EXCERPT

Introduction: The Penalty Box

NEITHER HOCKEY CANADA nor the Canadian Hockey League have ever asked themselves why junior hockey players are so often accused of sexual assault. Is there a connection between the gratuitous violence in the junior game, the deeply embedded practice of hazing new players—which in itself frequently constitutes group sexual assault—and the sexual assault of so many girls and young women by players?

Dr. Graham Pollett, Chief Medical Officer of London-Middlesex, Ontario, in 2007, wrote in the paper “Violence in Hockey” that sanctioning violence teaches boys that violence in men is somehow innate. “The integral part hockey plays in Canadian society; the role-model impact of older players, especially those at the rank of professional, on those younger; and the degree of sanctioned violence in the game make hockey both part of the problem and a potentially important part of the solution to address woman and child abuse.”

In 2010, after the Vancouver Olympics, the Vancouver Police Dept. reported crime stats for the three weeks leading up to and including the Games. Despite a massive increase in sports fans, crime generally decreased except for two: assault and sexual assault. The VPD reported sexual assaults increased 70% during the Olympics, but District One—where much Olympic partying occurred—had an increase of 233%. Irene Tsepnopoulos-Elhaimer, Executive Director of Women against Violence against Women, reported that centre workers accompanied five victims to the hospital the night of the gold-medal men’s hockey game. The alleged abusers were not hockey Olympians, but young males who lived vicariously through the triumph of Canadian players.

But this experience wasn’t used by the VPD as a predictor of a rise in sexual assaults in 2011, when the Canucks competed in the Stanley Cup play-offs. Police stats show a rise in police-reported sexual assaults starting in April. The play-offs culminated in the Stanley Cup Riots in June. When the report on the riots came out, there was no mention of an increase in police-reported sexual assaults.

Months earlier, a cautionary tale in the form of an open letter to the NHL was delivered by Dr. Pollett, Dr. Peter Jaffe of Western’s Centre for Research on Violence against Women and Children, and Ray Hughes, National Coordinator, Centre for Addiction and Mental Health, Centre for Prevention and Science, to Gary Bettman, NHL Commissioner, and to the NHL Board of Governors advocating for banning fighting in the sport. London-Middlesex Health Unit’s agenda for February 2011 notes, “This initiative is consistent with past actions undertaken by the Medical Officer of Health and the Board of Health concerning violence in hockey as part of a comprehensive strategy to address violence in society, particularly the prevention of violence against women and children.”

Seven years later, in a hotel room in the same city, a young woman endured sexual activity while up to eleven of the top junior hockey players in the world either engaged and/or watched. Canadian sport decision-makers had not, for one second, paused to reflect upon a very disturbing picture that experts in the field tried to warn them about. Between 1997-98, when “On Thin Ice” and Crossing the Line first appeared, and now, terrible alleged assaults continued in Canada’s hockey towns for nearly thirty years.

Then finally junior hockey’s rape culture burst into the news media when TSN’s Rick Westhead broke the story in May 2022 about Hockey Canada’s quiet settlement of a civil suit against Hockey Canada and eight players from the 2018 junior team after a woman went to London, ON, police about an alleged gang sexual assault by the world championship team. Westhead revealed soon after that he had also been shown a tape of members of the 2003 Canadian junior team laughing and talking about a “lamb roasting” as they circled an unconscious naked young woman.

Crossing the Line not only follows the new, ground-breaking cases about sexual assault by junior hockey players currently in the courts, it expands on the research of Jay Johnson of University of Manitoba that looks at why it is that junior hockey, even with rules against it, continues to enact barbaric ritual hazings on new players—the “bitches for the week”—and why these players too often subsequently re-enact their abuse upon girls and young women.