Teammate-on-teammate sexual assaults occurred in all types of sports in public schools, and experts said the more than 70 cases in five years that AP identified were the tip of the iceberg. Though largely a high school phenomenon, some cases were reported as early as middle school.
Boys made up the majority of aggressors and victims in teammate attacks, records show, and some suffered serious injury and trauma.
An Idaho football player was hospitalized in 2015 with rectal injuries after he was sodomized with a coat hanger. That same year, a North Carolina teen suffered rectal bruising when he was jabbed through his clothes with a broomstick. Parents of a Vermont athlete blamed his 2012 suicide on distress a year after teammates sodomized him with a broom.
"It's basically rape and sexual assault," said Hank Nuwer, a hazing historian at Franklin College in Indiana. "It's amazing to me that there hasn't been a public outcry on this to help stop it."
Although many of the cases AP identified included anal penetration, grabbing crotches or grinding genitals into teammates, those who often first learn of incidents -- coaches, school officials -- routinely characterize them as hazing, bullying or initiations.
People don't want to think kids could act that way and chalk it up to jock behavior, said Danielle Rogers, who in 2011 prosecuted locker-room assaults by three athletes in Hardin, Missouri.
"If this had happened on the street, nobody would say this is hazing or bullying," she said.
In the Georgia case, a draft public statement from the Gwinnett County Public Schools initially said a player's family had reported he was "sexually assaulted," according to records AP obtained. But the final version referred only to "inappropriate physical contact." When asked, district officials said that wording was "more inclusive" of the "diversity of the types of misconduct alleged."
