Teen Girls Hazed on N.J. High School 'Slut List'

Sept. 23, 2009 — -- Milburn High School in New Jersey is known for making Newsweek's list of the top 200 schools in the nation.

But the high school is also fast becoming known for another list, the "slut list."

"Every year these senior girls -- there is usually that one clique, I don't know what you'd call it, a group of girls who create a so-called slut list of incoming freshman girls," said recent Milburn graduate Conner Leslie. "It basically consists of a list of girls and little blurbs of something degrading."

For about 10 to 15 years now, popular senior girls have developed the list and passed it around, according to Leslie and other former classmates.

This year it was created at an alcohol-fueled party and it was worse than ever, one current senior told "Good Morning America."

A reporter for the Millburn-Short Hills Patch Web site told "GMA" she obtained this year's slut list and on it were the names of 21 freshmen out of a class of more than 300. Each entry had vulgar descriptions of the 13- or 14-year-old girls.

"I'm so desperate and hairy that I'll give you [drugs] for free if you get with me," one entry read.

"Keeping up with the family tradition, [blank] me ... and knock me up," read another.

The list is just part of what happens on the first day of school, students say. Seniors also blow loud whistles at freshmen, shove them into lockers and, in years past, slapped stickers on their backs.

Some of the stickers labeled the girls "sluts" or "whores," Leslie said.

The school's superintendent, Richard Brodow, sent an e-mail to students last week saying "any so called 'ritual' which in any way threatens, degrades or makes any youngster feel intimidated or less than whole is a violation of school policy and just plain wrong."

Hazing Blown Out of Proportion?

Though many parents have complained about the list, about a dozen current and former students told "GMA" the whole thing is being blown out of proportion. Some girls even want the attention of being on this list and feel left out if they're not on it, said the students we talked with. The girls who are on the list, they said, are the very same popular girls who, as seniors, haze the newcomers.

And according to freshman Maxine Mandell, the first day's hazing is not as bad as many believe, and is all in good fun.

"I think they're taking stuff and twisting it ... really it's all fun," Mandell said. "It wasn't anything bad ... . What people don't see is it's getting so much better, and it's turned from a bad thing into a fun thing."

One of Milburn's seniors wrote a Facebook message to "GMA" saying, "The list is just a silly tradition that is cyclical. It won't stop because seniors feel the need to initiate the incoming freshman. For all the parents who are complaining about the list, you have to wonder what they're going to do when their daughters are seniors making it."

To author Rosalind Wiseman, the hazing is a problem for more than just the teens involved.

"You have kids who want social power and can't wait to be able to exert that social power over others, parents who have not held them accountable for that behavior and want their kids to have high social power, and you have got an administration that maybe doesn't know what to do about it," Wiseman said.

The school has taken steps to battle the hazing, encouraging students to report any instances of intimidation or degradation, one student said.

In an upcoming school newsletter, superintendent Brodow writes, "Parents, along with school personnel must make it perfectly clear that hazing is wrong and we as a school community are better than that. Let not the actions of a few speak for the goodness of the many."