Categories
Hazing News

Mississauga Burning Over Video

Here is the story link and an excerpt from the Toronto Star

But Alex Juani, who works in Mississauga’s transportation and works department, said he showed officers the same video clip March 30. “It’s the only video that I have and it’s only one they have seen,” he said, crediting the decision to investigate to the media uproar.

The tape shows two employees facing each other with their legs, hands and bodies taped up.

Though Juani claims the hazing had been going on for about five years, the city is sticking to its claim that it first learned about the allegations — that employees in the transportation and works department were tied up with duct tape, spanked until they were bruised and humiliated at the behest of one of their supervisors — only in November 2009.

City manager Janice Baker said the city’s investigation concluded the “behaviour was in the nature of horseplay . . . locker room behaviour.” Employees seen in the video were interviewed and did not file complaints, she said. “The discipline was not suspension or firing, it was extensive retraining around appropriate workplace behaviour.”

By Hank Nuwer

Journalist Hank Nuwer is the Alaska author of Hazing: Destroying Young Lives; Broken Pledges: The Deadly Rite of Hazing, High School Hazing, Wrongs of Passage and The Hazing Reader. In April of 2024, the Alaska Press Club awarded him first place in the Best Columnist division and Best Humorist, second place.

He has written articles or columns on hazing for the Sunday Times of India, Toronto Globe & Mail, Harper's Magazine, Orlando Sentinel, The Chronicle of Higher Education and the New York Times Sunday Magazine. His current book is Hazing: Destroying Young Lives from Indiana University Press. He is married to Malgorzata Wroblewska Nuwer of Warsaw, Poland and Fairbanks, Alaska. Nuwer is a former columnist for the Greenville (Ohio)Early Bird and former managing editor of the Fairbanks Daily News-Miner in Alaska.
Nuwer was named the Ohio Society of Professional Journalists columnist of the year in 2021 for his “After Darke” column in the Early Bird. He also won third place for the column in 2022 from the Indiana chapter of the Society of Professional Journalists. He and his wife Gosia, recently of Union City, Ind., have owned 20 acres in Alaska for many years. “The move is a sort-of coming home for us,” said Nuwer. As a journalist, he’s written about the Alaskan Iditarod sled-dog race and other Alaska topics. Read his musings in his blog at Real Alaska Daily--http://realalaskadaily.com and in his weekly column "Far from Randolph" in the Winchester Star-Gazette of Randolph County, Indiana.

Leave a Reply