Bizcuits | Dangers of anonymity

Leanda Lee

I received a strange letter in my letter-box earlier this week from one of my neighbours – I have six. Strange because the letter wasn’t addressed to me but to the “Dear family of number 4” and it was signed off “Your Neighbour”. Stranger still because I don’t live at number 4. Let me indulge myself for a bit; it gets a little convoluted.
On the back of the missive was scribbled a short message which, upon a few hours eaten up by off-
and-on rumination, I realised to be a response to the original letter. The letter author had sent to and accused number 4 of running a noisy clothes-dryer at inconsiderate hours of the night, and number 4 thought me, their immediate next-door neighbour, to be the complainant author. Thus the existence of the incorrectly addressed letter in my letter-box.
Actually, the clothes-dryer perpetrator was me (not the poor wrongfully accused number 4). I readily acknowledge that I’d made a bad calculation and pre-set the thing to start at 5am rather than 8am on one Sunday morning. I stand contrite but number 4 took the flack, except that now I’ve have two neighbours annoyed with me; one wrongfully because I didn’t write the complaint and one by proxy as she doesn’t know it’s me that she’s annoyed with (Yes, it is a she: the detective in me has worked out her identity).
This is at least the fourth anonymous letter (that I’m aware of) to be sent by one of my six neighbours and each time I’ve been wrongfully accused of sending the thing. To try to maintain some semblance of neighbourly civility, face-to-face communication has cleared up the misunderstanding but the damage done by anonymous letters in our midst and misdirected accusations shall not be undone. Uncertain of the origin, the recipient becomes wary of all neighbours and has no way to adequately deal with this anonymous person’s gripe.
Anonymous communication has its place in society. Police investigations are aided and cases solved thanks to the information obtained through calls to Crime Stopper-type hot-lines; companies actively encourage complaints and service feedback from customers to help improve the quality of their product; in other places there are numbers to call to report dangerous driving – often displayed on trucks and buses of companies concerned for their reputations, other numbers to report litterbugs and problems with taxis like the number to DSAT in Macau. Where the author does not need to be held accountable, anonymous communication can remove the hurdles to getting valuable information.
In most situations, though, keeping the author’s identity silent is inherently dangerous, for just as hearsay, people’s reputation can be called into question and suspicion of others increases in a community. Together with the sheer volume of administrative workload that anonymous reporting generates, being investigated by police based on false accusations is one argument against anonymous reporting; the system can be used by troubled people seeking some form of retribution via another authority to slander, defame or simply annoy. However, a policing system in an environment of professional confidence manages these cases and upholds reputations of those falsely accused by anonymous sources. In systems we must trust, as we do professional confidentiality of medical experts, counsellors and legal advisors, and discussions with close friends.
As an accuser, putting one’s name to a complaint takes a little courage and faith in others but unlike crime reporting or customer services feedback, signing off is warranted to maintain accountability, minimise false accusations, misunderstandings and to protect the innocent. To not do so risks social cohesion, particularly in a neighbourhood or small community. In Macau we have developed ways to maintain this cohesion, through development of systems of proxy such as funnelling complaints through property management or simple restraint and forbearance. Less commonly do we find direct confrontation.
The general advice on what to do upon receipt of an anonymous letter is to ignore it. Easier said than done. In this specific instance I might just deliver to our neighbourhood’s serial anonymous author a copy of today’s MDT. Perhaps this time, I should have used a pseudonym.