Sodomy Hazing Leaves 13-Year-Old Victim Outcast in Colorado Town

By Chris Staiti & Barry Bortnick
Bloomberg News - Jun 20, 2013

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, Colorado, 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 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.

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About 4,000 sexual assaults occur each year inside U.S. public schools, as well as 800 rapes or attempted rapes, according to a letter the U.S. Education Department sent to educators in April 2011.
“We don’t tolerate this anywhere else in our society,” said Antonio Romanucci, a Chicago attorney representing some of the alleged Maine West victims in a civil lawsuit. “So why are we tolerating it in our schools?”

The entire story is here.

Thanks to Lamar Freed for this article.

State report blasts FAMU's effort to fight hazing before Champion's death

By Denise-Marie Ordway
Orlando Sentinel
Originally published December 28, 2012


FAMU lacked the internal controls needed to identify and fight hazing before the beating death of drum major Robert Champion in Orlando a year ago, according to a long-awaited investigative report released Friday afternoon.

The sharply critical report lays out a host of problems that the State University System found during its year-long investigation focusing on the university's failure to deter hazing in the years before Champion's death.

It comes just weeks after Florida A&M University's accrediting agency placed the school on probation for a year because of problems in areas such as student safety and school finances.

Derry Harper, the Inspector General for the university system's Board of Governors, reviewed hazing reports and FAMU's regulations between 2007 and 2011 to reach his conclusions. He discovered numerous failings, including poor communication between two key university departments and a lack of clear rules on how to handle hazing complaints.

Many of the hazing allegations investigated by campus police were never shared with the office that handles student discipline, even though some complaints might have prompted student disciplinary action. And nobody was tracking hazing on a campus that had been wrestling with the violent practice for decades.

The entire story is here.