In cases of suspected assault, abuse, or any other type of serious crime, those journal entries would be fair grounds - during an investigation by official parties.

If you suspect something, you don't go prying into your child's private possessions (if you respect their right to have any form of private life, that is, beyond yours); you speak to your child directly, or you pick up the phone and tell it to a police officer. Of course, people (like the mother in question) inevitably do go prying, because they either don't believe in the privacy of children as any more than transient (likely because it's how they were raised in turn)... or underestimate the faculties of children to speak up or speak out when being hurt, and so feel the need to do indirect checks.

In this case, it sounds as though it was the former reason.

Ultimately, your need to protect your child comes before your need to afford them privacy... and if you need to check, you will check. And if nothing's the matter, you absolutely should feel pretty bad (and more or less, depending on what was in there). And should your child find out you checked, they may deservedly feel wronged by your violation and you ought to make it up to them.

In this case, it sounds like nothing was the matter.

But the Mom thought differently. That's her second, more significant mistake: thinking there's something wrong with her child's private behavior, as described. I hope she wasn't swayed to confront her daughter and make a nightmare out of it, but... most likely she was and it wasn't pretty, and she did nothing to make up for it. A worst case scenario would've been the daughter getting rightfully offended, and when she reacted with anger (or otherwise attempted to stick up for herself, she got a slap in the face, either figuratively or literally.

When the proper thing to do was take her out for ice cream. Twice. At least.

These little injustices can add up to big time resentment, and even spiral into abuse.

The third mistake is not having these fundamentals down before getting pregnant (assuming it wasn't accidental).

~ Rainbow