Shrink The Game: High School Lacrosse Team Has Season Cancelled After Hazing Incident Involved Staging a Kidnapping
Wirestock. Getty Images.CNN -- At least 11 high school students in Syracuse, New York, have 48 hours to turn themselves in or face felony charges of kidnapping for their alleged involvement in victimizing at least five younger lacrosse players in an incident the district attorney says “goes way beyond hazing.”
The incident took place last Thursday evening, when a group of Westhill High School students, who are not being named due to their age, decided “they were going to haze or play some sort of prank” on younger members of the school’s lacrosse team, Onondaga County District Attorney William Fitzpatrick said during a Tuesday news conference.
What ever happened to the days when kids could just do a little dash hazing? Just a quick little hint of hazing with a pinch of pranking sprinkled in there. Something that is relatively harmless, maybe a little embarrassing, but overall lighthearted enough in a way that it helps bring the team together. Maybe you make all the freshmen on the team get a ridiculous looking haircut, or dye their hair. Maybe you make them run over to the girls' practice while singing "Twinkle Twinkle Little Star". Not that I'd ever condone such a heinous crime as underage drinking, but if you really wanted to get crazy you could make them play Edward 40 Hands. What happened over the last 15 years that turned hazing into whatever this is…
CNN -- Among the five victims identified by the Onondaga County Sheriff’s Office, one student was taken to a remote area in the county when people appeared from the woods, dressed in black and armed with what appeared to be at least one handgun and at least one knife, Fitzpatrick said.
That group put a pillowcase over that student’s head, then tied him up and threw him in the trunk of a car before he was left in a wooded area in the southern part of the county, the district attorney said.
There used to be a time when there was a difference between pulling a prank, and committing a felony. You used to be able to prank people by rolling up a piece of dog shit into a dollar bill and leaving it on the sidewalk for someone to pick up. I gotta be honest here--I just don't know if kidnapping someone falls under the category of a "prank". Like you can't show up to court if you get charged with kidnapping and expect the "it was just a prank" defense to hold up. Maybe, just maybe, if your judge was a total bro you'd have a chance. But if the judge is a woman? Forget about it. Your ass is going to jail, homie.
I always thought people were overreacting when they were trying to stop hazing a decade ago. I thought they were just trying to stop boys from being boys. But if this is how far hazing has evolved since then? Well maybe they had a point. Hazing used to be considered a rite of passage. Now it's just a gateway to committing felonies. There used to be an art to hazing. It was finding that line of what's acceptable, just teetering over it a little bit, but never enough for there to be any serious consequences. The moment you tie up a kid and stuff him in the trunk of the car, you've gone so far past the line that you can't even see it anymore. It might be time to actually ban hazing until we can get the pendulum swung back towards the direction of sanity.