Is the story unfolding in Sayreville, NJ, old or new?
Is it a tale of how boys will be boys — whether they’re terrorizing each other at 18th-century British boarding schools or on 21st-century New Jersey football teams?
Or is it a problem created by a teen culture that is oversexed and undersupervised? It’s a little bit of both.
After seven boys on the Sayreville War Memorial HS squad were arrested last week on charges of criminal sexual contact, many parents are doing a lot of head-scratching and soul-searching. It may be time to reexamine our strategies for dealing with adolescents.
The reports out of New Jersey describe terrifying scenes: Older boys on the team would turn the lights out and pin down a younger member while others assaulted him. In at least some cases, that consisted of using fingers to penetrate the victim.
Some of the kids interviewed say this has been going on for years. In addition to the criminal charges, the students involved have been suspended and the football season has been canceled for the year — possibly next year, too, administrators say.
While many parents are outraged by this behavior, others wonder why the entire team needed to be punished. As one parent pointed out at a meeting on the issue, “no one died.”
The reason for the collective punishment isn’t hard to grasp. Just as with a fraternity hazing scandal, it’s not simply about the individuals who did this but about a culture that made it seem acceptable.
And about a level of intimidation that ensured those who knew about it didn’t speak up.
The only way to end that is to start from scratch — not only with different kids but different adults in charge of them.
As with all stories about teenagers, the first question must always be: Where were the grown-ups?
The papers marvel that these horrors occurred despite the fact that New Jersey has recently passed tough anti-bullying measures. Indeed, it was all discovered during National Anti-Bullying month!
Of course, bullying now encompasses everything from pretending your fingers are a gun to calling someone a mean name to excluding someone from a lunch table.
It’s absurd to think that anti-bullying rules are going to faze teens engaged in criminal sexual conduct or the adults who are supervising them.
And what of the adults? Don’t we live in an era of helicopter parenting where we won’t even let 12-year-olds cross the street alone?
The parents who don’t hover constantly are being arrested for leaving their 9-year-old in a car while they run into the dry cleaners.
This is a generation that is being regularly spied on by their parents. (A recent article described some moms and dads using baby monitors on children as old as 5 and 6.)
Parents are trying to understand how they can’t see Snapchat photos, but some hacker can release a hundred thousand of them to all the world.
So how do parents miss the big things? It seemed like half the school knew about Sean Shaynak, the allegedly pervy teacher at Brooklyn Tech trading sex for grades. But for years students managed to keep the matter from parents.
Maybe we’re worried about the wrong issues. And maybe we have conveyed that message to our kids.
Middle-class parents in America are concerned about their kids’ grades and their college prospects, their athletic performances and other extracurricular activities. We want them to have friends and to be generally nice to others.
But there is so much else we are forgetting.
When it comes to sex, we treat them as if they are adults — letting them make their own decisions and telling them they can come to us to talk about condom use, all the while respecting their “privacy.”
When it comes to their friends, we have failed to teach them not only to be good but to judge the character of others, not just adhere to some mindless teen code of loyalty.
Which brings us back to what’s new here and what’s not. The teens in Sayreville aren’t living away at some prep school. They’re not on an island where they make their own rules. They come home to families every night.
The kids who turned savage in “Lord of the Flies” were really on their own — and, anyway, it was fiction. But the modern practice of letting teens have their own culture seems to have made savagery our reality.