America at Large: Epidemic of hazing in high school sport disturbing on so many levels

At Proctor High in Minnesota, a group of senior football players trapped a 16-year-old student in the locker-room, then held the boy down as one of the squad sodomised him with the handle of a toilet plunger. Others present gleefully captured the incident on their phones and shared it across the various social media platforms.

At Danvers High in Massachusetts, the ice hockey team had a weekly ritual called “Hard-R Fridays”. According to testimony, any player who refused to say the N-word with a hard ‘R’ was held down and beaten by his peers, often with a sex toy that ensured the individual had to skate through the rest of training with the outline of a penis on his face.

At Fruitland High in Idaho, 11 members of the football team invited three junior players to accompany them to McDonald’s for food. Afterwards, they piled into cars and drove to remote Birding Island South where they tied the younger boys to fences and electrocuted one of them with a dog collar.

At Barnesville High in Ohio, several senior footballers tied a freshman to a pole in the parking lot behind the school. They then backed a pick-up truck up to where he was stuck and told him they would be attaching a strap to the pole in order to drag him behind the vehicle. At a certain point in the terrorising of the kid, an unloaded crossbow was also produced and pointed at his head.

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A random selection of clippings from coverage of high school sports across America over just the past couple of months. These are not isolated incidents. By any stretch. More part of a pattern. To type “hazing” into Google News is to open the door to an epidemic of assaults – physical, sexual and psychological – in educational institutions in just about every state. Only the minor details change. A plunger handle was the instrument of torture in Minnesota. At Wall High in New Jersey, the footballers deployed a broom stick in the same way.

It’s not a gender-specific issue either. At Caldwell High in Texas, four female students are facing felony indecency charges for forcibly removing a 14-year-old team-mate’s clothes on a bus ride home from an away game in September. Other girls kept watch and blared loud music to cover up the noise from the coaches sitting at the front of the vehicle as they yanked the victim’s spandex pants and underwear to the floor. They later claimed it was an annual tradition where a younger girl is specifically targeted and stripped.

One of the many disturbing facets of this stuff is it’s too often dressed up as some sort of perversely cherished local custom, a spot of pranking handed down from dysfunctional generation to generation, not the product of an especially toxic sporting culture fostered over decades by maniacal coaches and myopic parents. This stuff doesn’t survive and flourish so long without the consent of too many demented adults who somehow believe it to be character-forming banter not straight-up assault and battery.

The Collins English Dictionary defines “hazing” as “a ritual practiced in some universities and other institutions, in which a new member of a club or society is humiliated or abused”. If it’s most commonly associated in popular culture with fraternities and sororities at third level, where it regularly causes deaths, four out of five athletes who play sport in college say they experienced some sort of rite of passage in high school.

An estimated 1.5 million American teenagers are victims every year. A statistic as astonishing as the survey that revealed 92 per cent of students say they wouldn’t report hazing to the authorities. Of course, it should also be pointed out violating somebody with a broom handle may be considered “hazing” by some but is actually a form of rape. That’s certainly the way it’s viewed by the county prosecutors currently preparing charges into some of the cases featured here.

Those researching the problem are often hampered by the fact data is unreliable since it’s not just kids who are reluctant to come forward and do the right thing. Parents often learn about the goings-on before the authorities but choose not to bring it to the attention of the school in case doing so might negatively affect their own children’s playing time or, indeed, jeopardise the team’s season.

In some instances, the first response once an allegation comes to light is to cancel all remaining fixtures. A decision that often leads to lawsuits from aggrieved mothers and fathers who think kids getting to play those games matters more than trying to teach them a life lesson about right and wrong. The kind of attitude that explains why this stuff is still happening with such regularity as to be almost normalised.

Consider the Cañon City High football team in Colorado. Forced to suspend their campaign following a hazing allegation, a subsequent investigation established newcomers to the squad were subjected to an initiation that included getting kicked, punched and pinned to the floor while ice water was dumped on their heads by senior players. The beatings didn’t rise to the level of criminal misconduct though so the season resumed after missing just two games. No big deal. Boys being boys.

"It presumably was a welcome to the team," said Adam Hartman, the school superintendent.

Welcome to the team. Welcome to a strange and sick world.