Why You Shouldn’t Call a Bully a Bully: Bullying and the Use of Labels and Roles standard
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: 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 ...
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