Sexual battery reports following game in Natrona County schools.
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CASPER — There have been roughly 15 reports of sexual battery in Natrona County’s high and middle schools over the past two weeks as part of a “game” where male students challenge each other to inappropriately touch their female peers, officials told the Star-Tribune on Monday.
“Fairly confident that I can say that all the (Casper middle and high) schools have been affected by it, to one degree or another,” Casper Police Sgt. Scott Jones said.
Jones said the “game” involves males singling out female students and daring each other to touch the girls in their “intimate” areas. He said the behavior happened in schools and involved victims as young as sixth-graders up through seniors in high school. He said some students had come forward and said they had been victimized months ago, before the recent uptick in reports. He said some of the alleged perpetrators had victimized multiple female students and that the numbers were higher than what authorities knew.
“The number I’m giving you is just what’s been reported to us,” Jones said. “We know there’s incidents that occurred that have not gone reported.”
He said it was unclear where the pattern of sexual battery began. Some victims don’t want to prosecute, he said, but “many” do. He said that as far as authorities knew, the victims were entirely female and the perpetrators entirely male. But Jones said he wasn’t ruling anything out.
The Natrona County School District notified parents and the community of the “game” by email Friday night, after Jones contacted the district Thursday to alert officials that police had seen “an increase in sexual battery reports” over the preceding two weeks. In the email, the district wrote that the police department “has and will continue to aggressively prosecute these cases.”