Reply to I got an email telling me my daughter is a mean girl.

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[quote=Anonymous]The instinct to call a whistleblower "threatening", "unhinged", or "unstable" is common. This is always the first defense people reach for when they don't want to confront an allegation of wrongdoing. It is always easier to blame someone making an allegation for being crazy than to even take a minimal amount of time to investigate and see if there might be even some truth to the allegation. Accusing the accuser is cleaner because it absolves you of having to do anything.

It's a bad instinct, though. After all, if you investigate and there's nothing to it, you've lost nothing. You've had a conversation with your teenage daughter about bullying. That's it. No harm. If anything, looking into it and finding nothing is better than doing nothing at all, because it means that if the allegations get escalated (to the school, for instance) you can say "Yes, I looked into this and this is what I found -- there is nothing to it." You should of course look into it.

Of course, if you investigate and you find something, you have an obligation to do something about it. That's what freaks people out.

Better to just call this letter writer weird, immature, or accuse her of issuing threats (the letter contains no threat of any kind, just an empty warning that treating people poorly may not be something that can be done indefinitely without consequence -- it is the letter writer's hope that there will be consequences for bad behavior, not a threat). Then you don't have to do the hard thing and actually address bullying behavior if it is occurring.[/quote]

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