Peer Review

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Cecilia Mercado

Professor Kennedy

ENGL 10

11/14/21

WP #3: Argumentative Paper on WGI and DCI’s Hiring Practices

Imagine what it would be like to be a doe-eyed high school student involved in the marching arts wanting to continue on and compete at the international level, only to have your shiny, polished view of the marching arts world shattered because those very organizations you dreamed of performing with are unable to keep their performers safe from sexual misconduct.WGI and DCI, known as Winter Guard International and Drum Corps International are major marching arts organizations that house competitive world-class color guards, marching bands, wind ensembles, and winter percussion ensembles. In recent years, the organizations have been under fire for their lenient hiring practices, allowing instructors with a history of sexual misconduct/allegations to work with their performers. DCI and WGI must put stricter hiring practices in place and make use of background checks in order to properly protect the minors and adults that come through their programs because simply having employees complete sexual assault trainings is not enough.

DCI has had several cases of sexual assault perpetrated by instructors. Perhaps one of the more major cases involved George Hopkins, a former instructor of the Allentown cadets. Hopkins walks free to this day but the damage he did is irreversible. The Hopkins incident is perhaps one of the more severe sexual misconduct cases to

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come out of DCI because of the sheer amount of how many young performers he abused. According to The Morning Call, a newspaper based in Allentown, George Hopkins was accused of sexual misconduct by nearly a dozen women from the ages of 16 to 37 over the course of 30 years and was charged criminally when a connection was found with two alleged incidents in 2018 but was fined $5,000 and sentenced to two years of probation because the women chose to accept a plea deal in which Hopkins plead no contest to the allegations (Schroeder 1). It’s obvious that this man caused severe psychological damage to these women and made them fear him so heavily that they did not speak out until years after the abuse occurred, after knowing they weren’t alone in their experiences with Hopkins. The Morning Call also includes a first-hand testimony of one of the victims’ encounter with Hopkins in which she details the events of the night she was abused by Hopkins stating that she was an employee of the organization at the time and she accompanied Hopkins to a bar then was taken to his apartment after and raped while she was intoxicated and likely drugged because she mentions her legs felt jello-like upon trying to leave the bar (Schroeder 1). This testimony is absolutely heartbreaking and shows us a first-hand account of what Hopkins’ victims experienced. Although this may be one of the more famous cases, it is not the only one, and it only shows us how abuse in youth organizations can be right under our noses.

It’s no secret that DCI’s hiring practices are unbelievably weak, causing them to hire a registered sex offender for one of their bands at one point. According to an article featured in the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, “Pioneer Drum & Bugle Corps & Color

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Guard had a registered sex offender on its staff, according to a statement issued this week from Drum Corps International...Pioneer later removed the sex offender from its staff...but it provided no other details about the offender, including what position the person held” (Diedrich). This shows just how poorly managed DCI’s employees are. How could an organization that works primarily with minors allow a sex offender to work for them? Easy, they simply don’t check. The fact that a youth organization allowed a registered sex offender to come within such close proximity to its students is quite ridiculous and only makes it extremely clear just how important it is for DCI to begin doing background checks because their hiring practices are obviously not strict enough to protect their performers.

Although a majority of sexual misconduct incidents tend to occur in DCI, several have occurred in WGI, one of the most well-known being the allegations against Ike Jackson who is a percussion instructor who was once in WGI’s hall of fame. According to a statement released by Winter Guard International regarding Ike Jackson’s misconduct, “We wanted to update you on our recent action in response to the events involving allegations of misconduct by one of our Hall of Fame members, Ike Jackson, a California-based high school percussion instructor...As a result of the information received during the investigation, the WGI Board of Directors has voted to revoke Mr. Jackson’s Hall of Fame status with our organization” (Jordan 1). Although the details of the case weren’t explicitly stated in this quote, likely to protect the victims, it’s still shocking that sexual abuse in the marching arts is as prevalent as it is across international marching arts organizations like WGI and DCI. DCI and WGI’s only

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preventative measures for sexual assault seem to be quite weak, as I could only find that they force their employees to complete sexual-harrassment training. While putting employees through sexual harassment training may be somewhat helpful, it is not going to stop abusers from taking advantage of children and young adults.

The final and perhaps most heartbreaking story is that of Melody Romo. Melody Romo was manipulated into a sexual relationship with her high school band teacher, Mike Stevens, who went on to teach a DCI group called the Oregon Crusaders. Romo worked up the courage to tell her story after finding out Stevens had been fired for multiple sexual assault accusations during his time working with the drum corps. Romo details her encounter in a Philadelphia Inquirer Article entitled “A Failure To Protect” in which she recalls being so afraid to tell anyone about what was happening to her because Stevens told her it would ruin her career and that years later she realized she had been coerced, manipulated, and preyed on. Although years passed, the shame never left her and she kept the relationship to herself until she realized she had not been the only young girl Mike Stevens took advantage of (Nadolny 1). Melody’s story shows us the direct effects her assault had on her and the psychological damage it did to her in the years to come. Her story serves as a cautionary tale now, but organizations like WGI and DCI must put a stop to allowing instructors like Stevens to infiltrate their organization so that stories like Melody’s will be few and far between, or nonexistent. Kids deserve to be protected.

Some may argue that sexual assault training is effective and prevents sexual misconduct enough in a variety of settings. This viewpoint can be supported in the

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sense that sexual assault training can reduce negative attitudes towards victims of assault, evidenced by a series of 8 studies that investigated male-targeted sexual assault prevention strategies in which results showed an overall statistically significant improvement in sexual assault attitudes across studies (Wright 1). What this study did not find was an actual correlation between attitudes related towards sexual assault, a reduction in sexual assault perpetration, and sexual assault knowledge. The reason this correlation doesn’t exist is because abusers know exactly what they are doing. They are not simply uneducated because rapists continue to rape despite these trainings. We see this claim come to life when we look at statistics regarding sexual assault trainings such as one mentioned in the Harvard Business Review that states, “Today some 40% of women(and 16% of men) say they’ve been sexually harrassed at work - a number that, remarkably, has not changed since the 1980s” (Dobbin, Kalev 1). This piece of evidence shows us that sexual assault prevention trainings really haven’t done much at all to prevent sexual misconduct in the workforce. If the rates of sexual assault is not going down as a result of these trainings in the workforce, they’re not likely to go down when utilized in settings with minors.

These abusers know exactly what they are doing and it is up to organizations like DCI and WGI working with minors to do everything they can to protect participants from these perpetrators.

At the end of the day, DCI and WGI are not protecting their performers in the way they should be. The system they have now is obviously keeping no one safe. These organizations must begin to do full background checks on the employees they hire and

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put stricter hiring practices into place. It’s important to crack down on sexual assault so we can show abusers that there is no place for them in youth spaces or anywhere, for that matter.

Works Cited

Diedrich, John Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. “Pioneer Drum and Bugle Corps Suspended over Poor Health Care, Having Sex Offender on Staff.” Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, 23 Aug. 2018, eu.jsonline.com/story/news/2018/08/22/pioneer-drum-corps-suspended-poor-cadet-health-care-and-having-sex-offender-staff/1068296002.

Dobbin, Frank, and Alexandra Kalev. “Why Sexual Harassment Programs Backfire.” Harvard Business Review, 27 Aug. 2021, hbr.org/2020/05/why-sexual-harassment-programs-backfire.

Jordan, Trevor. “Misconduct Investigation Concluded.” WGI, 18 Dec. 2020, www.wgi.org/misconduct-investigation-concluded .

Jordan, Trevor. “WGI Statement: August 13, 2020.” WGI, 13 Aug. 2020, www.wgi.org/wgi-statement-august-13-2020 .

Nadolny, Tricia. “A Failure to Protect.” Https://Www.Inquirer.Com, 19 Feb. 2019, www.inquirer.com/news/a/drum-corp-international-sexual-assault-misconduct-mike-stevens-george-hopkins-cadets-20181213.html .

Schroeder, Laurie Mason. “Former Allentown Cadets Band Leader Pleads No Contest to Indecent Assault; Judge Calls Him 'Disgusting'.” Mcall.com, The Morning Call, 24 Sept. 2020, www.mcall.com/news/police/mc-nws-george-hopkins-yea-sexual-assault-hearing-20200924-eo3p52o7bve4bot2e73pu2tuw4-story.html .

Wright, Lauren A., et al. “The Effectiveness of Male-Targeted Sexual Assault Prevention Programs: A Meta-Analysis.” Trauma, Violence, & Abuse, vol. 21, no. 5, 2018, pp. 859–69. Crossref, doi:10.1177/1524838018801330.