When "Boys Being Boys" Becomes
"Boys Being Crudely, Criminally Cruel"
Since I've been blogging about crime especially as it relates to school kids I've been noticing a disturbing trend over the past 8 years. It seems that a good number of scholastic athletes, high school and college, like to lord over their younger teammates by hazing them.
Now for those of you who are my age and went to school in the 80's you may say 'But Trench, I was a high school/college athlete and we hazed our teammates all the time.' Well, I'm not talking about taping someone to a goalpost or making someone run laps. Now the trend seems to be sexually assaulting younger teammates.
The most recent of these assaults that was brought to my attention allegedly took place with members of the Robertson High School football team. Robertson is a high school in Las Vegas, New Mexico. Four members of the football team have been expelled and are facing criminal charges for an incident that took place at a training camp. The four older teammates allegedly sodomized their younger teammates by sodomizing them with a broomstick through their shorts. I guess since they did it through their shorts they thought that was okay. The victims claim that an assistant coach walked in on the 'festivities', smirked and walked out without stopping it.
The entire coaching staff resigned over the allegations.
Speaking of broomsticks this kind of behavior is not limited to high schools or even the U.S. for that matter. At McGill University in Canada members of their football team assaulted a freshman in similar fashion in a ritual that they affectionately called 'Dr. Broom'. The victim ended up dropping out of McGill. The players were suspended for the remainder of the season which only had 2 games left and the University was fined $30K.
The most infamous of these cases, in my opinion, happened with football players from Mepham High School on Long Island. While away at a football camp in New Jersey the older players sodomized their younger teammates with a broomstick, golf balls, and a pine cone. The victims were harassed and the victims' parents were threatened in an overzealous football community. The suspects were tried as juveniles and received little to no time in any kind of correctional facility.
In too many instances in these kinds of cases the perpetrators are either not prosecuted or treated with kid gloves. To make matters worse, a lot of the time the communities will rally around the team rather than the victims.
If these kind of attacks, which basically amount to rape, happened in any other realm, the rapists would be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law. Since these happened in a school athletics situation it gets chalked up to 'boys being boys' and the school turns a blind eye.
I'm sorry but where I come from 'boys being boys' doesn't include being anally raped with a foreign object.
by Trench Reynolds
image: Trench Network