Word: gangly
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...startling frequency -- and not for heroic feats. From high school to college to the pro leagues, players are fast gaining a reputation for off-the-field sexual rampages. At St. John's University in New York City, members of the lacrosse team were alleged to have drugged, kidnapped and gang-raped a female student at their off-campus home. Two players on Oklahoma University's football team were convicted of rape. In Glen Ridge, N.J., five high school jocks were charged with sexually assaulting a mentally impaired teenage girl with a broomstick and miniature baseball...
...many experts argue that male athletes are no more prone to violence than the general male population. Still, a three-year survey completed for the National Institute of Mental Health discovered that athletes participated in about a third of 862 sexual attacks on campus. Another national study of 24 gang sexual assaults at colleges found that most involved fraternity brothers or members of athletic teams, primarily the football and basketball squads. "If you have an athletic fraternity, watch out," warns psychologist Bernice Sandler of the Association of American Colleges...
...great degree, sexual abuses are a consequence of men banding together in tight-knit competitive groups. Like military platoons, ghetto gangs and college fraternities, athletic teams foster a spirit of exclusivity, camaraderie and solidarity. Jocks not only play together but also often eat and live together. And personal integrity is frequently a weak match for group loyalty. In a mob, especially one fueled by alcohol or drugs, individuals may not blanch at joining in a gang rape. "They will do anything to please each other," observes psychologist Sandler. "They are raping for each other. The woman is incidental...
Victims find their complaints are not treated seriously. Gang rape is too frequently dismissed as (somehow more acceptable) group sex, for instance. Women are frequently pressured to drop charges. Says Gail Abarbanel, director ! of the rape treatment center at the Santa Monica Hospital Medical Center in California: "A victim seeking redress often finds herself silenced for the sake of the university's athletic success." A classic example occurred in 1983, when University of Maryland basketball coach Lefty Driesell telephoned a coed in an attempt to have her drop an accusation of sexual misconduct against one of his players. Driesell...
...have to be willing to draw the line for themselves and others. "A lot of us are unwitting accomplices," admits sociologist Edward Gondolf of the University of Pittsburgh. "It takes prompting and confrontation from women to make us understand." He knows. As a college football player, he watched a gang rape and laughed. Gondolf awakened to women's suffering and men's responsibility when his wife told him she had been raped before they met. That is a harsh way to learn a lesson. Better if players would remember that to the ancient Greeks, athletes were the embodiment of both...