No Labels

Are labels de-humanising to the people who use our services?

Much has already been written on the dangers of giving people a label.  Implicit in a label can be judgement, bias, stigma, and power imbalance.  It can strip people of individual identity.  So all of this can happen without intent, due to the complexity of language and how meaning is found in interpretation.

This is why Connected Voice Advocacy is taking the label discussion seriously and rethinking how we communicate in written and spoken formats about the people we work with.

Our ‘Shoulder to Shoulder’ strapline was originally chosen carefully to represent the partnership approach and shared power between an advocate and a person they advocate for.

I was recently in a room with advocacy leaders from across the sector and we were addressed by two people who have used advocacy for many years. They spoke candidly about how it made them feel when they were described as ‘partners’,  ‘clients’ or ‘service users’.  All these terms are open to misinterpretation and can lead to people feeling de-humanised.  It can also sound possessive when a professional refers to someone as ‘my client’ and detracts from the power that the person themselves holds in the instructed advocacy relationship.

The advocacy sector is embedded in person centred practice so it is interesting to reflect on how over time advocacy service providers have slipped into the trap of adopting these commonly used labels.  We can speculate why, perhaps with the professionalising of advocacy over the years as it became written into legislation, and with local government contracts and the commissioning process, organisations have had to adopt and conform to the data gathering language. Applications and monitoring forms frequently ask for statistics and data on the people we work with referencing the terminology ‘service users’ or ‘client’.

I have also heard advocates defend the use of labels, stating that they help to put the advocate on a level footing with other professionals so that they can be taken more seriously by professional peers, and therefore to achieve a better outcome for the person they are advocating for.

Often it is a short-handed way to refer to someone, as ‘person they are advocating for’ is a bit of a mouthful and the legal shorthand of ‘P’ (used legally for person in legal cases) can be just too short.

At our recent staff away day we took the decision to refer to people by their name when advocating for them in a meeting for example. This works well to bring the focus back on the person and their issues rather than being seen as a case. We will use the term ‘people’, where possible, when describing people we work with generally, to strip back the labels and connotations that they bring. We are committing to amend our documents, online presence and in person behaviour to ensure we always refer to people as people.