Is the GRAFITI around the corner still the same?
Fifth-year scientist’s project looks at nasty scribbles on school toilet doors
BOYS from mixed schools are more empathetic than males who attend single-sex schools, according to the findings of a BT Young Scientist project on bathroom graffiti.
Hollie Servis-Thorpe, 17, and Erin Hayes, 16, from Roscommon Community College came up with the idea to analyse graffiti on bathroom walls after overhearing a first-year student telling their principal he had been bullied in a piece of graffiti.
Their project, ‘Tagged walls and teenage tales: Unveiling the secrets behind graffiti in secondary school bathrooms’, was one of 550 on display in the RDS this week for the 60th Young Scientist and Technology Exhibition.
The two fifth-year pupils counted and analysed graffiti from the male and female loos in their school, conducted an online survey of over 400 pupils nationwide, and did semistructured interviews with 50 students from their own school and 50 from a local boys’ school.
Erin told the Irish Mail on Sunday: ‘We found that the boys in a mixed school are very empathetic towards graffiti in admitting they know it’s wrong and when they see it, they know it’s affecting someone. Whereas in the all-male school, they said the opposite – they just said, “Oh yeah, that’s funny. I don’t care who it hurts.” Which was very upsetting to see.’
‘A prominent theme of graffiti in our male bathrooms is a gang tag, such as [Roscommon estate] “Grove Street for life”,’ Hollie said. ‘We also found a lot of sexualised images and statements, whereas our female bathrooms... they did have some of that but they also had a lot of positive statements and images. There was stuff like “You’ve got this” or “School doesn’t matter, you can get through the day,” which was really nice to see because it’s like a support system.’
‘There was also a lot of racist things, saying negative things about a race or ethnic group in the boys’ bathroom and there was also a lot of anti-semitic symbols like swastikas,’ Erin added. ‘That was really upsetting.’
Seán O’Sullivan f r o m Coláiste Chiaráin in Co. Limerick won first prize on Friday for his AI verification project ‘VerifyMe: A new approach to authorship attribution in the post-ChatGPT era’.