Scottsdale Unified School District, he was violently slapped by a classmate who was upset at him for washing his hands in the boys’ restroom instead of the girls’. 

She believes the student was influenced by adults’ conversations on the subject around him.

She also said her son’s classmate returned to school after being suspended for less than two days. The district’s code of conduct states that students who assault another student can be suspended for one to four days.

Twelve-year-old Violet DuMont and her parents, Michelle Callahan and Andy DuMont, lived in Tucson before moving to New Zealand. They are part of a wave of families, in Arizona and elsewhere, leaving the U.S. because of federal policies affecting transgender youth. Callahan also said her family was receiving death threats because of its activism on behalf of their child.

When Violet started using her new name and pronouns in elementary school, Callahan and Andy DuMont said the pushback from administrators, teachers and other parents was immediate. Andy remembers dropping Violet off at school the day after notifying the school of her transition. He said the principal shook her head at him and walked away.

“When we finally had a sit-down meeting with the principal and their language resource counselor, they said that I was pushing our beliefs on other parents and that it was making them uncomfortable … that the other families were not cool with us,” he said. He noted that the other families had been the ones to approach him and ask why Violet was wearing makeup and jewelry, despite her having done so before transitioning.

Then the bullying began. Violet said she remembers several instances of other children pushing her into the playground’s sandbox, causing her to hit her head, before dumping sand on her hair or dragging her across the sandbox — all while her teachers watched and did nothing, she said. She also said an older girl once tried to pull down her pants in public to expose her sex, an incident she did not tell her parents about until years later.

“I dug my fingernails into her wrist so she wouldn’t, and I pulled (my pants) back up. She was like, ‘Oh my God, you scratched me!’ And the teachers were like, ‘Oh hell no!’ So I got sent to the naughty corner,” Violet said.

Previously, when she had asked her teachers for help after being hurt on the playground several times, Violet said they told her she needed to “earn respect” from the other students. When her pants were pulled down, she said her teacher dismissed the incident as a “harmless prank.”

As a result of the bullying, Violet started suffering from anxiety and behavioral issues. She would lash out at other kids and attempted to run from the school’s playground into the parking lot. She was punished so frequently in kindergarten that she was held back and has since lost her previous love of learning.

“I don’t trust teachers anymore, really. I hate school, I hate work. I hate other kids. I hate this, I hate that. I hate pretty much everything except my friends,” she said.

LGBTQ+ Resources for Parents: A Guide to Safe Schools

More parents are looking to find a safe space for their children to go to school. We did some of the legwork for you.

LOOKOUTYana Kunichoff (she/her)

Scottsdale as a case study

To see how often harassment and violence appear in schools’ own records, LOOKOUT requested social worker logs from Scottsdale Unified, Peoria Unified, Tucson Unified and Phoenix Union districts.

Only Scottsdale Unified, where the anonymous parent alleged her son’s assault took place, returned records. The logs show that from the beginning of the 2024-25 school year through the end of the 2025-26 school year, there were nearly 400 recorded school safety incidents involving bullying, harassment and violence by students. More than 150 of those incidents were recorded as assaults, and nearly 70 involved sexual conduct or harassment.

Only 10 of the incidents had more than one hour of time dedicated to investigating the incident. Of those 10, nine were bullying offenses and one was an assault. The majority of those received only one hour of time responding to the claims. 

Additional records requested by LOOKOUT found that within one month of the same time period, Scottsdale Unified recorded out-of-school suspensions for 13 sexual harassment incidents, 13 harassment incidents, and 10 assaults.

The toll of harassment

Many of the long-term effects of anti-LGBTQ+ harassment and violence in schools are unknown. But a study by the Trevor Project found that LGBTQ+ youth who reported experiencing physical threat or harm because of their identity had a suicide attempt rate three times higher than those who did not. 

In Arizona, around 40% of LGBTQ+ young people have seriously considered suicide, and 11% have attempted suicide.

Juste said addressing the problem requires more than changes to state law. She said research indicates that enumerated anti-bullying protections, cultural competency training for staff and LGBTQ+ student groups are all associated with lower reported harm among LGBTQ+ youth.

Madelaine Adelman, a community advocate for Arizona’s LGBTQ+ youth through Just Schools, argued that it requires repealing the state’s parental choice legislation around LGBTQ+ stories. She said that by “cutting queer and trans stories out of the curriculum, you are explicitly expressing that those people are not like us, they’re less than,” setting LGBTQ+ students up for “the kinds of violence that push people out of school.”

Finally, Alison Macklin, director of public affairs at the Sexuality Information and Education Council of the United States, said 30 years of research have found comprehensive sex education to be associated with lower overall rates of bullying and sexual violence in schools. Arizona currently has restrictive laws regarding what can be taught in sex education and does not require it for students.

Since leaving school, Kilbride has spent her time trying to address the issue at its root. She now works with Peer Solutions, a youth-led organization focused on preventing violence, child abuse and bullying in schools.

“It’s my goal to create this statewide change through Peer Solutions so that no student, whether they’re disabled, non-disabled, straight, LGBT or disabled LGBT specifically, is unable to get the help, support and protection they need … so no student has to face what I went through twice,” she said.