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Taking One For The Team:
High School Hazing
By CARA HALL
Knot Magazine
Tuesday, January 27, 2004
I remember high school -- the good old days when I had to be harassed and humiliated before I could become a cool kid -- such as S.W.A.S. week (that would be Sophomores Worship All Seniors), when seniors were assigned a sophomore "buddy" to order around for a week. It was quite an honor to walk to class wearing a ridiculous homemade t-shirt, submit to all sorts of bizarre requests, and be kidnapped in the middle of the night. Everyone laughed. No one blinked an eye.
I never witnessed anything I would classify as abuse -- a lot of shoe polish on cars, etc. But I heard rumors of more serious initiations, particularly with the athletes. It's interesting: at a frat house we call this hazing. In high school we call it, well, nothing.
But ask Karen Savoy, founder of Mothers Against School Hazing (MASH), what she called the initiation rite her 16-year-old son Jake endured at a football practice in October 2002 and she doesn't hesitate for a minute to call it hazing.
These excerpts from an essay Jake wrote about the incident are disturbing, to say the least:
"Next, the football shorts and girdle were yanked down from his buttocks. Comments like 'me first,' 'my turn,' and 'get him a good one' quickly echoed throughout the locker room."
"Some thought it would be amusing to put an empty tape roll between the crack of his buttocks. Others caught a laugh at rubbing their bare buttocks into the sophomore's shoulder and neck."
"Not until an upperclassman said, 'look bruh, he's starting to bleed!' did the pain slow."
The players had taped Jake to a bench and beaten him, first with their hands and then with a dirty shoe.
When he returned home after practice he went straight to his room. Later he talked to his coach on the phone for half an hour and then left for an evening religion class. He didn't mention the incident to his parents. It was his birthday and he didn't want to upset them.
But Karen and Jerry Savoy would soon find out the truth when they received a phone call from the St. Amant (Louisiana) High School principal saying that Jake had quit the football team. He had been hazed and it was pretty bad. Karen rushed to the school. Jake showed her the marks. She was furious. "I couldn't believe any human being would do this to a child," she says. There were 15 coaches on the football team. Why didn't anyone stop this?
As Karen would later find out, similar initiations were a long-standing tradition among the St. Amant team and others. Still, she says she was shocked when she found out what happened. "My son is well-liked and popular. I thought my God, they must hate him. But in reality, they like him. It just appalled me. If this is what they do to people they like, I can't imagine what they do to people they don't like."
St. Amant did not have a hazing policy, so administrators handed out 6-day suspensions and Saturday detentions to the 28 players who participated in the hazing. Karen notes that a Saturday detention is the same punishment a student would receive for leaving his school ID at home. She believes that the students did not receive harsher penalties because they were players on a successful football team. If they were all suspended, there would be no team. "It's sad that we put a child's safety below the football team," she says.
She demanded that the school expel the students, but nothing happened. Later she and her family filed a lawsuit against Coach Swacker and three of the students involved. All but one student pleaded innocent to the charges. The Savoys also filed a civil suit.
As they soon found out, when you speak up about this sort of thing in some parts of the country, you inspire outrage. But when you accuse a high school football team in small-town Louisiana, you're just someone who should have kept your mouth shut.
Community members shunned the family and wrote angry letters to the editor in the local newspaper. Jake went to counseling to deal with his emotions. At a football game, faculty members, the abusers' families, and others handed out t-shirts that said "Back Swack." While the Savoys received support from people outside of the community, they were vilified within it. "A handful of people in the athletic world were speaking loudly and doing repulsive things," Karen says. Parents, perhaps embarrassed to admit that their children could be responsible for such abuse, did most of the talking. "But once I step out of the athletic world, I have a 100 percent positive reaction," she says.
To add insult to injury, Coach Swacker told Karen that the team had voted unanimously to allow Jake back on the team. Although Jake wanted to play football -- something he'd worked for his entire life -- Karen couldn't believe that it was Jake, and not the abusers, that had to be voted back on the team.
Frustrated, and determined to right the situation, Karen did what many moms before her had done: she started a national organization. Modeled after MADD (Mothers Against Drunk Driving), she set up MASH to fight hazing and bullying in schools. While 42 states have anti-hazing laws, most, if not all, pertain only to colleges. Karen and her co-founder Ann Rasmussen hope to change these laws so that they also apply to high schools. "I can't change what happened to my son, but I can make sure it doesn't happen to anyone else," Karen says. MASH's other goals include creating awareness, educating students, parents, and administrators, and implementing and enforcing strict laws that discourage hazing.
In starting this organization, though, Karen has had to take on much more than a high school and even the state of Louisiana. She's had to take on a culture of violence that encourages teenagers to beat each other to show acceptance. She hopes that by bringing this issue to the surface, people will have to question the motivation behind hazing. "It's the same thing with bullying," Karen says. "If we don't correct the problem, we find ourselves dealing with the symptoms."
And as we know, the symptoms caused by bullying in this country have been devastating. The symptoms of hazing have been less obvious, and perhaps less easy to understand, given that hazing doesn't appear as malicious as bullying. It's easy for school officials to dismiss it as tradition or a practical joke, which is what Coach Swacker probably did. Only he wasn't around when it went too far.
Now St. Amant has a policy stating that a coach must be in the locker room at all times. Jake is back on the team and things seem to be getting back to normal. But there's still the rest of the country to conquer. "I've had so many parents sit at my kitchen table and cry, and say this happened to me and I wish I could have done something," Karen says. But, like the Savoys, they feared a backlash from the community.
I can't imagine what it must have been like for Jake to reveal the embarrassing details of his hazing, then stand up to his teammates, his coach, and his school. Or what it was like to face the accused in court. Or even worse, to face them at football games in a place where football is everything. But if things were going to change, someone had to.
Back at my high school, SWAS was cancelled three days into the week when administrators said things were getting out of hand. Thankfully, there were no Jakes.
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