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Hazing News

Alllegations of sexual assault rock middle school and a community

Here is the link to the Amarillo story

It seems with all the bad publicity that the number of incident reports are increasing, not decreasing. Sad.

Excerpt:from Globe News. Follow above link to read that newspaper in full.

Ranks closed as word spread Tuesday in Sunray about allegations of hazing in a middle school locker room in the small Panhandle town.

“Things have been very hush-hush,” said Monica Dodson, a mother of two boys at Sunray High School. “It’s a very quiet community. You don’t really hear much.”

The Sunray Independent School District announced this week that school officials and the town’s Police Department are investigating. Sunray Police Chief Tommy Pickering said state Child Protective Services investigators are also looking into the matter.

Parents of students at Sunray Middle School, along with a television news report, said the recent allegations of misconduct at the school involved sexual harassment by eighth-grade football players.

Two Sunray parents who have children at the middle school said they were told the problems began in the locker room and escalated from minor roughhousing and towel popping.

One parent, who declined to identify himself for fear that his son will face retribution from classmates, said eighth-grade football players locked seventh-grade football players in the locker room and turned off the lights. He said some of the eighth-graders then proceeded to place their genitals on some of the seventh-graders’ faces.

The parent said he learned the details of the incident from another parent who has a son on the seventh-grade football team.

Another parent, who declined to identify himself fearing community backlash, said his son, a seventh-grader, was in the locker room when the alleged sexual harassment occurred.

By Hank Nuwer

Journalist Hank Nuwer is the Alaska author of Hazing: Destroying Young Lives; Broken Pledges: The Deadly Rite of Hazing, High School Hazing, Wrongs of Passage and The Hazing Reader. He has written articles or columns on hazing for the Sunday Times of India, Toronto Globe & Mail, Harper's Magazine, Orlando Sentinel, The Chronicle of Higher Education and the New York Times Sunday Magazine. His new book is Hazing: Destroying Young Lives from Indiana University Press. He is married to Malgorzata Wroblewska Nuwer of Warsaw, Poland and Fairbanks, Alaska. Nuwer, former columnist for the Greenville (Ohio)Early Bird, finished a stint as managing editor of the Celina Daily Standard to accept a new position as managing editor of the Fairbanks Daily News-Miner in Alaska.
Nuwer was named the Ohio Society of Professional Journalists columnist of the year in 2021 for his “After Darke” column in the Early Bird. He also won third place for the column in 2022 from the Indiana chapter of the Society of Professional Journalists. He and his wife Gosia, recently of Union City, Ind., have owned 20 acres in Alaska for many years. “The move is a sort-of coming home for us,” said Nuwer. As a journalist, he’s written about the Alaskan Iditarod sled-dog race and other Alaska topics. Read his musings in his blog at Real Alaska Daily--http://realalaskadaily.com.

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