Dad Asks What To Do About The Awful Bullying His Daughter Endures After She Begged Her Parents Not To Respond
The bullying is so bad it might rise to the level of crime, but they worry a response will only make it worse.
Creativa Images / Shutterstock.com A dad on Reddit is at a loss as to how to help his 10-year-old daughter who is being victimized at school so intensely that her principal says it rises to the level of a crime.
But all involved are in a quandary: What if a response just makes it worse?
The dad is wondering what to do about the bullying his daughter is experiencing, which has shocked even veteran school officials.
Bullying in schools has been on the rise in recent years. Between 2016 — when, perhaps only coincidentally, bullying became a virtue on the national stage that helped win a presidential election — and 2019, cyberbullying incidents increased 55%, and have risen another 14% since.
At the time of this writing, bullying is the subject of national news following the death of non-binary Oklahoma teen Nex Benedict, who died after being severely beaten in a bathroom at Owasso High School, where they were a sophomore. Data has consistently shown that LGBTQ+ kids and children of color are substantially more likely to be bullied.
Though thankfully not as yet deadly, the bullying this Redditor's 10-year-old fifth-grade daughter is enduring is truly harrowing. It began with the usual "mean girl" friend group conflicts but quickly became a situation that left even the school's principal shocked.
The bullying escalated with a text messaging group in which kids urged the daughter to kill herself.
After helping his daughter through the friend group conflict and thinking it was now behind them, he and his wife began noticing their daughter's behavior change.
"We took our daughter's phone… and found the most disturbing text message group chats," he wrote in his post.
One of her former friends had started a group chat called "[Name] Haters" in which kids took turns making fun of the Redditor's daughter.
Photo: myboys.me / Shutterstock
"Then they added my daughter to the chat so she could see what people were saying," the dad wrote, adding that, "the things said about her were so awful and included some texts saying she should kill herself."
School officials want them to escalate the incident to law enforcement but their daughter is begging them to 'drop it.'
The dad wrote that he and his wife reached out to the parents of all of the kids involved and got mostly receptive responses, with the exception of the ringleader's parents.
As for the school, they've urged the dad and his wife to consent to bringing in a school resource officer to "explain the implications of their words," especially given that in many states, telling someone to kill themself is a crime.
But they're deeply worried about how escalation might impact their daughter. His wife worries it will only make the bullying worse, and the girl herself is begging them to leave it alone.
"We don't want our daughter to be put in a more difficult position in school by escalating this," the dad wrote, "but also feel there needs to be accountability on behalf of the children who participated."
Photo: Ground Picture / Shutterstock
After much deliberation, the parents decided to follow the school's recommendations on what to do about the bullying.
"I was appalled at what I read on that text thread," the child's principal wrote to the Redditor and his wife in an email. "It may be the worst that I've read at the elementary level." The principal went on to say that the nature of the bullying is such that the school is obligated to escalate it.
Laws on both the state and federal level often require such intervention, and lawyers recommend parents contact an attorney should their child's school officials refuse to do anything about bullying. In this case, the school began investigating the incidents by interviewing all the kids who took part and their parents.
"Given that there could be a crime involved, we are obligated to turn it over to [law enforcement]," the principal went on to say.
The dad wrote that he and his wife are very happy with how seriously the school has taken the situation. Their daughter, not so much, because it's had the exact impact she feared. "Today the group came up to her at recess and told her that she was no longer their friend — as if that wasn't already obvious," the dad wrote.
Redditors applauded the dad for not backing down on their daughter's bullies.
One former bully wrote, "I grew up being a bad kid, you have to go scorched earth or they get so much worse."
Having been bullied myself from first through 12th grade, I can attest — this is absolutely correct. The one and only time a bully finally left me alone was when he fell off his bike in our driveway after chasing me home and badly skinned his knee. My mom, normally a goody-two-shoes to the point of insufferability, refused to so much as help him off the ground.
"Yep, war is hell," she said to the bully with a shrug, as she kicked the woodchips he'd messed up back into her flower bed and led me into the house.
Cruel? Inappropriate? Perhaps. But after an entire year of torture, it was only scorched earth that finally got him off my back.
Sometimes you can only teach a bully about the moral high ground by fighting fire with fire — especially when their own parents can't be bothered to do it themselves.
John Sundholm is a news and entertainment writer who covers pop culture, social justice and human interest topics.