Posted: 06/20/2013 06:27:50 PM MDT
Updated: 06/21/2013 10:47:38 AM MDT
By Chris Staiti and Barry Bortnick, Bloomberg News
Norwood School Superintendent David Crews said experts were brought in
to talk about hazing and bullying in the wake of an incident in which a
13-year-old boy was sodomized by upperclassmen. Crews imposed a one-day,
in-school suspension on the three boys accused of the assault. (Barry
Bortnick/Bloomberg News)
NORWOOD,
Colo. — 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
Norwood, Colo., is so small that its 300 students in preschool through
12th grade attend classes in a single building. (Barry
Bortnick/Bloomberg News)
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.
At New York's elite Bronx High School of
Science, three teenage track-team members were arrested after a freshman
teammate alleged they repeatedly hazed him between December
Norwood's single main street, with laundromat and diner, presents a
working-class contrast to the lavish Telluride ski and summer resort 33
miles away. (Barry Bortnick/Bloomberg News)
and
February, including holding the boy down and sodomizing him with their
fingers. They pleaded not guilty in New York state criminal court in the
Bronx, according to Melvin Hernandez, a spokesman for the Bronx
District Attorney's office. A lawyer for one of the boys was unavailable
for comment; the other two declined to comment.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.
"Each time a hazing occurs, the perpetrators add their own mark to it by increasing the pain or humiliation," Lipkins said.
High
school boys are trying to prove their masculinity to each other by
humiliating younger boys because that's what they think manliness is all
about, said William Pollack, associate professor of psychology at
Harvard Medical School.
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Keith Srakocic / AP 
