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 a orchestrated event. Four players would hold a victim on the floor while two were on lookout, one parent told NJ.com after 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."
What say you NSG?
Did the school go to far in cancelling the football program? Did they not go far enough? Should the perpetrators be facing criminal charges?
