A small New Jersey town is reeling weeks after seven high-school varsity American football players were accused of charges ranging from hazing to aggravated sexual assault earlier this month.
According to the victims, seniors on the Sayreville War Memorial High School team would run into the locker room, turn the lights off, pin them to the floor and, at the very least, grab their buttocks. This allegedly happened on multiple occasions between 19 and 29 September.
Three of the players are facing more serious charges, including the sexual penetration of one victim.
This may have been an orchestrated event. Four players would hold a victim on the floor while two were on lookout, one parent told NJ.comafter their son confided in them. One player would signal the start of the process with a howl, then turn off the lights and assault the freshman.
Two victims interviewed by the New York Times, including one who said he was digitally penetrated from behind, said they were wearing football pants at the time and didn't consider what happened to be that serious.
Stories of older members of the team pinning down freshmen team-mates and assaulting them in a dark locker room as others cheered initially shocked the community. But after superintendent of schools Richard Labbe cancelled the rest of the team's season, many students and parents defended the programme and criticised what they saw as a punishment that extended to players who were not involved.
"If freshman thought we hated them before, we sure as hell hate them now," one 16-year-old student wrote on Twitter shortly after the season was cancelled.
During a school board meeting, according to Sports Illustrated, dozens of players and parents protested against the decision to cancel the season.
"They were talking about a butt being grabbed," one player's mother, Madeline Thillet, said. "That's about it. No one was hurt. No one died."
In reaction to the extreme backlash, the victims may be minimising the story, say Nate Shweber, Kim Barker and Jason Grant in the New York Times. They write that there has been an "atmosphere of recrimination" since the season's cancellation.
"The search is on for the snitches - the kids who killed football in Sayreville," they write.
Gary Phillips of the Journal News, a newspaper in the Lower Hudson River Valley of New York, says he has a problem with how many people have been referring to what happened as hazing at all. He writes that hazing is a part of team culture, but it is too often an excuse to bully or cause suffering.
What happened in Sayreville was not hazing, he says. What happened had nothing to do with initiation or building camaraderie.
"By calling sexual abuse hazing, society grants those perpetrators a free pass and downplays the brutality of their actions," he writes. "What is actually a very serious crime is passed off as a 'rite of passage' ritual that went too far."
Rape or hazing, football players in Sayresville need to come to terms with their homosexuality in a hurry. Fingering dudes' assholes is nothing a straight guy would do. I guess that's Jersey for ya!
ReplyDeleteLike those infamous pictures of U.S. Army personnel and defense contractors doing shots off eachother's butt cracks in Afghanistan?
ReplyDeleteOr the Israeli defense contractors and American Army personnel raping teenage boys in front of their fathers in Abu Ghraib?
Should they also, "come to terms?"
Canceling the high school football season has not killed football in that town. No one is going to stop guys going out after school and playing football together. They can do that every day, if they like. Only, no one now is going to celebrate them for doing it.
ReplyDeleteBest comments from the moral town's people,
ReplyDelete"No one died.."
"We hate them now.."
So bullying is okay as long as no one dies and openly declaring your hatred for an entire class is okay, oh, along with acts of violence against that same class. This is America, the so-called, "Christian Nation," according to Fox News.
Football from what I have seen generally turns guys into authoritarian wimps who learn how to "go along with the team thing" and quash any signs of independent thinking, especially when the "team" is doing wrong(sound familiar?). How many soldiers know what the USA is doing in other nations is wrong but are afraid to speak up, or worse yet, use the "team" principle to justify war crimes? When you do something to a person who does not want that thing done to them(even something non-sexual), that is violation(rape)!
ReplyDeleteEvery person subconsciously knows that football with getting 'penetration' into
ReplyDeleteThe opponents 'endzone' And all the fanny patting is a homosexual ritual.
Check it out: http://ww2.biol.sc.edu/~jalam/Dundes_Football.pdf
Besides that most of the players are dumb as an ape and the fans are as
Vicariously hoping to 'screw' their opponents and give them the 'shaft'
as they gobble down 'wieners' in the stands.
Ditto goes for all those dumbass wars led by football 'cheerleader' at Yale,
George DUHbya and Barak-the-first-gay-president-and-his-transsexual-wife-Obama
I would say that the football/homosexual ritual is definitely at work there too.
Maybe some shrink can do a paper on that.