Sodomy used as hazing at schools

[Smartmarzipan]

Sodomy hazing leaves victim, 13, outcast in Colorado as boys abusing boys increases
http://bangordailynews.com/2013/06/21/n ... ncil-shun/

At the state high-school wrestling tournament in Denver last year, three upperclassmen cornered a 13-year-old boy on an empty school bus, bound him with duct tape and sodomized him with a pencil.

For the boy and his family, that was only the beginning.

The students were from Norwood, Colo., a ranching town of about 500 people near the Telluride ski resort. Two of the attackers were sons of Robert Harris, the wrestling coach, who was president of the school board. The victim's father was the K-12 principal.

After the principal reported the incident to police, townspeople forced him to resign. Students protested against the victim at school, put "Go to Hell" stickers on his locker and wore T-shirts that supported the perpetrators. The attackers later pleaded guilty to misdemeanor charges, according to the Denver district attorney's office.

"Nobody would help us," said the victim's father, who asked not to be named to protect his son's privacy. Bloomberg News doesn't identify victims of sexual assault. "We contacted everybody and nobody would help us," he said.

High-school hazing and bullying used to involve name- calling, towel-snapping and stuffing boys into lockers. Now, boys sexually abusing other boys is part of the ritual. More than 40 high school boys were sodomized with foreign objects by their teammates in over a dozen alleged incidents reported in the past year, compared with about three incidents a decade ago, according to a Bloomberg review of court documents and news accounts.

Among them, boys were raped with a broken flagpole outside Los Angeles; a metal concrete-reinforcing bar in Fontana, Calif.; a jump-rope handle in Greenfield, Iowa; and a water bottle in Hardin, Mo., according to court rulings and prosecutors.

While little research has been done on boy-on-boy sexual hazing, almost 10 percent of high school males reported being victims of rape, forced oral sex or other forms of sexual assault by their peers, according to a 2009 study in the Journal of Youth and Adolescence.

"This is right out of 'Lord of the Flies,"' said Susan Stuart, a professor of education law at Valparaiso University Law School in Indiana, who has studied an increase in federal lawsuits brought by male victims of sexual hazing. "And nobody knows about it."

Hazing in high school is fueling college hazing, experts say, as a new generation of players on middle- and high-school sports teams learn ways to haze through social media, said Susan Lipkins, a psychologist in Port Washington, N.Y., who has studied the subject for 25 years. The practice has been increasing in frequency over the past decade, becoming more brutal and sexually violent, she said.

In at least four cases of sodomy hazing last year, the coach or supervising teacher was alleged to have known about it, ordered it, witnessed it or laughed about it, according to police reports and court filings.

At Maine West High School in Des Plaines, Ill., a Chicago suburb, varsity soccer players allegedly "rewarded" new teammates by holding them down and sodomizing them with sticks and their fingers, while coaches did nothing to intervene, according to court documents and police reports.

After witnessing an attack on a 16-year-old in July, varsity coach Michael DiVincenzo allegedly congratulated the victim and asked him "if it was all good," according to a police report. During a freshman drill, he was alleged to have told players they would be sodomized by the varsity team if they failed to communicate effectively, according to a police report.

About 4,000 sexual assaults occur each year inside U.S. public schools, as well as 800 rapes or attempted rapes, according to a letter the U.S. Education Department sent to educators in April 2011.

"We don't tolerate this anywhere else in our society," said Antonio Romanucci, a Chicago attorney representing some of the alleged Maine West victims in a civil lawsuit. "So why are we tolerating it in our schools?"

State anti-hazing laws enacted in the 1990s have had little effect as victims are often reluctant to testify and penalties are mild. While the Education Department hasn't warned schools about sexual hazing, it has offered guidance on bullying, cautioning schools that they can be held liable for tolerating or ignoring it.

"We leave it up to the states to monitor it," said Elaine Quesinberry, a department spokeswoman.

Norwood sits 7,000 feet high on a mesa in the Colorado Rockies, a six-hour drive southwest of Denver. Its single main street, with laundromat and diner, presents a working-class contrast to the lavish Telluride ski and summer resort 33 miles away. The area was once home to Spanish explorers and mountain men. Robert LeRoy Parker, better known as Butch Cassidy, worked the ranches here more than 100 years ago.

Norwood is so small that its 300 students in preschool through 12th grade attend classes in a single building. The football team fields eight players instead of the usual 11. Still, glass cases lining the school's hallways show off sports trophies celebrating decades of triumphs from basketball to cheerleading.

"Pain is temporary" reads a poster on the wall. "Pride is forever."

"We always thought it was a great area to raise kids," the principal said in an interview. "They were really happy kids, liked going to school, straight-A students."

Their 13-year-old son was especially good at sports. A sturdy teenager with dimples and a quick smile, he started Pee Wee wrestling at age 3. At home he dazzled his family with his knowledge of sports trivia and enjoyed hanging out with his older brother. Yet in the months leading up to the attack, his mother become concerned that her usually easy-going son was being teased at school, she said.

In February 2012, the boy rode the bus to Denver as the team manager, in charge of videotaping the older high school students at the meet. After the coaches and wrestlers left the bus to weigh in, three older and bigger boys pinned the younger boy down, bound him with the tape, pulled down his pants and assaulted him, according to the principal. His parents were at a hotel, awaiting the start of the meet.

Bloomberg isn't naming the boys involved because they are juveniles.

Just before the meet started, the principal's older son heard the attackers laughing about the assault on his brother and told his father.

"I was shocked beyond belief, and I was mad," the father said. "I do believe I was madder than I have ever been. You're trying to protect your kids, and then something like this happens."

The father sought out his son, who told him what had happened. He then confronted Harris, the head coach, who at first said nothing had occurred, according to the father. In subsequent conversations, Harris said: "This happens 1,000 times a day around the U.S.," the principal recalled.

"I knew it wasn't going to be pretty," the principal said. "When you take on, first, a powerful family in the town — and he is also the school board president, and his kid had done something wrong — there is going to be something coming back at you."

While the 7th-grade victim didn't require medical attention after the attack, he soon found himself repeatedly teased by students.

"They would say, 'What's been stuck up your butt today?"' said his mother. "Things were posted on Facebook, like 'Rot in hell, liar!"'

As word spread about the incident, townspeople turned against the principal and his family.

"When I was in school there might have been bullying, but there was none of this crap about telling the school," said Jennifer Long, a waitress at the Hitchin' Post Cowboy Bar, a popular eatery on the town's main street. "How you going to be tough if you don't get bullied sometimes?" she said.

Long's husband James Eilmann agreed.

"I got bullied as a kid because I had long hair and earrings," said Eilmann, a 45-year-old carpenter. "I played football, baseball and soccer and the older kids bullied me. But we always shook hands and it would be over with. But today, you can get prosecuted. It has all gone too far."

Frustrated by the response of town and school officials, the principal finally reported the incident to the Denver police. The police sent investigators to Norwood and on April 23 they arrested the three boys, charging them as juveniles with kidnapping, sexual assault and false imprisonment, according to the district attorney's office.

On news of the arrests, anger exploded in Norwood, and it was aimed squarely at the principal and his 13-year-old son. The school board held a series of private meetings with parents who clamored for the principal's dismissal.

"They blamed our victim," said Lynn Kimbrough, a spokeswoman for the Denver district attorney's office, which brought the charges against the three students. "There was a huge backlash, and everybody turned against this boy and his family for bringing trouble to their town."

After the T-shirt incident, the principal decided to stop sending his son to school, and instead brought his assignments home.

"My son was the outcast," the principal said. "He was made to feel like he was the one who caused the whole thing."

Later that year, one of the accused students pleaded guilty to sexual contact without consent; the other two pleaded guilty to third-degree assault. They received varied sentences that included probation, community service and restitution of about $2,500 apiece.

The principal's contract was up for renewal. After extensive negotiations involving lawyers from both sides, the board renewed his contract and put him on paid leave while it reached a settlement.

The principal was offered another job in a town 200 miles away that pays half his previous salary. The family moved and he enrolled his children in a new school.

Harris was reappointed Norwood's wrestling coach. He was given a letter of reprimand for leaving students unsupervised on the bus, Crews told police.

This...I don't.....just......

Words are failing me at the moment.  :shock:

[AllPurposeAtheist]

First and foremost if this happened to my son and the SOB laughed at me he would be pulling a chair out of his ass, but hazing has GOT to stop and become what it is, felonious assault and no more slaps on the wrists.. Lock these assholes and their enablers up and let them spend ten, twenty years with REAL hazers..

[Solitary]

Even normal hazing I always found to be cruel, but this is in a whole new category.    Solitary

[Johan]

Unacceptable. That is the only word I have for this.

[Poison Tree]

"When I was in school there might have been bullying, but there was none of this crap about telling the school," said Jennifer Long, a waitress at the Hitchin' Post Cowboy Bar, a popular eatery on the town's main street. "How you going to be tough if you don't get bullied sometimes?" she said.

Long's husband James Eilmann agreed.

"I got bullied as a kid because I had long hair and earrings," said Eilmann, a 45-year-old carpenter. "I played football, baseball and soccer and the older kids bullied me. But we always shook hands and it would be over with. But today, you can get prosecuted. It has all gone too far."

What in the hell is wrong with these people. Getting raped with a pencil will make you tough? It is going too far to prosecute rapists? If I were a more violent person, maybe on the next day when it is too damn hot down here I'd drive into the mountains and try beating some morality into these townspeople.

I have to say, I'm beginning to wonder if male victims of rape and sexual assault don't have it ever-so slightly worse them women, if only because--while they both face the same type of victim blaming and "boys will be boys/let's not ruin someone's life by charging them with rape" attitude--what victim support there is (at least vocal support among the general public) seems to be focused almost entirely on women (understandable so, at least to some--perhaps large--degree, since most of the victims are women by a huge margin). Still, for as much talk about rape-culture as I've been hearing lately regarding rape jokes, jokes about male rape seem more common and don't appear to draw nearly as much backlash.

[Agramon]

I remember pulling some crazy pranks on freshman in varsity football, but never anything that fucked up. What really gets me is there's apparently a whole group of guys at these schools that are cool with this, not just one or two fucked up kids (or adults) like I would have thought. Also, what happened to the whole "gay" taboo in sports?

[aitm]

apparently some people have no imagination as to proper "revenge". Lord help the kids if they did that to mine. And there would be no help for that parent that would allow their kids to do that without punishment.

[Youssuf Ramadan]

Good grief, this is disgusting.   :shock:

[gussy]

I spent a few years at a boarding school and it happened quite a bit.  One of my roommates got shit on in a literal sense.  He got it  worse than most but there was nothing anyone was going to do about it.  Some of the older guys put Deep Heat on my tender places  :oops: .  The perpetrators were the most crudely homophobic people in public but always were doing the gayest things in private.

[Farroc]

Community service?! Fines?! THIS IS UNDERAGE RAPE. If someone were to try this with me I'd be the one going to prison.  And I'm a goddamned pacifist.

[NeoLogic26]

Wow. I'm not one of those people who are all gung-ho for vigilante justice, but when the justice system refuses to acknowledge there is a problem, or the system is filled with corruption, what recourse do victims and their families have? I would have burned that whole district to the ground and anyone who perpetrated the backlash would have been collateral damage. I'm sickened and infuriated when things like this are allowed to happen. That such injustice exists and is allowed to spread makes me wish I could hit the reset button on humanity.

If my son or daughter is ever involved in something like this (from the attacker's side) I can't imagine the hell I would unleash on them as punishment. For all intents and purposes their social lives would be over and until I could determine that whatever defect that caused them to behave that way was fixed, they would never leave the house except to go to school.

[Smartmarzipan]

Community service?! Fines?! THIS IS UNDERAGE RAPE. If someone were to try this with me I'd be the one going to prison.  And I'm a goddamned pacifist.

There is a strong, underlying current of rape culture in this country. A lot of people don't like to hear it (and many think it's only about men raping women), but it's there. "Oh, that's not real rape." "Oh, they were asking for it." "Oh, we don't know what really happened..." "Certain people can't be raped." The excuses and rationalizations people make for unwanted sexual behavior goes on and on. Someone earlier explained it to me, and they called it "the culture of sexual presumption" which is "the presumption that a human being is, regardless of their own feelings on the matter, at all times a sexual being of some degree or other." And we're all guilty of THAT. I am. I've been working on it for a while, trying to view people without making any kind of snap judgments (including what they might be like in bed), but we're human and that's going to happen. But when people refuse to acknowledge that this exists, well, that's how we end up with a problematic rape culture.

[gussy]

Community service?! Fines?! THIS IS UNDERAGE RAPE. If someone were to try this with me I'd be the one going to prison.  And I'm a goddamned pacifist.

There is a strong, underlying current of rape culture in this country. A lot of people don't like to hear it (and many think it's only about men raping women), but it's there. "Oh, that's not real rape." "Oh, they were asking for it." "Oh, we don't know what really happened..." "Certain people can't be raped." The excuses and rationalizations people make for unwanted sexual behavior goes on and on. Someone earlier explained it to me, and they called it "the culture of sexual presumption" which is "the presumption that a human being is, regardless of their own feelings on the matter, at all times a sexual being of some degree or other." And we're all guilty of THAT. I am. I've been working on it for a while, trying to view people without making any kind of snap judgments (including what they might be like in bed), but we're human and that's going to happen. But when people refuse to acknowledge that this exists, well, that's how we end up with a problematic rape culture.

It is much easier to believe that something is wrong with the victim.  Parents don't want to think that their own children are that fucked up.  Instead they blame the victim for not being a good sport about it and try to run him out of town.  ]

[Aletheia]

On topics like this, the fervent desire of those gun fanatics suddenly has a place in society. I suspect that gun-culture would quickly eradicate rape-culture if a few people looked the other way for a bit. Vigilante justice might be ethically immoral, but one can see where the temptation lies.

Much of these problem arises from the out-moded concept that children can't lie and aren't predisposed toward violence. This simply isn't true. Children learn to lie rather quickly and by the time they reach adolescence they can be pretty adept to lying and without a firm hand, can become rather creative in nurturing very violent tendencies. Children and teen-agers are after all, immature human beings. We as a species do not have a track record as being peace-loving and rational.

If anything, this rape-culture is an indication of lazy parenting and poorly managed schools. Violence and sex are among the most primitive elements of the human psyche and require early, consistent, and continuous training from family, schools, and society in general to keep in check.

[Smartmarzipan]

Much of these problem arises from the out-moded concept that children can't lie and aren't predisposed toward violence. This simply isn't true. Children learn to lie rather quickly and by the time they reach adolescence they can be pretty adept to lying and without a firm hand, can become rather creative in nurturing very violent tendencies. Children and teen-agers are after all, immature human beings. We as a species do not have a track record as being peace-loving and rational.

If anything, this rape-culture is an indication of lazy parenting and poorly managed schools. Violence and sex are among the most primitive elements of the human psyche and require early, consistent, and continuous training from family, schools, and society in general to keep in check.

It is much easier to believe that something is wrong with the victim. Parents don't want to think that their own children are that fucked up. Instead they blame the victim for not being a good sport about it and try to run him out of town.

I definitely blame the parents as having a hand in this, and perhaps that is why they can't bring themselves to hold their children accountable for their actions....because (I believe) the parents are also accountable. No one wants to admit they raised kids with terrible values and no sense of responsibility or empathy. It's easier to blame the victim than admit that you and your kids suck.