Wilson not alone in hazing gone awry
By Paul Westmoore and Aaron Besecker
- NEWS NIAGARA BUREAU
Updated: 05/04/08 7:03 AM
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- Hazing hit home last week when three members of Wilson High School’s boys varsity baseball team were charged with sexually abusing at least two members of the junior varsity team.
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Wilson High School is not alone when it comes to allegations that hazing has crossed the line into sexual abuse.
A list of cases over the last five years includes two junior high school football players near Syracuse who held down a teammate on a locker room floor while another rubbed his genitals in the boy’s face.
A 15-year-old freshman football player in Greenwood, Ind., was pinned down in a locker room while his teammates struck and kicked him, then tried to insert a two-foot-round metal rod into his rectum.
And members of a Long Island high school football team sodomized three junior varsity players with a broomstick during a preseason training camp in Pennsylvania.
“We’ve come a long ways from a wedgie,” said Wilson Village Trustee James O’Donnell III.
Hazing gone awry hit the area full force last week, after three members of the Wilson High School boys varsity baseball team were charged with sexually abusing at least two members of the junior varsity team aboard a bus two weeks earlier.
Two coaches aboard the bus were charged with endangering the welfare of a child and are accused of turning a blind eye to the abuse going on in the seats behind them.
The allegations in Wilson ring familiar to experts who have followed similar cases across the country. Most incidents share similar elements, are handled in similar ways and — regardless of how uncomfortable they are to discuss — provide teaching moments for communities, adults and students forced to confront them, the experts say.
These incidents occur more frequently than most people realize, said Susan Lipkin, a psychologist from Port Washington,
L. I., who has published a book on the subject, “Preventing Hazing.”
“There is a tradition to initiate new members on a team, particularly on male athletic teams,” Lipkin said. “It normally involves older team members taking steps to humiliate and demean the boy at the lowest level.”
“The common trend over the past five years or more has been basically to turn a boy into a girl by penetration,” Lipkin said of the worst situations. “In other words, they get engaged in homosexual play and then they call the victim gay because he’s been sodomized. Ironically, it’s the perpetrators that are committing the homosexual act.”
Such incidents are self-perpetuating, because the tradition passes from one class to another, she said.
After such cases surface in public, they also tend to follow a familiar pattern, Lipkin and other experts say.
Once arrests are made, a community often begins to polarize, said psychologist Doug P. Jowdy, a Niagara Falls native and an assistant clinical professor at the University of Colorado.
In previous cases, most community members diminish what happens and try to sweep it under the rug, said Jowdy, who specializes in sports psychology.
Others, though, o v e r r e a c t and feel there’s no hope, he said. They want only the worst for the students who committed the crime.
Both groups would be better to focus on healing the victims and those responsible for the incident, Jowdy said.
The community needs to come together, face the matter, discuss it, understand it and take measures to prevent it from happening again, he said.
As these cases go through court, the perpetrators typically are allowed to plead to misdemeanor charges reduced from felonies.
“Most people begin to rally around the coaches, the teachers and the perpetrators and say the victims are making a big deal” out of very little, Lipkin said. “They act like the victims are basically being lame by complaining. Everybody wants the whole thing to go away.”
Both Lipkin and Jowdy call this secondary hazing, which can sometimes prompt a victim’s family to move out of town.
Leadership is vital as a community works through the aftermath of arrests, and healing takes years.
“Leaders like the superintendent, the principal and the athletic director have to become very proactive,” Jowdy said, “[They need to] bring the community together and set up programs to teach everyone — coaches, teachers, parents and even sports team captains — how to make sure kids understand what behaviors are socially acceptable.”
It’s a message that must be reinforced continuously, he said, and a couple of classes won’t do.
“Kids also need constant supervision and guidance,” Jowdy said. “You can’t leave them to their own devices, even on the back of a bus. That’s irresponsible and inexcusable.”
Lipkin said the district also has to initiate measures that will reward students for breaking “the code of silence” that allows hazing and sodomy to occur.
The victims and the bystanders, she said, need to be honored for their bravery in coming forward.
State police did so last Monday, when announcing the arrest of the three members of the Wilson High School varsity baseball team. Each was charged with a misdemeanor count of endangering the welfare of a child under age 17, and felony third-degree aggravated sexual abuse. The felony charge accuses them of forcing a foreign object into a private body opening.
In high schools across the region, officials have the topic of hazing on their minds. Many attended a seminar on the issue held by Section VI officials in March.
Len Jankiewicz, Lancaster’s athletic director and head football coach, said the Wilson incident boils down to a loss of old-fashioned respect for others.
“If you take student athletics out of the picture, we’re just talking about treating people the way they should be treated,” said Jankiewicz, who’s spent more than 35 years in education, including 22 years as a football coach and 13 as athletic director.
Jankiewicz said he feels bad for Wilson as a whole, because something like this could have happened in any district across Western New York.
Jim Mauro, athletic director at all-male Canisius High School, also believes authority figures can’t let their guard down or be lulled into a false sense of security.
“We have a tremendous responsibility as coaches and administrators to these young men,” Mauro said. “You can’t take anything for granted. You have to be ‘on’ all the time.”
In the 2003 case at Fulton Junior High School, north of Syracuse, the boys accused in the attack of a football teammate were sentenced in Family Court.
The boy who suffered the heaviest punishment got 200 hours of community service, two years of probation and was ordered to undergo counseling.
Robert P. Dwyer, a Syracuse attorney, represented the victim’s family in a lawsuit against the Fulton City School District.
It took about four years, including an appeal , from when the incident occurred until a settlement was reached in September.
“It was torture,” Dwyer said. “It was public humiliation for the parents of the victim.”
Dwyer urged parents in Wilson to push the school district for answers, adding they should pursue an independent investigation.
pwestmoore@buffnews.com and abesecker@buffnews.com
