Cheltenham High’s hazing scandal isn’t the outlier you think it is

Here we go again. Another high school football team. Another hazing assault. Another round of shock, outrage, and canceled games.

That’s what I thought when I read about the charges that have been filed against six students and four coaches in connection with what the authorities said were a pair of hazing assaults on a Cheltenham High School football player. Of course I was outraged that several teammates stomped on his groin and chest with their cleats and poked at this buttocks with a broomstick, according to Montgomery County prosecutors.

But I wasn’t surprised. And you shouldn’t be, either.

Put simply, hazing is as American as apple pie. When an incident like this happens, everybody expresses shock and dismay. Legal charges are filed, coaches are fired, and games are canceled. And then we go back to hazing again.

Most Americans probably associate hazing with college and — especially — with fraternities. But in a 2009 survey of over 11,000 university students, 47% reported they had experienced hazing in high school. All told, an estimated 1.5 million high school students are hazed each year.

That means it’s people you know, in the communities where you live.

In 2004, a grand jury reported that three Long Island football players attending a summer camp in Wayne County, Pa. had inserted pine cones and golf balls into teammates’ anuses. The assaults were part of a long history of hazing at the camp, where coaches “displayed a lack of common sense and accountability,” the report said.

In 2014, Central Bucks West High School in Doylestown acknowledged that rookie football players had been forced to grab other players’ genitals. They were also led into the shower with towels over their heads, which the players called “waterboarding.”

In 2015, seven football players at Sayreville High School in Middlesex County, N.J. were charged with grabbing teammates’ buttocks and digitally penetrating one of them.

In 2016, prosecutors said that football players at Conestoga High School in Berwyn had penetrated a freshman player with a broomstick as part of a hazing ritual called “No Gay Thursdays.” And in 2022, football players at Wall Township High School in Monmouth County, N.J. were caught on video holding a student’s legs apart and, yes, assaulting him with a broomstick.

Are we seeing a pattern here? Most high school hazing involves verbal — not physical — abuse. But the most violent episodes happen on sports teams, which also have the highest rate of hazing.

And they’re also the most likely to generate criminal charges. In Cheltenham, six players have been charged in connection with the assaults on their teammate. And four coaches face charges of endangering the welfare of a child and conspiracy for allegedly trying to cover up the incident.

That’s necessary and appropriate, but it’s not enough. Hazing is illegal in 44 states and the District of Columbia, and it happens anyway. Clearly, our laws aren’t deterring it.

Ditto for our educational efforts. When reports of hazing surface, school officials pledge to conduct anti-hazing training for coaches and students. And they release statements declaring that hazing will not be tolerated, in any form.

But their message is falling on deaf ears. So it’s time to change the messenger, to someone whom kids will really hear: the hazers themselves. If you haze somebody, you should be required to speak to other students about it.

It’s happened before. After a Virginia Commonwealth University student died of alcohol poisoning in a fraternity initiation in 2021, six students who pleaded guilty to hazing him agreed to travel to universities around the country to discuss the tragedy and the role they had played in it.

If you haze somebody, you should be required to speak to other students about it.

We could — and should — demand the same thing from high school hazers. Plea agreements in hazing episodes often require guilty parties to perform community service. What could be a better service than speaking at student assemblies and other public events about the problem of hazing?

In the Cheltenham incident, two 18-year-old football players were charged as adults — one with assault and conspiracy, the other with false swearing for being untruthful to police. The four other players were under 18 and were charged as juveniles.

I don’t know what penalties they should receive. But here’s what I do know: the rest of the school would discover a lot more about hazing if the six students were required to speak about it. And maybe, just maybe, we could start to shift the culture around this destructive behavior.

When hazing is reported at a high school, local officials condemn the incident and inevitably declare that “this is not who we are.” In fact, it’s exactly who we are. We haze. So let’s hear from the people who do it, about why they haze and what they have learned. We can all learn something from them.

Jonathan Zimmerman teaches history and education at the University of Pennsylvania. He is the author of “Schooling Citizens: How Education Can Save Democracy,” which will be published next spring by the American Philosophical Society Press.