When Hazing Turns into Rape: Trench Reynolds DBKP This Week in Crime
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
The Trenchcoat Chronicles
image: Trench Network
Hazing has definitely evolved over the years to be more criminal that ritual. It’s too bad in the cases you mentioned that the boys received little punishment. Even background checks run of the boys would probably not show any offenses.
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What about the victims? In my day, (early 70′s) we had a thing called pay back. Do these victims ever consider retaliation.
I would sue them for everything they would ever have, put up flyers all over town stating they were rapist. That would get them lots of dates. I would call every college that any one of these boys wanted to go to, and tell them what they had done and what to expect. If they did get a scholarship I would run a add in the local paper in that town telling how they were charged with rape? As you can tell, I think these boys should pay dearly for what they did, and if it were my child I would see to it that they regretted there action. I would also like to say I would keep it within the law. There are lots of things you can do within the law if you just think hard enough.
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This is a result of liberal laws that this country has adopted throughout the years. Kids of today do not have any respect for anyone or anything and laws prevent us from doing anything to them for their actions. I say line them all up and Kane them.
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Ron, I think you don’t understand much about the psychology of rape victims. It’s not something you want to stand around the rooftops screaming to the community. Rape is a horrible, awful thing that can make someone retreat from the world. It should NOT be the victim’s responsibility to prosecute and punish his abusers.
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