by Kristen McCarthy
Could you cheer at a basketball game for the student who raped you? Could you shout his name when he took free throws? What happens if you choose to remain silent when the rest of the cheerleaders yell this student’s name?
For a cheerleader in Texas, not cheering for the student who raped her led to her removal from her high school cheerleading squad. This happened a few months ago, and a lot has been said about this on the Internet but, if you’ve missed it, here’s what happened.
The young woman, identified simply as H.S., claimed that, when she was 16, two fellow students at Silsbee High School, assaulted her at a post-game party. A court declined to indict the men for sexual assault. In September, one of her assailants, having pled guilty to the lesser charge of Class A assault was sentenced to two years of probation. He came back to school and remained on the school’s basketball team, during which cheerleader H.S. refused to cheer his name during games.
H.S. fulfilled her role as a cheerleader. She participated in all the cheers for the team as a group. Her only refusal was to shout the first name of the man who assaulted her. School officials, in an extremely disturbing display of disrespect, told H.S. that she had to scream her assailants name with the rest of the cheerleaders. If she refused to do this, she would be kicked off the cheerleading squad. When H.S. was kicked off the team, she sued the school for violating her First and Fourteenth Amendment rights.
While I find this whole incident very troubling, what concerns me most is the decision by the 5th Circuit Court of Appeals. If you’re interested in reading the full text of the decision, you can find it here. The court ruled that, as a cheerleader for Silsbee High School, H.S. was “contractually required to cheer for the basketball team” whose roster included her alleged rapist. The court was unsympathetic to the psychological distress that could potentially befall the student and rejected the allegations made by H.S. that the school had violated her Fourteenth Amendment rights by forcing her to cheer.
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