Hazing scandal.
High-school football.
Been in the news for quite some time, as now there are at least seven students who are criminally charged over a hazing scandal
This, apparently, is another set of older players sodomizing younger players.
As I've noted several times on this blog, this is not a unique nor first-time situation. There was a famous case of a Long Island school whose older students took the younger students to the back of a school bus, on way to a summer football camp, and sodomized them with broomsticks.
According to a Mel Robbins CNN opinion piece, at least four freshmen football players were pinned to the ground and sexually assaulted by upper-classmen players over a ten-day period in September of 2014.
The football program has been cancelled for this season, and there is a chance, or so the superintendent says, that it isn't coming back.
At that point, I have but only two reactions:
First, even though the decision was upheld by the school board, I have to wonder how long it's going to be before this guy either gets threatened, shot, or simply run out of town.
Stubenville, anyone?
Penn State??
And, going back to the CNN piece, I look at comments like this one from a football mom and have to wonder how bad that mom has been beaten (perhaps by her own son?) over football:
"No one was hurt. No one died. I don't understand why they're being
punished. I think that the forfeited game was punishment enough."
I'll start the second reaction by the opinion piece's proposed actions:
1) Fire the coaches.
No. JAIL the coaches. Schools act, in the eyes of the courts as in loco parentis -- in the place of the parents. This isn't just a function of the actions themselves, but, either through a direct cover-up (and one which the opinion piece says may have been going on for years.
To believe that the coaching staff has no criminality in all of this is utterly ludicrous, especially in the nature of that this occurred in the locker room. At minimum, there should be an arrest and investigation on the complete abrogation of responsibility of oversight. At maximum, they took part, in one way or another, too.
Firing them just puts a Band-Aid on the problem.
2) Cancel next football season too.
Not sure that's going to be enough either. I'd say, right now, your next football season (if I don't get my ultimate recommendation, to come later), should be about the Twelfth of Never.
No more football.
Not sure if there should be any more sports either of any kind!
What alarms me in people believing otherwise is this real question: If the students are doing this to other football players to initiate them (and that's what this is: a perverted form of "Freshman Initiation"), what the fuck are they doing to other students, especially those considered "lesser" (non-athletes, LD, etc.)?
3) Find the whole truth.
Good luck, if that one mom is any indication. You'll probably end up with another Stubenville.
And that's why I give my ultimate recommendation: Shut the entire school district and re-partition the area into other districts.
Why? Very simple. How many innocent parties are there, in a true sense? Could we be talking a situation that anyone who didn't perpetrate this was a victim, or that the perpetrators were in the same position when they were younger?
You might well, as I just said, have a Stubenville situation here, where a massive series of incidents basically meant that a bunch of rapists, etc., ran the fucking town.
You try to find the whole truth, and you'd best be prepared for that truth to be utterly devastating?
And, of course, this is another example of football as rape -- basically, a non-consensual power-over which some people are taking quite literally.
Shut it down -- all of it.
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