Page 10 The Skanner May 10, 2017
News
AP: Sex Assaults in High School Sports Minimized as ‘Hazing’
By Reese Dunklin
Associated Press
T
he Georgia school
district said it was
investigating
the
baseball players for
“misbehavior” and “inap-
propriate physical con-
tact.” What it didn’t re-
veal was that a younger
teammate had reported
being sexually assaulted.
Even after players were
later disciplined for sex-
ual battery, the district
cited student confidenti-
ality to withhold details
from the public and used
“hazing” to describe the
incident, which it also
failed to report to the
state as required.
Across the U.S., per-
haps nowhere is stu-
dent-on-student sexual
assault as dismissed or
as camouflaged as in
boys’ sports, an Associ-
ated Press investigation
found. Mischaracterized
as hazing and bullying,
the violence is so nor-
malized on some teams
that it persists for years,
as players attacked one
season become aggres-
sors the next.
Coaches
frequently
say they’re not aware of
what’s happening. But
AP found multiple cas-
es where coaches knew
and failed to intervene
or, worse, tried to cover
it up.
The AP examined sex-
ual violence in school
sports as part of its larg-
er look at student-on-stu-
dent sex assaults. Ana-
lyzing state education
records, supplemented
by federal crime data,
AP found about 17,000
official reports of sex
assaults by students in
grades K-12 over a recent
four-year period. That
figure doesn’t capture
the extent of problem be-
cause attacks are widely
under-reported and not
all states track them or
classify them uniformly.
Nor does the data paint
a detailed picture of spe-
cific incidents, revealed
when the AP reviewed
more than 300 cases
of
student-on-student
sexual violence that
surfaced through law
enforcement
records,
lawsuits, interviews and
news accounts. In those
cases, the sports setting
emerged as a leading
venue for such attacks.
Teammate-on-team-
mate sexual assaults
occurred in all types of
sports in public schools,
and experts said the
more than 70 cases in
five years that AP iden-
tified were the tip of the
iceberg. Though largely
a high school phenome-
non, some cases were re-
ported as early as middle
school.
Boys made up the ma-
jority of aggressors and
victims in teammate at-
tacks, records show, and
some suffered serious
injury and trauma.
An Idaho football play-
er was hospitalized in
2015 with rectal injuries
after he was sodomized
with a coat hanger. That
same year, a North Car-
olina teen suffered rec-
tal bruising when he
was jabbed through his
clothes with a broom-
stick. Parents of a Ver-
mont athlete blamed his
2012 suicide on distress
a year after teammates
sodomized him with a
broom.
“It’s basically rape
and sexual assault,” said
Hank Nuwer, a hazing
historian at Franklin
College in Indiana. “It’s
amazing to me that there
hasn’t been a public out-
cry on this to help stop
it.”
The acts meet federal
law enforcement defini-
tions of rape and sexual
assault, but language
shrouds the problem and
minimizes its severity. It
also shapes how coaches
and schools respond, and
can influence whether
AP PHOTO/LM OTERO
Reporters examined sexual violence in school
sports as part of its larger look at student-on-
student sex assaults
Flags hang over the court at a varsity basketball game at Flower Mound High School in Flower Mound,
Texas, on Tuesday, Feb. 7, 2017. In 2011, Charles Freet lost his job as boys basketball coach at the school,
and now works at a Dallas-area private school. After a Flower Mound High School teacher reported
that players were putting their fingers in teammates’ bottoms, he told administrators investigating the
allegations that the acts were merely a joke and not hazing.
off-campus authorities
hold anyone account-
able.
“Language is every-
thing,” said B. Elliot
Hopkins, a sports safety
expert at the National
Federation of State High
School Associations. “If
anyone knew that their
kid was going to run
the risk of being sexu-
ally assaulted to be part
of a team, we wouldn’t
have anyone playing any
sports.”
Playing With Words
What really happened
on the Georgia baseball
team — compared to the
school district’s official
statement — is outlined
in graphic detail in state
education, police and
court records AP ob-
tained.
The
players
from
Parkview High School,
in the Atlanta suburb of
Lilburn, were playing in
a tournament in South
Carolina in June 2015.
That year’s squad would
be defending the school’s
third state champion-
ship and second Baseball
America High School
Team of the Year title
since 2011.
Over a pizza dinner, an
upperclassman warned
several freshmen to
“sleep with one eye open
tonight” and specifically
threatened sexual vio-
lence.
At the team hotel later,
with coaches nowhere in
sight, five to eight upper-
classmen barged into a
room and ordered three
freshmen out of hiding.
Over shouts of “get his
ass,” they pinned down
one boy, and through his
shorts, he felt fingers
shoved into his rectum.
They pulled down an-
other boy’s shorts. He
got them back up, but the
attackers grabbed and
punched his testicles.
The third managed to
flee.
To gain entry to a sec-
ond room, one of the up-
perclassmen pretended
to be a freshman and
obtained a key from the
front desk. Inside, the
aggressors blocked the
door and ganged up on
one boy. Only when he
broke free and threat-
ened to tell the coach
did the assault stop. “We
don’t want to be raped!”
another terrified boy
pleaded.
The
upperclassmen
didn’t challenge the ev-
idence in disciplinary
proceedings, but de-
scribed what they did to
the freshmen as “wres-
tling and horse playing.”
Targeting rookies for
humiliating, and even
risky, rituals is not new
to sports. However, ex-
perts say the last 10 to 15
years have seen an es-
calation into sexual vio-
lence.
The reasons why aren’t
entirely clear, and re-
search on sports hazing
rarely addresses these
assaults in depth. But
players, perhaps influ-
enced by sexualized pop
culture, seem to be try-
ing to one-up what was
done to them, experts
say.
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