PORTLAND, Ore. - One of two boys facing sex abuse charges in connection with "spanking" incidents at a McMinnville middle school told KATU News Friday it was all a simple game.

Corey Mashburn, 12, said about half of his seventh grade class at Patton Middle School was spanking each other's bottoms, part of a game a lot of his friends were playing.

"We were just, you know, smacking the girls' butt, and they'd have to smack another person's butt," Mashburn said. 

But authorities took it seriously. Mashburn and a 13-year-old classmate are facing the equivalent of felony sex abuse charges. In court, Yamhill County authorities said their investigation showed the boys slapped female classmates on their buttocks numerous times over the past several weeks and poked their breasts.

According to authorities, the boys were sometimes acting out a character known as "Party Boy" from a movie based on the popular MTV series "Jackass."

They were charged late last month and taken to juvenile hall.

A judge reunited the seventh-grader with his McMinnville family after six days in custody, where he spent time rooming with a 17-year-old the family's attorney described in court as a juvenile delinquent.

"I was so scared, I was throwing up the first and second night," the boy said.

His mom, Tracie Mashburn, said she would have disciplined her son herself had school officials told her about the problem.

"You shouldn't be doing that, but they should have let us know," she said. "Had we known ... we would have gone to the parents and had him apologize to them. Nobody even gave us a chance to do that." 

Since then, some of the girls have said they felt pressured to tell authorities and school officials what they wanted to hear - that the boys were doing something much worse.

"The girls have come forward to our attorney and have talked to our attorneys and our private investigators and deny any - well, not all the things, they say 'Yeah this happened, it's funny. If we say no, we're laughing.' "

The 12-year-old said he's learned his lesson.

"Now I know that it was wrong," he said. "But I didn't know it was wrong then. And no one else did."

"And it wasn't sexual," his mom said.

"It wasn't sexual at all," he said.

The Mashburns have heard that authorities are considering charging other students at the middle school but that could not be confirmed Friday.