Students Have a Better Term for “Bullying”

In my work in bullying prevention, I’ve advocated for dropping the terms “bully” and “victim” to describe, respectively, the one who uses the aggressive behavior and the one who is harmed by it. The terms are labels, are subjective, and carry strong negative connotations. They are grossly inaccurate and can serve as barriers to solving a bullying problem. The terms I use are “aggressor” and “target,” which are neutral, descriptive, and objective.

The term “bullying” is also very negative, which largely stems, I think, from the legacy definition to which the term was originally tied. This definition wrongly stated that the primary intent of these behaviors is to cause harm to another person. As such, the term implies intentional cruelty, unyielding torment, and a childhood horror from which an observer would want to both shy away from and punitively strike down.

This negativity can lead to strong emotional responses from those who need to work in partnership to solve such a problem, which creates a barrier to resolution. The charge of “bullying” is often received as a slanderous accusation, and nothing brings out the protective “mother bear” in a parent, one demanding nothing less than harsh consequences, than learning that “some bully” is tormenting their child. The implied solution demanded by such a negative term is punishment, which invariably makes the problem worse.

So I’ve often wondered: is there a better term than “bullying,” a term that is objective, avoids the negative emotions that make resolving bullying situations more difficult, and points to an effective solution?

I had the opportunity to pose this question to a very unique group of students, a middle school class at the Acera School in Winchester, Massachusetts. Acera is a STEAM school for gifted students (full disclosure: a child of mine attends the school). The school provides students with opportunities for limitless creation, boundless exploration, intellectual challenges, and social experiences in both playground and classroom settings.

For me, speaking with Acera students is always educational and slightly intimidating. They are brilliant kids, and the intellectual horsepower they can apply to a challenge is both awesome and a little scary. Some of them also have had experiences with bullying from prior schools that give them unique insights into the topic. So I was thrilled and excited when I had the opportunity to talk to a class of Acera students where I could pose the question “Is there a better, more objective term than ‘bullying’?”

After guiding the class through a discussion on the topic, I tossed the question into the middle of the room and stepped back. And the students went right to it, breaking down the behaviors; analyzing the perspectives of the aggressor, target, bystander, and adult observers; and drilling into what made these sorts of interactions different from other types of student interactions. It was fascinating to observe, much like watching a group of engineers take a pile of discarded household appliances and use the parts to build a working rocket. And the students didn’t disappoint; they came up with not one answer but two.

The two suggestions as a replacement for “bullying” were “social ordering behavior” and “status enhancement behavior.” The class recognized that when students are required to spend time together, willingly or not, a social hierarchy invariably develops. This ordering results in the grouping of students by status, with the most popular group at the top of the hierarchy. And the behaviors that create this hierarchy allow individuals to maintain their place or even ascend the social order by enhancing their own personal status.

What the students hit upon, and what adults sometimes fail to recognize and what the legacy definition got wrong, is that the primary purpose of these behaviors is social status enhancement. Harm to the target can (though not always) occur from the behaviors, and generally takes the form of diminished status (a feeling of rejection) by peers. But harm is not the primary goal. Social ordering behaviors create and maintain the peer group social hierarchy, and can be used by individuals to enhance their own status or diminish that of a peer.

The new terms also suggest the effective solution to situations in which status enhancement behaviors cause harm. If the goal of the behavior is to achieve a social benefit, the way to change the behavior is to eliminate the opportunity to gain that benefit, which is a consequence of the behavior, not a punishment. Simply depriving the aggressor of time in the peer group during which the behaviors typically occur will create a very strong incentive for the aggressor to stop. In addition, teacher sensitivity to these groups and the purposes of the behaviors can provide opportunities for proactively preventing problems and resolving them when they do occur.

Critically important, of course, is to address the harm caused by these behaviors, which diminish the social status of the targets and lead to feelings of rejection. Targets can be taught that these behaviors are not personal, and can learn how to respond to them to render them ineffective. In other words, problematic instances of status enhancement behavior (SEB) can be solved through social emotional learning (SEL).

The new terms also make less likely the strong negative reactions of parents that invariably make resolution of such issues difficult. Imagine how differently a parent would respond to being informed that their child is involved in a status enhancement behavior issue. Gone will be the flare-up of emotion that often short-circuits the ears and brain and results in anger directed at the messenger, the educator.

Just as many educators have come to recognize that the legacy approaches to dealing with bullying are ineffective and often counterproductive, it’s time to acknowledge that the word “bullying” itself is a legacy term that carries significant negative baggage and contributes to the problem. This term should be abandoned and replaced with a term that is objective, is emotionally neutral, and points to effective solutions. Of course, eliminating the term would make my role as a “Bullying Prevention Educator” more difficult to describe (“SOB Educator” doesn’t quite work), but I can always take the question of a more appropriate job title back to the students at Acera. In the meantime, I’ll happily grapple with that if it means that the field dedicated to addressing this childhood problem takes one more step away from the legacy approaches of the past and embraces more effective solutions for the children of today and the future.