Harvard University suspends men's football team over sexual rating of female players

A prestigious university men's soccer team has been suspended for the season after it made a 'scouting report' rating the women players for looks and sexual positions.
Harvard University footballers put together a nine page document, using Google Groups, on their female counterparts rating their attractiveness in points and what sexual position they were perceived best suited for.

"She seems relatively simple and probably inexperienced sexually, so I decided missionary would be her preferred position," one unidentified author wrote in the document, seen by the university's newspaper Harvard Crimson.

The document at the Ivy League college in Cambridge, Massachusetts, was started in 2012 but has continued to this year. It featured pictures of six female players giving them ratings.

An investigation was launched by the university's general counsel and it evealed "this practice appears to be more widespread across the team and has continued beyond 2012, including in 2016, and that current students who participated were not immediately forthcoming about their involvement," Athletic Director Robert Scalise wrote in an email to student athletes.

"As a direct result of what Harvard Athletics has learned, we have decided to cancel the remainder of the 2016 men's soccer season. The team will forfeit its remaining games and will decline any opportunity to achieve an Ivy League championship or to participate in the NCAA Tournament this year."

Scalise also stated that the athletics department will work with the university's office of sexual assault prevention and response to conduct more training sessions for the men's soccer team and all athletes. The sessions should teach "the seriousness of these behaviours and the general standard of respect and conduct that is expected."

The six women - Brooke Dickens, Kelsey Clayman, Alika Keene, Emily Mosbacher, Lauren Varela, and Haley Washburn - pictured and rated discussed "the embarrassment, disgust, and pain we feel as a result" in an article published in The Harvard Crimson.

"We have seen the 'scouting report' in its entirety. We know the fullest extent of its contents: the descriptions of our bodies, the numbers we were each assigned, and the comparison to each other and recruits in classes before us. This document attempts to pit us against one another, as if the judgment of a few men is sufficient to determine our worth. But, men, we know better than that.

"We are hopeful that the release of this report will lead to productive conversation and action on Harvard's campus, within collegiate athletic teams across the country, and into the locker room that is our world. But ultimately, we hope this will catalyse the cultivation of an environment and a culture that strives to lift up all of its members.

"Finally, to the men of Harvard Soccer and any future men who may lay claim to our bodies and choose to objectify us as sexual objects, in the words of one of us, we say together: 'I can offer you my forgiveness, which is - and forever will be - the only part of me that you can ever claim as yours.'"

Harvard University president Drew Faust released a statement praising the action to forfeit the rest of the season. She said she was "deeply distressed" to learn that the "appalling actions" of the 2012 team had spilt over to subsequent years.

"The decision to cancel a season is serious and consequential, and reflects Harvard's view that both the team's behaviour and the failure to be forthcoming when initially questioned are completely unacceptable, have no place at Harvard, and run counter to the mutual respect that is a core value of our community," she said.

The Crimson men's team had been in first place in the Ivy League.