What is bullying? 

The exhaustive answer is longer than we have space for here. There is verbal abuse and name-calling, the kind of thing that the “sticks and stones” saying was created to allay. There are cruel attempts to exclude and isolate, as old as time and the subject of endless books, sitcoms, and movies. Then there are those sticks and stones; where subtle and insidious efforts to put another person down become overt and violent. In certain contexts, bullying is very obvious. In other contexts, less so. In other contexts again, it is a practice that is set up to be somehow justifiable, something practiced and looked upon as some form of “rite.”

It’s this third category, in the world of American school sports, that a particular variety or style of bullying is so boldly and “institutionally” practiced that it has its own term: hazing. 

This is what happened at Lisbon High School this year, leading to a weeks-long investigation into the school’s football team by a law firm, resulting in damning findings regarding incidents and attitudes that it said amounted to a “culture.” 

Hazing is not horseplay, it is not “part of the experience.” It’s vile and its consequences for its victims can be life-ruining.

That fact has never been more evident to us than it is today. Whereas an incident in bygone times could be passed on by word of mouth, Snapchat and other social platforms now offer an easy means of disseminating recordings far and wide, compounding the effects of the abuse.

How to stop this? Better educate students about what to expect and what to accept; this is an obvious action and the need for it will never let up. 

More than that, though, the responsibility lies with the adults in our communities. It lies with the parents and guardians of pupils (many of whom prove themselves all too capable of inserting themselves into educational and sporting contexts where they are neither needed nor helping), with school administrators and coaches. What took place in Lisbon recently is no anomaly.

Press Herald sports writer Travis Lazarczyk put it best last week, writing in a powerful column: 

“Every school in the state should be paying attention to what’s happening in Lisbon, just like every school in the state should have been paying attention to what happened in Brunswick three years ago. 

“There, the football season was shut down and coach Dan Cooper was fired in the wake of a hazing investigation at a preseason team retreat. If you tell yourself it can’t happen at your school, you are either naïve or willfully ignorant. Anti-hazing and anti-bullying policies at every school need to be reviewed with every student. Providing a student a handbook full of rules doesn’t cut it.”

Support is more important than strictures. All the rules and policies in the world will come to nothing without open and honest communication between people at all levels, without caring and careful oversight, or without leading by example. The stakes for our young people are far higher and far scarier, today than in bygone seasons, years and generations. We have to hike our standards up – way up – to meet them effectively.