The Language of “Bullying” and “Harassment”

Public debate about “bullying” flared recently in the wake of an incident in Queensland, when a fifteen-year-old boy died in August as a result of a brawl in a schoolyard. The Courier Mail reported that on average “three children in each class are bullied daily or almost daily”. According to the article, Australia’s largest study of school bullying, released in June, showed that Queensland had the highest levels of bullying in the country. The article quoted the Education Department’s assistant director-general of student services, Patrea Walton, as saying at a street community forum that bullying was “a pervasive problem in schools” and “one of the biggest fears parents have for their children”.

In the same article, the Courier Mail reported that Tullawong State High School principal Leonie Kearney, credited with turning her Caboolture school around through a tough stance on bullying and bad behaviour, had said that 70 per cent of suspensions she administered related to bullying. According to the paper, Ms Walton said “she didn’t believe the proportion of suspensions for bullying would be as high across the state, but was unable to provide a figure, citing no agreed definition”.

“Bullying” is not the kind of concept that easily lends itself to operational definition and precise quantification. Like most concepts referring to interpersonal relations, “bullying” refers to a particular motivation and way of thinking. To be effective, the “war on bullying” needs to engage with that way of thinking. A precise definition of “bullying” will not necessarily help us to count individual acts of “bullying” but it could help schools to recognise and fight the “bullying” mentality.

In a follow-up article published three days after the fatal incident in the schoolyard, the Courier Mail wrote:

“it is apparent there is some confusion about what constitutes bullying behaviour.

“Expert writers on bullying have adopted the definition that bullying is behaviour, either overt or covert, that is repeated by an individual over time so that he or she can achieve some power over the victim. A number of incidents in school grounds are one-off and, therefore, by definition, do not constitute bullying …

“Notwithstanding these facts, there is clear evidence that violence and bullying in schools have escalated. The solution to eradicating bullying behaviours will need to start with a change in attitude by parents in modelling appropriate behaviours in their daily interactions with others.”

The points about the repetitive nature of “bullying” and about the “bully’s” power over the victim are well taken, but the exclusive focus on “behaviour” is unhelpful. Arguably, to “eradicate bullying behaviours” we need to start with identifying the pattern of thinking which underlies the pattern of behaviour. An accurate definition of “bullying” can help explain what that pattern of thinking is.

How Can the Words be Reliably Defined?

While there is no shortage of various attempted definitions of bullying, they are usually lacking in clarity, precision and explanatory value. This is partly because to provide an adequate definition of bullying one needs to consider closely not only human behaviour but also the meanings of words and ways in which these meanings can be accurately defined and intelligibly explained.

What matters here is not how the word should be used, or what it should mean, but rather, what it actually means as it is normally used by “ordinary people”. It is this plain meaning manifested in “ordinary people’s” use of the word which functions as part of the shared conceptual currency of speakers of English. To identify this meaning accurately and intelligibly we need a workable methodology. Such a methodology can be found in the so-called “NSM” (from “Natural Semantic Metalanguage”) approach to definitions, which has been developed in Australia and which has resulted in hundreds of scholarly publications and hundreds of definitions (see www.une.edu.au/bcss/linguistics/nsm/).

A detailed discussion of the “principles of defining words” developed within the NSM approach can be found in my book Semantics: Primes and Universals (2006), which takes issue with the strand of modern linguistics that claims that while “ordinary people” may need definitions, linguists have no responsibility for developing them because it is the task of mere lexicographers to do so.

For example, Noam Chomsky, for long the pre-eminent guru of modern linguistics, pronounced (in his essay “Language in a Psychological Setting”) that while “dictionary definitions don’t offer anything like a faithful representation of a word’s meaning … they are all right as they are, because there is no need for dictionary definitions to be even approximately correct”. The starting point for this startling claim was actually quite reasonable: “Anyone who has attempted to define a word precisely knows that this is an extremely difficult matter, involving intricate and complex properties. Ordinary dictionary definitions do not come close to characterizing the meaning of words.” But from that reasonable premise Chomsky concluded that the meanings of words (including those like carburettor and bureaucrat) are given to us “innately” and therefore don’t require precise definitions:

“The speed and precision of vocabulary acquisition leaves no real alternative to the conclusion that the child somehow has the concepts available prior to experience with language, and is basically learning labels for concepts that are already part of his or her conceptual apparatus. This is why dictionary definitions can be sufficient for their purpose though they are so imprecise: the rough approximation suffices, because the basic principles of word meaning (whatever they are) are known to the dictionary user, as they are to the language learner, independently of any instruction or experience.”

According to this logic, neither children nor adult language learners need any precise definitions of “bullying” or “harassment”, because they learn these words as labels for concepts “that are already part of their conceptual apparatus”. Dictionary definitions, inadequate as they are, are nonetheless “sufficient for their purpose” because they can, so to speak, awaken a concept that the language learner has “independently of any instruction or experience”.

The Oxford English Dictionary online offers the following definition of “bullying”: “The action of the verb to bully: overbearing insolence; personal intimidation; petty tyranny, often used with reference to schoolboy life”. One can certainly agree with Chomsky that this characterisation is a very rough approximation; but the idea that a more adequate definition is not needed because both children and adult have an innate concept of “bullying” prior to any instruction or experience is so bizarre that it hardly needs any further rebuttal.

The NSM approach to the issue of definitions is broadly as follows:

1. People do need definitions, and to be maximally useful, these definitions need to be accurate and reliable.

2. A definition should not be circular. For example, if the word harassment is defined via the phrase sexual harassment no progress in understanding can be achieved.

3. Complex concepts should be defined via simple (or simpler) ones, not via concepts which are equally or more complex than those which are being defined. For example, if bullying is defined via intimidation, victimisation and humiliation, its meaning will not become any clearer to people who don’t know exactly what the words intimidation, victimisation and humiliation mean.

4. If we want to define words in a way which explains rather than obfuscates their meaning, the most dependable tools to this end can be found in maximally simple words like say and do, someone and something, want, know and feel, bad and good, and fifty or so others that any English-speaking child (old enough to attend school) would know. Moreover, empirical cross-linguistic investigations show that a similar set of sixty or so words can be found in all other languages, and that these sets match. This means that while complex words like bullying often don’t have exact equivalents in other languages, simple words like do, say, know and feel do. Accordingly, the shared set of a few dozen simple words can serve as a basic tool for defining precisely and explaining the meaning of words to speakers of any non-English-speaking background, as well as to native speakers of English.

5. If we rely in our definitions on simple words, we can capture generalisations which would otherwise escape us. For example, if one defines “bullying” as a type of behaviour that makes someone feel intimidated, or insulted, or humiliated (see examples below), then one loses the generalisation that this behaviour makes someone “feel something very bad”. Complex words like intimidated, insulted and humiliated are not very helpful; they are also unnecessary, because they can be replaced in the definition with their common denominator “to feel something very bad”. The result will not only be easier to understand but also more precise. For example, the concept of “insult” is not included as a whole in the concept of “bullying”, only some of its components are. All these components, relevant to “bullying”, can best be captured in simple words (like do, say and feel), not in complex ones (like insult, intimidate and humiliate).

The phrase “to feel something very bad” is of course very general. But a person who is “bullied” can experience a wide range of bad feelings, including fear and anger, as well as humiliation and the like. And the rest of the explication throws light on the kind of “bad feelings” that the victim is likely to experience.

6. Finally, to pin down and explain a complex concept like “bullying” we need to break it into a number of parts which together make up a meaningful little story, or a “prototypical scenario”. Such a story refers not only to what happens (in a typical case of “bullying”), but also to what the perpetrator thinks, wants and feels. It also refers to the thoughts and feelings of the victims, and also to the evaluation placed by the speech community on such patterns of behaviour and patterns of thinking.

As the next three sections will illustrate, using the guidelines formulated here we can overcome the inadequacies of traditional models of definition, and we can actually explain the meaning of words, in ways which can be both cognitively accurate and socially and educationally useful.

Why Existing Definitions Are Not Adequate

Consider the following definition, which comes from the website of an Australian university: “Bullying: Repeated unreasonable and inappropriate behaviour in the workplace or educational environment that intimidates, offends, degrades, insults or humiliates an employee or student. This can be physical or psychological behaviour.”

This definition fails to adequately distinguish the concept of “bullying” from other concepts, in particular, from the concept of “harassment”, which is defined by the same website as follows: “Harassment: Unlawful harassment can occur when someone is made to feel intimidated, insulted or humiliated because of their race, colour, national or ethnic origin; sex including sexual harassment; disability; sexuality; or any characteristic specified under human rights legislation. It can also happen if someone is working in a ‘hostile’—or intimidating—environment. The behaviours can be overt or subtle, verbal, non-verbal or physical.”

In the light of these definitions, it could be concluded that “harassment” was a type of “bullying”, whereas in fact the two concepts overlap, without one of them being a more specific version of the other. There are several important differences between the two concepts, resulting in two significantly different ranges of use.

There are many reasons why the definitions of bullying and harassment on the website are inadequate and unhelpful. One of them is that these definitions focus exclusively on the behaviour of the perpetrators (and its effect on the victims) and ignore the perpetrators’ attitudes which underlie that behaviour.

Bullying

The importance of the attitude is particularly relevant in the case of “bullying”, a form of the verb to bully, which is derived from the noun (a) bully. It is clear that when we call someone “a bully” we are attributing to this person not only a certain pattern of actions but also a certain mentality. Indeed, we can say more about a “bully’s” mentality than about the details of his (or her) behaviour, because there is a wide range of actions by means of which one can engage in “bullying”, whereas the mental attitude is quite specific and can be specified very accurately.

Essentially, all we can say about a bully’s actions as such is that the bully is doing something bad to someone else for some time (and that it causes the other person to feel something very bad for some time). This is not to say that any kind of action that involves doing something bad to someone else can count as “bullying”, but rather, that, to be seen as “bullying”, an action must be compatible with a particular “bullying” motivation. The motivation, on the other hand, is quite specific. Using the “natural semantic metalanguage” we can portray it as below. (Phrases like “this someone” and “this other someone” are unidiomatic in English, but they are perfectly intelligible. The reasons why these are preferable to “this person” and “this other person” from a semantic point of view cannot be discussed here for reasons of space.)

this someone does these things to this other someone because this someone thinks like this:

“I can do many things to this someone as I want, this someone can’t do anything to me

if I want this someone to do something as I want, this someone can’t not do it now

this someone knows that if I want, I can do something bad to this someone”

In addition to the prototypical motivation, another factor which indirectly restricts the range of actions that can come under “bullying” is the prototypically (though not invariably) institutional setting (school, workplace, army, prison and the like). In NSM, this can be represented as follows:

something like this often happens in a place where many people do some things for a long time with other people

In such settings people often can’t avoid other people, and some of these other people can be big, strong, aggressive and even nasty.

Relatedly, “bullying” implies also something about the emotions felt by both sides—“good” in the case of the perpetrator and “bad” in the case of the victim:

when this someone does these things to this other someone, this someone feels something good

at the same time, this other someone feels something very bad

Furthermore, the concept of “bullying” implies also a certain image. This image is linked in particular with the noun bully, but it is carried over to the verb to bully and the form bullying as well. Arguably, it is an image likening a case of bullying to a situation when a big animal of one kind pounces upon a small animal of the same kind. This can be represented in NSM as follows (the concept of “animal” is not one of the sixty-five or so simple concepts which are shared by all languages. It is, however, relatively simple, and has been defined in NSM):

when this someone does these things to this other someone, people can think about it like this:

“sometimes something like this happens when a big animal of one kind does something bad for some time to a small animal of the same kind”

Finally, bullying implies a negative evaluation: “it is very bad if it is like this”.

Taken together, all these components bring us to the following explication:

a. it can be like this:

b. something like this often happens in a place where many people do some things for a long time with other people:

c. someone does bad things to someone else for some time

when this someone does these things to this other someone,

this someone feels something good

at the same time, this other someone feels something very bad

d. this someone does these things to this other some one because this someone thinks like this:

“I can do many things to this someone as I want, this someone can’t do anything to me

if I want this someone to do something now as I want, this someone can’t not do it

this someone knows that if I want, I can do something bad to this someone”

e. when this someone does these things to this other             someone, people can think about it like this:

“sometimes something like this happens when a big animal of one kind is doing does something bad for some time to a small animal of the same kind”

f. it is very bad if it is like this

Harassment

“Harassment” differs from “bullying” in many respects. To begin with, harassment is less likely to evoke an institutional setting. While sexual harassment refers, above all, to a workplace, racial harassment—the second most common collocation with harassment—often refers to incidents occurring in the street. People can certainly be “harassed” in the street or on public transport, but usually not “bullied”. The wider range of locations where “harassment” can occur is illustrated by the following examples from the Cobuild Collins Wordbanks Online database:

• The police say racial harassment is any incident where the victim or any other person (such as witness or police officer) believes the attacker had a racial motive.   

• Since that painful and fateful night, Lawrence’s family have been subjected to constant threats and harassment in the area they live.

• The defence told the judge yesterday that a maid who lived next door to Simpson apparently had gone home to El Salvador, perhaps for good, to escape harassment from the media and others.

• People living with HIV can also face discrimination and harassment, from neighbours, landlords or even flatmates.  

• You get harassment every time you walk in the door so you don’t count.

• The remaining diplomats have had to endure isolation, harassment and sweltering temperatures. This has taken its toll. Last week Sweden and Norway evacuated their officials.

• And the mum of two added that she was determined to clear her name and wanted to protect her family from further harassment.

The actions of the “harasser” are conceived of as “unwanted” rather than “bad” as in the case of “bullying” (although “harassment” is of course evaluated as “bad”). The attitude of the person who is “harassing” someone can be described as follows:this someone knows that this other someone doesn’t want this

this someone doesn’t want not to do it because of this

this someone thinks like this: “I can do it, I want to do it”

The thoughts of the person who is being “harassed” can be portrayed like this:

“this someone is doing something to me now

I don’t want this

the same thing can happen to me after this

I don’t want things like this to happen to me”

The last line above deliberately doesn’t specify whether the unwanted “repeat” is expected from the same person (as is usually the case with “sexual harassment”) or from other people (as is often the case with “racial harassment”). In the case of “bullying”, the recurring “bad” actions typically come from the same “bully”, but in the case of “harassing” (which can happen in the street) it is not necessarily so.

The thoughts spelled out above preoccupy the person who is being “harassed” and lead to recurring feelings of annoyance and distress:

this someone can’t not think about it at many times

when this someone thinks about it, this someone feels something bad

As a whole, the explication of harassment can look as follows:

a. it can be like this:

b. something like this happens in a place at many times:

c. someone does something to someone else at some time

d. this someone knows that the other someone doesn’t want this

e. this someone doesn’t want not to do it because of             this

f. this someone thinks like this: “I can do it, I want to do it”

g. when this someone does this to this other someone, this other someone thinks like this:

“this someone is doing something to me now

I don’t want this

the same thing can happen to me after this

I don’t want things like this to happen to me”

h. this other someone can’t not think about it at many times

i. this other someone feels something bad because of this at many times

j. it is bad if it is like this

“Bullying” as a Specifically English Concept

Bad interpersonal behaviour (in institutional settings and elsewhere) is hardly a special feature of English-speaking societies. Yet such behaviour can take many different forms. It can also be differently interpreted and categorised by different speech communities. It is important to recognise, therefore, that “bullying” (attested in English from the beginning of the nineteenth century) is an English concept, without equivalents in other languages (whether European or any other kind).

In a recently published book, Touché: A French-woman’s Take on the English, Agnès Catherine Poirier writes:

“bullying seems to me yet another way of illustrating this much-contained violence of British men. Tragic stories of pupils committing suicide after having been the victims of bullies regularly make gruesome headlines in the British press. Bullying in offices, the army and even at the BBC is an issue often addressed and discussed in the British media. There is no exact word to translate “bullying” in French. We talk about intimidation, but the concept of bullying seems specific to Britain. It seems to be linked to the physicality of domination. Bullies will behave in a domineering manner until their victim surrenders. There is very little talk about bullying or any equivalent in French schools as related by the French media. In le monde du travail, people complain of harassment, stress and intimidation but not of bullying. Direct confrontational style being a permanent feature in French society, tension is usually released verbally, thus reducing the force behind the uppercut.”

One may or may not agree with Poirier’s comments about British and French societies, but her claim that French has no word corresponding to bullying is easy to verify. Furthermore, her comments on “bullying” as something specifically Anglo (she says “British”), both as a social phenomenon and as a category of thought and speech, provides a valuable cross-cultural testimony, based on personal experience of someone who has lived her life in England and France.

The question of why the concept of “bullying” emerged in English-speaking countries, and why it emerged when it did, deserves a thorough investigation, and so does the history of “bullying” as a social practice and as a category of discourse in England, in Australia and in other English-speaking countries. A detailed comparison of Anglo patterns of behaviour and patterns of thinking with those of non-English-speaking countries would also be interesting. 

Given the apparent escalation of “bullying” in Australia—especially in schools—in recent times, and the importance of the concept of “bullying” in society’s thinking about interpersonal relations in schools and workplaces, it is important that this concept should be well understood and adequately explained to immigrants, as part of their cultural induction programs.

Conventional definitions such as those given in dictionaries, official documents and educational resources are not sufficient—first, because they are usually obscure and based on exemplification rather than explanation; second, because they don’t make it clear how, for example, “bullying” differs from “harassment”; and third, because the words they use to (purportedly) explain the meaning of “bullying” are usually as complex and incomprehensible to immigrants from non-Anglo backgrounds as the word bullying itself, or more so.

For example, we have seen that the definition of “bullying” offered on the university’s website mentioned earlier presents “bullying” as behaviour that “intimidates, offends, degrades, insults or humiliates”, and “harassment”, as behaviour that makes someone “feel intimidated, insulted or humiliated”. Thus the two definitions share the reference to “intimidating”, “insulting” and “humiliating”, whereas that of “harassment” leaves out any reference to “offending” and “degrading”. Is this omission intentional or accidental? And if “harassment” is defined via “sexual harassment”, what exactly is “sexual harassment”?

Finally, if none of the words used in the two definitions (intimidating, insulting, humiliating, offending and degrading) have exact counterparts in an immigrant’s native language, how can the subtle but significant differences between the two be effectively explained?

Conclusion and Applications

The definitions (or explications) of bullying and harassment offered here may seem to be too vague to have a great explanatory power, and in some ways they are indeed vague, because they are based on prototypical scenarios rather than on a set of necessary and sufficient conditions. At the same time, they have a much greater explanatory power than conventional definitions such as those provided in dictionaries or websites.

I know of a case of an academic who held no administrative position and who was accused of “bullying” someone who did hold such a role and was in a position of power over the accused person. In the light of the explication presented here the behaviour of such an academic cannot coherently be labelled as “bullying” because “bullying” implies an asymmetry in power: just as a big kid can bully a small one but not vice versa, so an academic “boss” can bully an employee in a subordinate position, but not vice versa.       

Clearly, it is also important that employees should know what exactly they are accusing their “bosses” of when they lodge grievances about “bullying” and “harassment”. If such categories can be used inappropriately against employees, they can also be so used against superiors, supervisors, heads and directors. It is in everybody’s interest, as well as in the interest of fairness and decent workplace relations, that such categories should not be applied and loosely thrown around.

While many Australian schools regard “bullying” as a major problem and are committed to fighting it, they often don’t know how to identify and explain it to students, and have no helpful definition they can use. Talk of “behaviour” disassociated from any attempt to identify the underlying attitudes is a serious obstacle to achieving progress in this area. If these attitudes can be described in very simple scenarios and words, teachers and parents can draw on such descriptions to help children to identify and understand them. No doubt it is a long way from understanding such attitudes to effectively combating them, but a clear and precise understanding would be a good first step.

Anna Wierzbicka is a Professor of Linguistics at the Australian National University.