The question comes down to this: by calling a child a bully, are you reinforcing that behaviour? Forever typecasting them into the role of bully? Building up their self-image into that of a bully?

Currently, there’s at least a few different ways of thinking about this issue:

  1. The first group believes that the focus of bullying should be on changing behaviour and that labeling the participants is counterproductive to that (e.g., we should refer to ‘the child that bullies’ rather than ‘the bully’.) Especially in the cases of learning disabilities and illness, that makes sense. You don’t want to forever refer to the child with asthma as ‘the asthmatic’. There’s more to any child than their illness or disability and so they shouldn’t be identified by it alone.
  2. The second group, more in line with the zero tolerance policy on bullying, believes that a bully is a bully is a bully. Get rid of the bullies, you solve the problem.
  3. A third perspective, put forward by Barbara Coloroso, is to “use labels as identifiers of certain roles and the behavioural characteristics of those roles. When a child is referred to as a bully, it’s intended to identify only a role that the child is performing at that moment in that one scene. It’s not intended to permanently label a child.” That is to say that, when you call a child a bully, you’re referring only to the role the child is playing in that instant when they’re bullying someone.

While I believe that the first and third perspectives listed above both have their strengths, it’s important to keep the audience in mind.

The third perspective, while very practical for when adults are discussing bullying incidents (it’s much faster to say ‘the bully’ than ‘the child that’s bullying’), is likely far too subtle a distinction for small children to understand.

A child repeatedly referred to as a bully will come to believe that they’re a bully. Even adults are susceptible to this. A child repeatedly referred to as a bully is likely to build up a reputation as such and be thought of as ‘a bully’ by adults.

Watching our words and doing our best to use the language of behaviour (a child that bullies) rather than labels (the bully) will help all of us to keep in mind that, beneath the labels and roles, these are children that need help and guidance to move past this.