At a suburban Baltimore high school, 14 players on the boys' varsity soccer team are suspended after dragging freshmen across a muddy field and forcing them to stand against a, wall while being whacked by soccer bails that are kicked at close range. Two students are injured during the punting incident, one of whom suffers a concussion.

On Long Island, the season opener for the Great Neck South High School football team is forfeited after 10 players are suspended for beating a freshman soccer player, leaving him severely bruised.

At a football camp on Staten Island, high school students from New Jersey and Long Island are roughed up, paddled on their rear ends and forced to box each other until they bleed.

For those who monitor violent hazing, incidents like these -- all of which occurred in the last year -- are disturbing evidence that brutal initiation rites are no longer just the stuff of college fraternities and military school barracks.

Although juvenile stunts and punishing endurance tests have long been a part of high school athletics, educators and students say the rituals have grown more vicious in recent years, mirroring both the rise in reckless college hazing and the overall escalation of violence in society.

A high school wrestling team in Trumbull, Conn., apparently had a decades-long tradition of hazing, but this year, the ritual drew the attention of the police after a 15-year-old team member's bruises were noticed by his parents.

Over the span of a month, investigators said, the sophomore had been spat on, hogtied, held inside a gymnasium locker, slammed into walls and held down while other players forced the handle of a plastic knife into his rectum. Three team members were arraigned last week on adult charges, and five others have been charged as juveniles.

To earlier generations, high school hazing meant scavenger hunts, wearing beanies or fetching doughnuts for upperclassmen. But these days, it is more likely to involve some form of humiliation or physical abuse, say educators and law enforcement officials.

Although there are no statistics on high school hazing, a survey of major newspapers across the country found 28 serious incidents since the start of the school year, many involving beatings, sexual assaults with objects or instances in which students were restrained with duct tape. During the same period a year ago, eight such incidents were reported.

"Hazing has changed from the goofy high jinks of the 50's and 60's to something that is remarkably brutal and vicious," said Gary Powell, a hazing expert in Cincinnati who writes a legal newsletter for schools fraternities. "Like society itself, it's become more violent."

Long cloaked in secrecy, the dark side of high school hazing has only begun to emerge from the shadows. Once considered a harmless, if unpleasant, part of high school team sports, hazing, has also come to be seen through a different lens, especially since the rash of school shootings has shown America how violent its children can be.

Parents who might have once brushed off hazing rites as adolescent foolery now see them as dangerous and sadistic bullying. In many cases, it is parents, not students, who notify the authorities after learning of a hazing incident. And school officials, sobered by a spate of lawsuits that have found them liable for the behavior of students have started to confront activity they may have ignored in the past.

"The whole notion of kids just being kids, has changed," said Douglas Fierberg, a lawyer in Washington who has represented several high school students injured during hazing. "As a result of high-profile incidents, parents have come to expect that when they send their kids to school, they do so with the understanding that the school will control and prevent wrongdoing."

Still, in dozens of interviews at local schools, many students and even some coaches said that initiation rites -- from compulsory head shavings to beatings that leave victims bloodied -- persist in high school sports. Tom Howard, the athletic director at Farmingdale High School on Long Island, said many coaches saw hazing as a rite of passage, an essential part of becoming an athlete. "They figure boys will be boys, and they just look the other way," he said.

By and large, it is boys. Although hazing also occurs in girls' athletics, the more brutal and sexually oriented assaults often involve male contact sports like football and wrestling, experts say.

School officials at Trumbull have denied any knowledge of the wrestling team's hazing tradition. But the 1999 high school yearbook refers to -- and celebrates -- some of the practices, as does a team videotape made of a wrestling match. A lawyer for one of the defendants said that hazing, in some form, dated back at least 30 years.

Hank Nuwer, author of "High School Hazing," a book for students published last month, said he first noticed violent and sexual incidents in the 1980's. "Before that, the worst of it involved players dressed in diapers or hot ointment in jock straps," he said. "Now you see more cases of penetration or extreme brutality, things that I think qualify as criminal behavior."

While most of the pranks and horseplay at high schools tends to be less hazardous than the well-publicized incidents of forced fraternity-house drinking, they can be just as traumatizing, say opponents of hazing. Such experiences, they add, also pave the way for the more egregious initiation rites associated with college sports and Greek organizations.

The harsher the hazing, the more likely an initiate will become sadistic when his turn to haze comes, said Brian Rahill, of Columbus, Ohio, who runs a Web site, Stophazing.org. "Hazing doesn't bring people together," he said. "It only breeds animosity and separates people."

In a national study published last summer by Alfred University, 42 percent of those who endured hazing in college said they were also hazed in high school. Of the 2,000 athletes surveyed, 80 percent said they had been hazed in college.

"There is something terribly wrong with our society when abuse becomes a means of bonding," said Dr. Nadine Hoover, the study's principal investigator.
Mention the word hazing to high school athletes, and most will deny it exists. But ask them how they usher new players into their ranks, and they readily describe a tradition of practical jokes and organized roughhousing intended to disgrace, degrade and terrify.

Standing outside the locker room of North Babylon High School on Long Island on Monday, members of the football team said their annual "Freshman Friday" was a way of inducting younger members into their "family." Jonathan Hines, 15, a starting tackle for the Bulldogs, explained that with the locker room lights shut off, freshmen players were roughed up, slapped around and slammed into the lockers. They know we're playing," he said.

But in the fall, after hitting one boy a little too forcefully and making him cry, Jonathan said, he received a four-day suspension. Asked if he regretted the episode, he said, "I was just mad because I got suspended."

Beyond that spurt of violence each fall, newcomers to North Babylon's football team are subjected to relatively mundane acts of submission, like serving water to seniors or being ridiculed at team dinners while they stand on tables and sing. Each season the coaches warn against malicious behavior, the players said, but the admonishment is generally ignored.

After individual acts of violence in school, concerns about group brutality.

Vin Iovino, the athletic director at New Canaan High School in Connecticut, said the school began cracking down on hazing a few years ago after a student who was forced to carry a cinder block all day with his arms in chains dropped the block on his toe, breaking it.

That same year, he said, members of the girls' soccer team were blindfolded, put on a train and told they were head to Grand Central Terminal. The train, in fact, was going to a seedy station in nearby Norwalk.

"No matter how mild the form of initiation, we feel that it's demeaning to the kids and a distraction in the classroom," Mr. Iovino said. Despite the ban on hazing, he said, the school newspaper consistently runs editorials in objection, saying that initiation rites build team unity.

Matt Flemming, 20, a former football and wrestling team captain at Columbia High School in Maplewood, N.J., agreed that hazing promoted team cohesion but said it also helped establish a pecking order. "You have to pay your dues first," he said of the freshmen. "They don't always realize who is boss."

To educators, however, the rise in sadistic hazing is further proof that America has lost its bearings.

As family bonds weaken and relationships between adults and children become more adversarial, teenagers are desperate for inclusion in groups that help fill the void, educators say. And without the guidance and input of adults, children invent initiation rites that use abuse and humiliation as a means of proving loyalty and self-worth. For examples, they only have to look to popular culture or professional sports, where the hazing of rookie players is celebrated in the media.

Dr. Rachel Lauer, a psychologist at Pace University who has studied hazing, said many students were so eager to belong to a group that they submitted to treatment they know is wrong. "In addition to companionship and comfort, there's a certain amount of prestige in belonging," she said. "And the harder it is to get it in, the more prestigious it is."

The pressure to be included is so intense, most of those subjected to hazing refuse to talk about it. "You rat out your teammates and it's the end for you." said Mr. Nuwer, the author of "High School Hazing."

Many students do not realize they have been victimized until years later. Dr. Hoover of Alfred University said the number of those who admitted to being hazed in college jumped markedly between freshman and senior years.

"It often takes distance and experience for these kids to realize that what happened to them was wrong," she said.

Those working to combat hazing say the best way to break the cycle is by holding coaches and school officials accountable while educating students about the dangers of such behavior. Eileen Stevens, a Sayville, N.Y., mother whose son died of alcohol poisoning during a hazing incident in college 22 years ago, said the ideal place to start was in high schools, even middle schools, where mythological yams about the glories of hazing are first spun.

Over the years, Ms. Stevens has spoken to 40 high schools, usually after a disruptive hazing incident. "It's become so deeply rooted in our culture," she said. "So many kids glamorize hazing, they almost look forward to it when they get to college."

Douglas E. Fierberg is a trial lawyer and partner in the Washington, D.C. law firm of Bode & Grenier, L.L.P. Mr. Fierberg represents victims of hazing, personal injury and other campus crimes, and serves as counsel for certain national sororities which have committed to end hazing.