Dutch high school students wear purple on Friday to support LGBTQIA+ peers
Today is Paarse Vrijdag, or Purple Friday, in the Netherlands. On this day, secondary school students wear something purple to show support for their LGBTQIA+ peers. Three-quarters of secondary schools are participating this year. About one in ten are holding a full-out celebration of diversity, the rest pay attention with extra lectures on the topic, RTL Nieuws reported.
In the broader society, opinions about Paarse Vrijdag are more divided, RTL found when surveying 19,000 members of its opinion panel. Almost half of the Dutch, 47 percent, are positive about the initiative. A third is negative about it. Common objections are that such initiatives emphasize differences and that there is too much attention for the topic of LGBTQIA+ acceptance.
Secondary school teachers and parents of LGTBQIA+ children are much more positive. A teacher said: “I want not only my own children but also all my students to become happy people and to have the freedom and space to find out how they can be happy.”
RTL researcher Gijs Rademaker thinks that the opinion of “experts by experience” should weigh more heavily here. “Of the participants who are LGBTIQ+ themselves, 42 percent think that such a day contributes to better acceptance, and of the parents of an LGBTIQ+ student, 31 percent think that.”
About 8 percent of schools said that Paarse Vrijdag causes tensions at the school. A small group of teachers said that there are more absences on Paarse Vrijdag than on a regular school day. And about half of the teachers said that only a few students participate in the initiative.
There are concerns about an apparent decrease in LGBTQIA+ acceptance in the Netherlands. The Youth Health Monitor 2023 showed that only 43 percent of young people in Amsterdam accept that two people of the same sex can be in love with each other.
Earlier on Friday, Statistics Netherlands reported that gay men and women are over twice as likely than the average Dutch person to experience discrimination. One in ten Dutch people aged 15 and older experienced discrimination last year. Among homosexual men and women, that was 25 percent.
The actual number of discrimination victims in the LGBTQIA+ community is likely even higher. The Amsterdam LGBTQIA+ community launched its own reporting point for discrimination during Pride this summer, to lower the threshold for victims to come forward. In a few months, it received over 300 percent more reports than the authorities received in all of last year.
LGBTQIA+ people are also more likely to fall victim to crimes and more than twice as likely to experience sexual violence.
