[MARS_James]

As someone who has been the mentor overseeing the spirit team including the mascot I have been the one who has talked to people who have felt our mascot has been inappropriate or broke a rule without realizing it. Never anything to the extent of what has been stated here (which lets not split hairs this is sexual harassment in some cases), but I have never allowed anyone who I felt would not make our team proud behind a mask, I have seen mascots who use the ambiguity to do things they would not do without a mask.

Now as someone who was the mascot a few times as a student I can say the mascots have been abused as well. From heads being spun around, people being tripped, or even people taking inappropriate pictures around the mascot. So it is a two way street of treatment of mascots as well as mascots treatment of others.

Finally I ask any mentor who deals with reports or complaints of there mascots behavior to take it seriously and as soon as you receive it find the mascot and talk about it. For I have experienced both sides of this coin:

My first year mentoring we had one of our more socially awkward students in the suit and we started to get complaints of him being inappropriate with the other mascots, nothing uncomfortable, but more so that they were worried he would hurt the other mascots or damage them. Wrongfully I assumed that this student who did not like being touched would not do this and ignored it. The last day of competition the mascots had a "staged fight" and our mascot damaged another very expensive costume unintentionally, had I taken the reports more seriously and talked with the student it could have been avoided.

Now the other side was several different complaints from different cheerleaders brought to a competition by a team. After talking to him multiple times the decision was made to take the student out of costume for the last day of competition, and have no mascot. Surprisingly we continued to get complaints from the cheerleaders about our mascot the next day, after getting 5 of these (one of which when the student in question was standing next to me) we talked to the team who brought them and found out that the cheerleaders has been lying the whole time, so the student was allowed back into the costume and was given the most sincerest apology of my life. Had I believed the student who I trusted or talked with the team earlier the student would not have been unfairly punished.


So my advice to all teams who deal with mascots is make sure the student can be trusted, when receiving complaints take them seriously, but be sure that you get the mascots side of the story and talk to the team the person making the complaint is from to see if an event actually occurred.