What Percentage of College Athletes Report That Theyve Been Subjected to Some Form of Hazing?
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Outside the Lines Athletes abusing athletes
In Vermont, hockey players grab each others' genitalia and parade effectually in a freshman initiation ceremony. In Connecticut, a loftier schoolhouse wrestler is pig-tied and sodomized with the blunt end of a plastic knife. In Oklahoma, a football histrion suffers a caput injury after being jumped by teammates.
Since the death of Nicholas Haben, who died in a lacrosse squad initiation in 1990, awareness of athlete hazing has grown.
In Indianapolis, a phone rings off the claw.
"It's just been non-stop," sighs Hank Nuwer, a leading hazing potency, of the media'southward recent interest in sports-team hazing.
After decades, perhaps even a century, of darkness, the hazing of athletes by athletes is getting its starting time thorough public examination. Once seemingly the province of fraternities and the military, hazing has emerged from the shadows. A serial of initiation-related incidents gone wrong have forced the world of sports to look in to quantify and address whatever issues.
Answers are not piece of cake to come by. There has been only 1 comprehensive study done on sports team hazing -- past Alfred (N.Y.) University, which last year surveyed athletes, coaches and administrators on 224 higher campuses. The response charge per unit in some sports, such every bit football, was depression. Some athletic directors dismissed the report's premise every bit ridiculous, insisting that hazing was bars to Greek Row.
One of the more telling findings was that only 12 percent of respondents checked the "yes" box when asked if they had been hazed. Yet, when asked well-nigh specific activities they were asked to engage in when they joined the squad -- everything from physical corruption to forced consumption of alcohol to wearing embarrassing wearing apparel -- 79 percent said they had been subjected to what the authors accounted questionable or unacceptable hazing.
The vast gulf between the perception of athletes and what the Alfred authors consider reality points out the get-go claiming in agreement hazing: Simply defining the term. Many of those who take gone through stress-inducing activities upon joining a squad contend that "hazing" -- a word with a negative connotation -- does non accurately draw their feel, because they consented to the exercises, and often even enjoyed them.
The i-hour bear witness, originally shown on Tuesday, re-airs Thursday at 4 p.one thousand. ET (1 p.m. Pacific) on ESPN and and then again on Saturday, Apr 22 at apex ET. The five-day online serial runs through Friday and features original manufactures, polls and a message board that allows you to join in the debate.
On ESPN Online and on television, explore the issue of hazing in sports this week every bit the Emmy Award-winning Outside the Lines presents "Rites and Wrongs," a show and companion Internet series on the topic. 
"Ane of the most pervasive behavior in sports is that hazing, or initiation, builds unity," said Nuwer, the author of iii books on hazing in various cultural institutions. "They think it'southward something good, or that it (creates) a kind of camaraderie."
The Alfred Academy researchers defined hazing as, "Any action expected of someone joining the group that humiliates, degrades, abuses or endangers, regardless of the person's willingness to participate. This does non include activities such equally rookies carrying the assurance, team parties with community games, or going out with your teammates, unless an atmosphere of humiliation, corruption or danger arises."
Clear plenty. And yet, every bit Bobby Knight and Indiana University have demonstrated, the civilization of sports often includes varying degrees of schoolhouse-sanctioned degradation, danger and corruption. The lines of proper behavior are blurred to college athletes, many of whom never have been talked to by administrators or coaches most hazing.
High school athletes are fifty-fifty less equipped to deal with the issue. Robert F. Kanaby, executive managing director of the National Federation of State Loftier School Associations, said issues regarding hazing are so new that his system has non even issued a formal argument on such activities.
"My approximate is that the number of state (athletic governing bodies) that take fabricated statements would be limited likewise," Kanaby said. "Information technology's one of those issues people don't address until they have to."
The growth of reported incidents of serious acts of hazing by athletes, co-ordinate to ESPN.com research:
Reported incidents
Twelvemonth
Incidents
1980
one
1981
one
1983
1
1985
ii
1988
iv
1990
3
1991
3
1992
5
1993
1
1995
2
1996
7
1997
9
1998
iv
1999
17
2000
7
In 1998, New Orleans Saints tight finish Cam Cleeland and another thespian were injured in a hazing activities in preparation camp that included running through a gantlet of players who hit the rookies with bags of coins.
Antennae were raised further when University of Vermont administrators canceled the school's hockey flavour last Dec later on 4th-string, walk-on goalie Corey LaTulippe filed a lawsuit against the academy and seven players who allegedly hazed him. The state attorney general issued a scathing report on the matter, in which ix freshmen were asked to participate in a range of questionable activities, including parading around a house naked while holding the genitals of the person ahead of them in line -- the so-called "elephant walk."
The hazing issue connected to catch fire with the case involving a Trumbull (Conn.) high school wrestler, a special-education educatee who was allegedly tortured past team veterans in a series of attacks.
Publicity surrounding those events gave shape to a serial of other athlete hazing incidents in the past twelvemonth -- in Illinois, Oklahoma, Washington, Wisconsin and elsewhere. Hazing is now a genuine concern of many school officials, equally well every bit the NCAA, which actively has supported and promulgated the Alfred findings.
Simply ane athlete is known to have died from a hazing outcome conducted as part of a team initiation: Nicholas Haben, a lacrosse player at Western Illinois University, in 1990 later on a drinking do. Since and so, according to ESPN.com research, at least 59 incidents of hazing involving athletes accept been documented, setting the stage for this twelvemonth's national mitt-wringing nigh the issue.
Hazing by sports teams is distinguished from fraternity hazing in some ways, Nuwer said. Without a formal pledge program or fraternity-style house in which to get together, athlete initiations more than oft circumduct around one big night of activities. As well, the coach already has decided who will be on the team, and so the youngest members are merely looking for peer acceptance from their teammates.
Nonetheless, that demand for approval can be a powerful component, because the importance of teamwork in an individual's athletic success.
"There'due south probably an awful lot of sports teams that have very minor initiations or no hazing at all," Nuwer said. "Simply let'southward look at the 80 percent who were hazed, and the athletes who were involved in alcohol or some sort of criminal behavior. That'due south a pattern I don't think we can ignore."
Tom Farrey is a senior writer for ESPN.com. He can be reached at tom.farrey@espn.com.
Source: https://www.espn.com/otl/hazing/monday.html
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