Bullying used to involve name calling, stolen lunch money, and playground fights. According to a recent Bloomberg News article, bullying and "hazing" have become increasingly sexually violent. The report quotes child psychologist Susan Lipkin as saying that social media fuels brutal hazing as perpetrators learn new methods for brutalizing their victims from seeing what others are doing. "Each time a hazing occurs," she says, "the perpetrators add their own mark to it by increasing the pain or humiliation." For most young teenage boys, nothing could be more painful and more humiliating that being penetrated anally.

The Bloomberg article, by Chris Staiti and Barry Bortnick illustrates the dramatic increase in sexual assaults cloaked as hazing: "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." The authors say their statistics were gleaned from reviewing court documents and news reports about sexual abuse during hazing.

An early mention of anal penetration in sports hazing involved a 2010 case in which a high school wrestler, a senior, was accused of sexually abusing a younger boy during practice.  Preston Hill, then 17, said he had performed a legal wrestling maneuver known as the "butt drag" to try to get his younger opponent to move. The "victim" told his parents and police that Hill, whom he also accused of bullying him at other times, had performed the move so forcefully that he inserted two fingers into his rectum through his clothing. Hill denied the allegations, and after a lengthy process that involved a criminal charge of misdemeanor sexual battery and his expulsion from school, the accused was eventually cleared of any wrongdoing. According to witnesses, the "victim" was joking around during practice and did not complain about the "assault" until after he told his parents about the incident. His father, a former counselor for a child abuse agency, is accused of making a mountain out of a molehill in alleging sexual assault as a result of wrestling move performed legally during a high school practice.

But what about other instances of anal assault in sports? Over the past years, several instances have occurred in which athletes have penetrated their younger teammates with fingers, pencils, broom handles, jump rope handles, sticks, a broken flag pole, a javelin, and more--all in the name of hazing. In several of these instances, a teacher or coach is accused of knowing about the crime and doing nothing to prevent it, nor to report it to authorities even though reporting child abuse is required by law. In some cases, the adults are accused of even encouraging the acts. In at least one case, a coach has been arrested and charged after witnessing his soccer players assaulting new teammates with fingers and sticks to "reward" them. He allegedly told his younger players that the varsity team would sodomize them if they didn't perform well.

In other cases, though, these incidents are handled with a "boys will be boys" mentality, and the accusers are bullied further, accusing them of tattling or lying. In one small town, several wrestlers are accused of binding a 14-year-old teammate with duct tape and sodomizing him with a pencil. The community was outraged--not by the acts of the perpetrators, but by the victim's family reporting the assault to police when the school did nothing more than give the assailants one day of in-school suspension. One townsperson told Bloomberg, “When I was in school there might have been bullying, but there was none of this crap about telling the school.” The victim's father, who was the principal of the school, had to accept a buyout of his contract and leave town. The wrestling coach, who told the father, "This happens 1,000 times a day around the U.S.," was allowed to keep his job.

There is no question that many incidents get blown out of proportion, and criminal prosecution seems to be overkill for a minor incident. However, the rate and violence of sexual assault as hazing seems to be increasing, and it is critical to weigh each incident carefully in order to protect victims of sexual assault as well as victims of false accusation.