In the last year, there have been more than a dozen hazing incidents around the country involving high school boys who have sodomized other boys with foreign objects, reports Bloomberg. Over 40 boys have been reported victims. Most have been younger students.
There’s a dearth of data concerning the size and scope of the national boy-on-boy anal hazing problem. Astonishingly, though, a study published in the Journal of Youth and Adolescence has claimed that nearly 10 percent of high school males report suffering some form of sexual assault including, in some cases, forced oral sex or rape.
Social media plays a big role in the spread of hazing in high schools, asserts Susan Lipkins, a New York psychologist who has studied the phenomenon. High schoolers learn new and more brutal ways to haze thanks to virtual communities.
“Each time a hazing occurs, the perpetrators add their own mark to it by increasing the pain or humiliation,” Lipkins told Bloomberg.
A sampling of recent incidents certainly demonstrates creative cruelty.
Three former soccer players at La Puente High School in the suburban sprawl east of Los Angeles were convicted of sexually assaulting other students with a javelin and a broken flagpole, reports Southern California Public Radio.
A bit farther east, in Fontana, Calif., underage students allegedly tried to place a piece of rebar inside the anal cavity of another student, according to NBC Southern California. There was a similar incident involving a broom handle. Prosecutors say a masonry teacher was present at the time and knew what was happening.
In tiny Greenfield, Iowa, a group of members of the Nodaway Valley High School wrestling team allegedly pinned down a 16-year-old teammate and sexually assaulted him because he had missed practice. An unidentified student told ABC affiliate KCRG that older wrestlers ordinarily forced jump role handles into the anuses of younger wrestlers who missed practice or failed to make weight.
At New York’s fancypants Bronx High School of Science, three members of the track team stand accused of violently sexual abusing at least one younger student, reports CBS New York.
“You need a good fingering, you freshman,” one of the attackers allegedly told the victim at one point.
In the suburbs of Chicago, prosecutors say a group of older soccer players at Maine West High School sodomized several younger players with fingers or sticks, says WLS-TV.
The embattled coach, Michael DiVincenzo, is charged with abetting the hazing abuse.
“He himself threatened players that he would order varsity players to perpetrate acts of violence and hazing upon these young men,” charged a prosecutor in the criminal case against the coach, according to the Niles Herald-Spectator.
Bloomberg covers the horrifying, fascinating details of another case that occurred in 2012 in the tiny ranching town of Norwood, Colorado. Three varsity wrestlers bound a 13-year-old boy with duct tape on a bus — at the state wrestling meet — and sodomized him with a pencil.
The wrestling coach was the father of two of the attackers. The victim’s father was the principal of the school’s single, all-grade public school.
The superintendent gave the assailants a one-day, in-school suspension.
The unnamed principal confronted the wrestling coach. After initially denying the incident, the coach allegedly said, “This happens 1,000 times a day around the U.S.”
Students teased the 13-year-old boy. “What’s been stuck up your butt today?” they would ask.
The townies sided overwhelmingly with the coach and the pencil-wielding attackers.
“I got bullied as a kid because I had long hair and earrings,” a local carpenter told Bloomberg. “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.”
“When I was in school there might have been bullying, but there was none of this crap about telling the school,” added the carpenter’s spouse.
The principal eventually had to accept a buyout of his contract and move to another Colorado town.
The wrestling coach is still employed by the school.
The sexual assault craze that is sweeping America’s schools isn’t limited to hazing, or anal violations, or high schools.
Three male students — two third-graders and a fifth-grader — at an elementary school in New York City forced a third-grade boy to perform oral sex on them, according to a disturbing lawsuit. (RELATED: Three grade-school boys allegedly forced third-grader to perform oral sex on them)
The March 2012 incident allegedly occurred in a bathroom at Public School 194 in Harlem. The eight-year-old victim was standing in a hallway when the three assailants dragged the boy into a bathroom stall. His pleas for help went unheard.
