7 Sayreville High School Students Charged in Football Hazing Probe: Prosecutor

[Crabby Appleton]

Source: NBC News

Six Sayreville War Memorial High School students have been arrested on sexual assault and other charges in a series of alleged hazing incidents last month, and a seventh student is being sought, prosecutors say.

Prosecutors in New Jersey announced last week they were investigating allegations that upperclassmen on the top regionally ranked Sayreville High School football team were hazing freshmen players in ways that could be considered sexual assault.

On Friday, the Middlesex County prosecutor announced charges against seven Sayreville students, ages 15 to 17. They're accused of forcefully holding the younger students while others improperly touched them, and in one case, kicking one victim during an attack.


more...

http://www.nbcnewyork.com/news/local/Sayreville-New-Jersey-Copes-No-High-Schools-Football-278861871.html

Read more: http://www.nbcnewyork.com/news/local/Sayreville-New-Jersey-Copes-No-High-Schools-Football-278861871.html

[vlyons]

1. what about the coaches?

Is the school district going to fire their asses? Those coaches bear some responsibility for this. And the principal of the school is not entirely blameless either.

[Celebration]

2. what evidence do you have that the coaches were responsible, or knew about it?

I think you are passing judgment before the facts are known.

This does not seem to be a cover up situation.

Should a teacher of any kind be responsible for her student's criminal activity? Generally no.

[packman]

4. Damn right the coaches knew

this so-called ritual of passage is given the old wink-wink, nod-nod by the adults. How naive one must be not to think the coaches didn't know about it.

[Oktober]

9. Prove it...

This is a legal standard and not a 'everyone knows' standard btw...

Maybe they did but you have to show it and not just assume.

[on point]

10. Thanks for standing up for the law! Otherwise we get witch burnings because 'everyone knows'

[heaven05]

11. the 'law' means NOTHING anymore

not to police, politicians, DA's, Judges(supreme or otherwise). NOTHING!!!!

[on point]

15. So don't stoop to their level. Uphold and restore it.

[heaven05]

19. the law has been

only upheld for a certain segment of this society. When it's time to put a black male threat in prison for a non-violent or first offense, the 'law' is upheld. For the very same crime the 'law' is upheld in a less stringent manner for a certain racial-economic segment of society. Should not be a case where it has to be restored at all. Fair and balanced should be the criteria for all and for a certain racial-economic segment of this society it has never been. And with the renewed power of the racist in this country, precisely because of Barack Obama's election to POTUS, WILL NEVER BE. I fear we who could restore the democracy in our legal system have lost the power to do so and that's sensible whites and ALL blacks.

Corporations, huge monied banks and RW media have agitated a certain segment of this society to the point where only confrontation will be the result if fair and balanced representatives(police) of the power structure are not reigned in from shooting down unarmed citizens in our streets and judges start applying 'fair and balanced' judgement.

I'd be willing to bet these kids will not see much time in jail. SPORTS IS KING.

[lolly]

14. Poster called for firing, not arrest

Having so little control of the students you are supposed to be supervising that they manage to sexually assault others multiple times in the area under your supervision would seem by itself to demonstrate incompetence.

[Orsino]

22. "On the coaches' watch," I'm hearing.

Is there evidence that the hazing happened when and where a coach could have witnessed it? If not, then what we're really saying is "during the coaches' tenure."

[yurbud]

7. in communities that revere sports, principals give coaches a wide berth

and then look the other way when they do see something.

[vlyons]

8. no excuse

It happened on the principal and coach's watch. At the very least, I would expect the principal to fire the football coach, and the school district to fire the principal. The standard is set by the principal to make it perfectly clear to the coaches and teachers that hazing of this sort will not be tolerated, and the coach's job to communicate to the students and parents the same. How difficult is it for the coach to communicate to the students that ganging up on a freshman is cowardly and unmanly? How difficult is it to teach that bullying behavior makes you a pariah? and that sexual assault is criminal.

[yurbud]

12. yep. and more than other adults, what the coach says goes.

[tomm2thumbs]

3. 'arrested on sexual assault and other charges'

maybe that will finally wake up the parents who were miffed about missing a few games

I can only guess ones arrested didn't happen to mention to their parents what they were doing -- mom and dad had to find out for themselves when the police showed up to get their 'perfectly innocent' kids.

[leftyladyfrommo]

5. I think a whole lot of this kind of abuse

happens to young boys. It's kind of a sick right of passage. Happens in sports, in private even elite schools, anywhere there are groups of boys. Kind of a Lord of the Flies sort of thing.

No one talks about it.

[Stuart G]

6. k and r..no text.

[XemaSab]

13. Is it true that all the boys who were arrested are black?

I smell a racist rat here.

[ManiacJoe]

16. What have you seen that would suggest that?

[XemaSab]

17. It was on one of the news sites but they took it down

n/t

[840high]

21. It doesn't matter what color - what

those boys did was disgusting.

[Oktober]

23. If it's true...

The allegations are certainly awful...

[KamaAina]

24. In Sayreville? I doubt it.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sayreville,_New_Jersey#Demographics

At the 2010 United States Census, there were 42,704 people, 15,636 households, and 11,414 families residing in the borough. The population density was 2,695.7 per square mile (1,040.8 /km2). There were 16,393 housing units at an average density of 1,034.8 per square mile (399.5 /km2). The racial makeup of the borough was 67.04% (28,630) White, 10.71% (4,573) Black or African American, 0.23% (100) Native American, 16.12% (6,882) Asian, 0.04% (18) Pacific Islander, 3.50% (1,495) from other races, and 2.36% (1,006) from two or more races. Hispanics or Latinos of any race were 12.31% (5,258) of the population.

[defacto7]

18. Does anyone else get the opinion that

this either will start to bring out other sexual related hazing in other sport teams in America... or will this be just one very messed up bunch of boys who were taught that everyone does this, then to find out they are the odd boys out... alone in their perverted acts of abuse?

I hope they are the screwball exceptions, but if not I hope many more victims will come out and let it be known.

[customerserviceguy]

26. Can we all stop calling it 'hazing'?

That's just a 'boys will be boys' way to disguise what it really is: bullying. The idea that this or any other form of harassment and intimidation somehow builds a team spirit is erroneous, and needs to be treated like the same kind of bullying that produces national tragedies like Columbine.

[defacto7]

27. It's not a matter of whether

hazing is bullying, it's a matter of defining who is doing the bullying. I think hazing is the correct word because it depicts a certain group that has had too much protection or acceptance. It takes both words to make the point that there are ways of bullying that have other less expected venues. Yes, most now know that hazing in it's historic secretive form is bullying. In this particular case, it's unquestionably bullying.

[KurtNYC]

28. Hazing is what my windshield does in thick fog. Calling it what it is might help stop it:

(pick from):

Involuntary Deviate Sexual Intercourse
Aggravated Assault
Kidnapping
Unlawful Restraint
False Imprisonment
Terroristic Threats
Criminal Coercion
Simple Assault
Reckless Endangering of Another Person
Criminal Conspiracy

[Rhinodawg]

20. Bye idiots.

Enjoy prison.

[KamaAina]

25. Sayreville is considering banning football altogether

https://gma.yahoo.com/jersey-football-program-might-jeopardy-hazing-bombshell-133130457--abc-news-topstories.html

A New Jersey high school football program could be in jeopardy after seven players were charged in connection with a hazing investigation.

Sayreville War Memorial High School canceled its season last week as details emerged from a Middlesex County Prosecutor’s Office investigation. District Superintendent Richard Labbe says the program could remain dormant for longer than just this season.

“I will be making that very, very difficult, but very, very important decision as to whether to have a football program at Sayreville,” Labbe told ABC News.

Labbe said he is awaiting further information from the Middlesex County prosecutor’s office.

Gee, you suppose Steubenville, Ohio ever considered that?

[radicalliberal]

29. Dave Zirin's response to the Sayreville scandal:

http://www.edgeofsports.com/2014-10-13-962/index.html

‘Raiders Night’ Comes to Sayreville
By Dave Zirin


The best young adult sports book that I’ve ever read is Raiders Night, by Robert Lipsyte. It details the dynamics of a big-time New Jersey high school football team, the Nearmont Raiders, and the ways in which a sports hazing culture seamlessly morphs into a sexual assault against a teammate. Raiders Night lays out better than a stack of academic articles how the toxic masculinity embedded in many football teams, when spliced with peer pressure, could lead otherwise good kids to choose silence when faced with a violent crime. I lent this book to a friend in 2010 and I’ll never forget their judgment that it was “just another overly melodramatic attack that demonizes football with an horrible event that wouldn’t really happen.” Tell that to the Sayreville, New Jersey, football team, winner of three state championships in four years, where the reality makes Raiders Night look not only prescient but restrained.

Seven players on the Sayreville football team have been charged with a series of crimes. Three of the arrested were charged with “aggravated sexual assault, aggravated criminal sexual contact, conspiracy to commit aggravated criminal sexual contact, criminal restraint, and hazing for engaging in an act of sexual penetration upon one of the juvenile victims.”

According to the police, “One of those juvenile defendants and the remaining four juvenile defendants were charged with various counts, including aggravated assault, conspiracy, aggravated criminal sexual contact, hazing and riot by participating in the attack of the remaining victims.”

As the report details, “the hazing rituals included younger members of the team were then said to be held down while other members penetrated their rectums with fingers. Those fingers were then placed in the victims’ mouths.”

The season has been canceled and the coach, George Najjir, who has led with the team in two decades of glory, is almost certainly gone.

Like Raiders Night but also like recent events in Steubenville, Ohio; Torrington, Connecticut; and many other towns, where the victims of football team sexual assaults are women, we see the connections between the rape, rape culture and sports. What makes these cases so harrowing—and why the term “rape culture” must be used to describe it—is that they all involve bystanders seeing the assault and choosing to do nothing.

In Sayreville, these rituals were so constant and widely known that freshman boys would be hustling in and out of the locker room to avoid assault. Four survivors have already gone public, and there are more to come.

I contacted Robert Lipsyte for his thoughts about the ways in which his young adult fiction is playing out as a national story, and his words spoke volumes. He said:

”Eight years ago, when I started visiting high schools reading and speaking about Raiders Night, players and even some young, assistant coaches would tell me the book was like a documentary, while coaches and principals (many former football coaches) would have my appearances cancelled. And some were pretty upfront—they thought high school football was where college football had been fifty years ago, ready to break into national TV, sponsorship, and a national tournament. Thus the increasing pressure to win, to get on that national track early, was ramping up the hard-driving ‘rites of inclusion’ like hazing and—because of football’s homosocial nature—sexual dominance. Lots of it stays in the locker room in a jock culture where if you’re not on the team, you’re a girl or a puke. You saw the need to belong to the most powerful gang in school, the team, all that rage and frustration that often goes inward and make the next class go through what you went through to belong.”

This is Sayreville. As one parent described, “It’s sickening, man…. I just think if my son or somebody else’s son wanted to leave … they couldn’t leave because there was somebody at the door there. I could see the kids saying, ‘You’re not going nowhere until this is over.’ It’s just like being in a bad dream, you know?”

There may always be violence. There may always be alpha athletes who are drawn to express their physical power by humiliating those they perceive to be weak. But we can also live in a world where the majority no longer “sit around and witness stuff like this” and instead speak out. We can live in a world where the mere thought of silence in the face of a sexual assault would make a person violently nauseous. Standing up to this then becomes a point of instinctual moral reflex. If they feel like they can’t “stand up” to the 17-year-old muscle-bound seniors blocking the door, then they know that there are adults they can go to and speak about what happened. That’s our job. We have to fight to change this culture so the attackers are the anomalies and the whistleblowers aren’t “snitches” but fighters against a rape culture that has to die. But most importantly, above all else, we have to live in a world where the adults aren’t proudly ignorant, like those Lipsyte described canceling discussions and squelching the truth. We have to make sure that in the future, Raiders Night is seen as a harrowing fictional representation of the past and not a “documentary” of our present.