VANCOUVER—The longer a school has a gay-straight alliance club, the more safe students feel at school, according to new research from the University of B.C.

Gay-straight alliances (also called gender and sexuality alliances) are student clubs that provide support for queer and gender nonconforming youth.

UBC nursing professor Elizabeth Saewyc and her team have found that both LGBTQ and straight teens feel safer at school for each additional year the school’s GSA is operating.

“That increase in safety doesn’t plateau,” said Saewyc, who is also the executive director of the university’s Stigma and Resilience Among Vulnerable Youth Centre.

“Some schools actually started GSAs 14 and more years ago,” she said, and after three years, five years and even 10 years, “it’s just a continuing increase in the extent to which young people feel safe in school and that’s the same for lesbian, gay, bisexual teens and for straight teens.”

Previous research has shown that when a GSA has been around for three years or more, there’s a lower rate of suicidal thoughts in both gay and straight kids, Saewyc added.

The new paper, published in the SSM — Population Health journal, used new statistical modelling and data from B.C.’s 2003, 2008 and 2013 adolescent health surveys. Youth at 135 schools, in grades 7 through 12, were asked how safe they felt in different locations at school, specifically in classrooms, hallways, bathrooms, the cafeteria, the library and outside on school grounds.

Governments worldwide are providing queer and trans people with more legal protection. For example, changes to human-rights laws in B.C. in 2016 and at the national level in 2017 aimed to protect transgender and gender nonconforming people from discrimination.

Regardless, Saewyc said there’s still been controversy around gay-straight alliances.

Some people claim that the clubs only help LGBTQ kids and might even “cause confusion or might cause harm,” she said. Some have been campaigning to remove queer-positive education from curriculums in both B.C. and Ontario.

However, Saewyc said, “this research provides yet another and an even more robust set of evidence here in Canada and going back even years … with solid population-level measurement that, in fact, (GSAs) provide significant benefit including for heterosexual people.”