False accusations

In fourth grade, we had a system where we had student lunch monitors in each class who would keep an eye on students and report their misbehavior.

Our teacher had given us a number of slips of colored paper that we kept at our desks.  For each "demerit" we got for lunch misbehavior, we were supposed to give our teacher a slip of paper. 

One day, after I had brushed come cookie crumbs off my part of the table, we came back to class and one of the lunch monitors reported that I had earned a demerit for "shooting crumbs". 

I knew I hadn't, and some of the kids knew I hadn't either.  Someone told me to "write a complaint", which we were allowed to do. 

Instead, after finishing my work, I took the prettiest sheet of paper I had--a bright pink one--from the slips we'd been given and took it to my teacher.  I said, "Here."

She held the sheet of paper in her hand and asked me about what had happened at the lunch table.  I said, "I was only brushing them off."

At the end of our conversation, she gave me back that sheet of pink paper. 

I can't remember who the lunch monitors in our class were now, but I do know that at least one of the lunch monitors had used that false accusation to bully me.  I'd been bullied since first grade, and it would go on until 12th grade.

Nearly twenty years later, I sat in a counselor's office and cried because I said, "She believed me."

What if she hadn't?  What if she had thought that I was the person who was lying? 

I thought about that incident in the wake of this article, where a group of students used social media to spread a rumor that another student had threatened to "shoot up" their high school. 

That group framed the accused student.  They accused the student of doing something that they hadn't done--just like the lunch monitor did to me in 4th grade. 

This is just another way to bully students.  And it's very frightening, because often it comes down to "they said, they said" and you have to make a decision on who to believe.  I've often thought that the anti-bullying hotlines, where you can pick up a phone and dial a number to report bullying; or boxes where you can put in anonymous tips, could also be used to frame students who hadn't done anything wrong.

And even if the person is cleared . . . there's always the taint of suspicion.  Especially when you lob a false accusation of sexual misconduct against someone.  I know that the majority of accusations of sexual abuse are true  . . . and there are some that are false. 

In another situation, if the lunch monitors had been a group of "the cool kids", and if I had been a kid from the "wrong side of the tracks", so to speak; or if the teacher had liked the lunch monitors and hadn't liked me . . . she very easily could have not believed me.  She could have believed a false accusation.

In this day and age of social media, all you have to do is type a person's name, say, they did such-and-such, hit the "send" button . . . and presto, you have turned someone's name into mud. 

Some things have not changed since I was in fourth grade.

Just my .04, adjusted for inflation.