Category: Hazing News

Wonder no more.  My interview with renowned journalist Lance Williams is in the new issue of The Quill (SPJ).

Hazing: A Worldwide Scourge

by Hank Nuwer

India’s national disgrace with ragging is more common in many industrial countries than even journalists realize. Aman Satya Kachroo, 19, died this month in a hazing incident.  Four seniors at Dr Rajendra Prashad Medical College in Kangra were arrested and face murder counts. The government of India is considering the banning of all hazers caught ragging from ever attending a state university ever again.

Japan has vicious sumo wrestler initiations, one newcomer beaten to death by three older wrestlers not long ago. Beatings similar to ragging recently have resulted in killings in the Philippines, Indonesia and the United States.

In the latter three countries ragging is called hazing, the term apparently taken from the term in the old American West for the practice of controlling stock animals. The word “hazing” was later appropriated in the Wild West for the ridicule and rough jokes forced on newcomers called “greenhorns.”

Unfortunately, while awareness of hazing in the U.S. media has never been higher, deaths from fraternity and, to a much lesser degree, sorority hazing have continued unabated for thirty years.

The first male fraternity man to die was the son of a former Civil War general at Cornell University in 1873. America has had at least one hazing death—and sometimes many deaths—every year from 1970 to 2009, according to my research.

These pledges or so-called “associate members” die mainly from alcohol poisoning and beatings, but sometimes they die in bizarre ways, including burning to death, drowning, choking on forced substances such as liver chunks and getting hit by drunk drivers while abandoned and lost far out in the country.

Worse, with a few exceptions, educational programs to address hazing in American secondary schools before college are mainly non-existent or hastily planned only after an incident occurs.

While high school students do not often die from beatings, they do endure pummeling, paddling, and worse, sexual abuse ending in rectal tearing from objects such as pens and brooms inserted by their gleeful, sadistic peers. Two football players from a small New Mexico town pleaded guilty in recent days to sodomizing a so-called “rookie” teammate.

These high-school hazers take inspiration from American professional athletes who delight in tormenting, humiliating and one time (the New Orleans Saints football team) savagely beating rookies—many of these incidents being treated as humorous and part of the game by U.S. sportswriters.

Moreover, the hazing frenzy in North America is not limited to the United States. Canada’s junior hockey program long has seen newcomers subject to sexual abuse, and one rookie quit McGill University’s well-known football program amid claims he was sexually hazed. A vicious paddling incident at a prestigious school northwest of Edmonton has drawn frenzied press coverage this year.

And beatings and sexual abuse during initiations in prestigious South African secondary academies have only recently sparked parents and concerned citizens to begin campaigns similar to India’s anti-ragging efforts to force school administrators to ban all such so-called “welcoming” activities.

India’s attempts to impose a lifetime ban on those caught ragging is admirable (though likely to have educators mired in appeals and litigation), but if bans in the United States are any indication, they are doomed to failure. Hazing used to be practiced out in the open in the United States, but when perpetrators faced expulsion from school and fraternity, plus misdemeanor or felony hazing charges, they took the practice underground.

Beatings continued in secrecy, particularly in African-American and Latino groups that admire warrior ability to endure pain and sacrifice. Coerced alcohol initiations among international, national and local fraternities and sororities not only escalated but they evolved into creative games. This month a young sorority woman pleaded guilty to giving a fraternity pledge at Utah State University a fatal administering of booze during a games session. Supposedly it was a “reward” for the pledge to be hazed by women instead of fraternity brothers for one night.

Is there anything that can be done about practices such as ragging and hazing other than throwing one’s hands up in disgust and outrage?

I think there is. Having written and studied about hazing since 1975, after a hazing death occurred at the Nevada university where I attended graduate school, I believe these are positive developments in the USA:

–National and international fraternities and sororities themselves have come down hard on hazers, expelling individual and individual chapters caught violating rules. (Sadly, many chapters and even a few international organizations give hypocritical lip service to anti-hazing rules, flouting them in reality).

–National organizations such as HazingPrevention.org and Stophazing.org provide educational programs, as do risk management corporations such as the Human Equation which provides online anti-hazing educational courses. Buffalo State College’s library in New York has a “Hazing Collection” to put scholarly books and articles and videos all in one place for scholars to study.

–Criminal laws gradually have been tightened state by state, mainly because the parents of dead victims have lobbied hard for felony hazing charges in states like Florida and California. Civil litigation (including awards of $14 million U.S. dollars) also serves as a deterrent—at least to the elders who are university administrators or fraternity officials.

But in the end, it is going to take a paradigm shift where young people themselves begin to universally condemn hazing before true reform can be expected to become the reality.

And even if a decrease in ragging/hazing does occur due to toughened national laws in India and the USA and elsewhere, I have no doubt hazing will crop up again and again among students sometime in the future.

As I have written in my books “Wrongs of Passage” and the “Hazing Reader” (Indiana University Press), hazing and ragging are indeed a weed in the Garden of Academe. Stamp it out in one quadrangle and it flares up again in the next.

More than a weed, in my opinion hazing and ragging are a true scourge, allowing us to see in our young people the kind of viciousness that erupted in the American holding pens for prisoners of war at Abu Ghraib.

Only when our young people gain a respect for human rights will these vicious human rites truly disappear.

I pray they do disappear, but my research demonstrates that hazing/ragging will not disappear altogether in my lifetime, nor in the lifetime of anyone reading this commentary.

And that is a sad commentary on human affairs indeed.

 

BIO: Hank Nuwer is an American university professor and the author of four books on hazing. His website is at Hanknuwer.com where he reports on international hazing and ragging incidents daily.

 

 

 

 

The New York Times explores a hazing at a prestigious Dutch university: New (10/4/20): a shocking hazing death in Belgium: Sanda Dias at K.U. Leuven

 

Excerpt from the NY Times:  Incredible reporting in this sad story–Moderator Hank Nuwer.  But what disgusting members these were at a Catholic university.

“This was not an accident,” said Mr. Dia’s brother, Seydou De Vel.

The details, uncovered recently in a string of local news stories, have forced the nation’s Dutch-speaking region, Flanders, to confront rising racism and xenophobia, even at such renowned universities as this one, the Catholic University of Leuven, now known as K.U. Leuven.

Belgian universities, like their American counterparts, are generally seen as left-leaning. But campuses and clubs here have also reflected and fueled the conservatism of Flanders, where a nationalist movement is increasingly openly racist and anti-immigrant — and growing in power.

“They thought, ‘He’s just some Black guy,’” said Sanda’s father, Ousmane Dia, speaking French. “‘We are powerful and nothing can happen to us.’”

Hazing: A Weed in the Garden of Evil by Hank Nuwer (Revised and updated Feb. 27, 2020)

While colleges across the country are finding creative ways to celebrate National Hazing Prevention Week next September (2020), I’ve managed considerable progress on my goal to create a database of every hazing incident reported in the media from colonial days to the present. It will be published in my forthcoming book titled “Hazing in American Culture.” begun with a small seed- money grant generously provided by Franklin College–thank you, FC.

The present database has come a long way from the database I published in my 1990 book, “Broken Pledges,” using then mainly Lexis-Nexis data–or the database I published in “Human Behavior” magazine in 1978 using data combed out of New York Times annual indexes.

My database of hazing deaths now reveals that the U.S. experienced at least one hazing death per year 1959 to 2019.

One can only pray that 2020 will be free of the first hazing death in 61 consecutive years.

Much of that updating came as a result of research performed for my Indiana University Press investigative book, “Hazing: Destroying Young Lives” (2018).

The new database at https://www.hanknuwer.com now shows one death per year in U.S. colleges, secondary and elementary schools from 1959 to 2019. Consider 1959.  Alaska and Hawaii were admitted to the US Union. Frankie Avalon, Elvis Presley and the Isley Brothers rock and rolled.  NASA revealed  its roster of the Mercury Seven astronauts. Me? I was a student at St. John Gualbert’s Elementary School in western New York State.

Some years many deaths occurred, not just one. Consider this, too: Although there were no U.S. deaths recorded in 1958, there was an annual death from 1954 to 1957. Hazing and so-called initiation deaths in North America include deaths in Canada and Mexico student groups.

In addition, I counted a relatively small, though disturbing, number of hazing deaths over the years in Boy Scouts, Masonic organizations, the Knights of Columbus, and the U.S. Armed Forces. The story of how Benjamin Franklin in 1737 momentarily tarnished his reputation by failing to stop a dangerous hazing prank is the first incident in this database.

Behind every death is a family torn apart by the loss of a loved one who was strangled by alcohol, beaten to death, struck by a car while blindfolded, drowned, and so on.

The first fraternity death, that of Mortimer Leggett, son of a famed Civil War general with the same name, occurred at spanking new Cornell University in 1873. Young Leggett fell off a cliff on a required midnight walkabout while wearing a blindfold in gorge country.

Then there is the proctor who got sick and tired of being hazed at Swarthmore College and grabbed a flashlight and rifle to slay one tormentor as he slept. The hazer escaped the electric chair with an insanity plea.

There was the death of Clemson pledge Tucker Hipps. Hipps died when he fell from a bridge at Lake Hartwell. His was the second Clemson fraternity death at that lake. No reporter, including me, reported that fact until a new keyword search came up with another tragedy at Clemson in 1961.

Stashed among thousands of news clippings about hazing are earnest appeals from educators, grieving parents, activists and earnest students to do away with this “weed in the garden of academe” as one pundit called it in an 1860 speech at Harvard.

But the problems of hazing in 1860 are the same now, but the perpetrators are a lot more careful to hide their tracks, to lie or to stonewall investigators, and to intimidate anyone threatening to come forward with the truth.

I’ve met dozens of the hazed and hazers alike, the families of the dead, the dedicated Greek professionals, a lot of jaded alums, and activists from HazingPrevention.org, Stophazing,org, the AHA Movement and so on. Many parents who gave years of service to the cause have quit, so disillusioned by the continuing string of deaths that they no longer can even utter the word “hazing.”

Much has been tried. Bystander training. Help Weeks instead of Hell Weeks. Associate memberships instead of pledges. Delayed rush. Yanking charters. Involving the parents of hazing victims. Many good people have tried their best to kill this weed in the garden.

But still the deaths continue.

My list of deaths gets longer, longer and still longer.

Stopping hazing is easy, I tell students. “Just don’t do it.”

But too many don’t listen. They just do it.

Hank Nuwer is a Franklin College journalism professor (retiring from teaching in Spring 2020) and the author of “Hazing: Destroying Young Lives,” “The Hazing Reader,” “Wrongs of Passage” and many other books.