Ingrid Holmquist | Hazing: disgusting in practice and in principle

They say it’s a rite of passage.

From military barracks and locker rooms to fraternity basements across America, young men were tortured in initiation rituals. Hazing is a tradition that spans time and space and is recorded in almost every race, class and culture. On college campuses, we all know how this goes. Condemned publicly and practiced privately, hazing seems to be a tradition almost synonymous with the college experience.

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Anyone would agree that hazing that reaches the level of grievous bodily harm is unacceptable. It is well known that initiation rituals can be deadly, leading to cases of alcohol poisoning, drowning and suicide across the country. From 1959 to 2021, there has been at least one death from hazing every year. But even in cases of “mild” or “non-violent” hazing, there is a dangerous precedent: a person must humiliate and humiliate himself in order to be accepted as part of the group.

Because hazing is so common, with a reported 55% of college students involved in student organizations experiencing it, we think of it as just another part of college. It’s not just violent stories we hear on the news; student organizations of all kinds require new members to run errands, do meaningless menial tasks, or publicly embarrass themselves in some way. These rituals may seem light-hearted and laughable, but they are also likely to be humiliating and exist for the sole purpose of making new members “earn their place.”

Any hazing is bad hazing. The very definition of the word describes a systematic process of humiliation. Even if it doesn’t manifest itself physically, research shows that the brain reacts to humiliation in the same way it reacts to physical pain. The very concept of undergoing embarrassing rituals to prove your allegiance to a group you barely know is traumatizing and in no way lays the foundation for a meaningful relationship.

Anthropologists have been studying the phenomenon of hazing for many years. This is a psychological mystery that closely resembles the pattern of relationships in which a person is abused and then shown affection by the partner. Psychologists argue that hazing can cause pledges to fall into a kind of cognitive dissonance, minimizing and even supporting hazing in order to come to terms with the fact that they are being hurt by the very people from whom they expect approval and friendship.

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Student groups that engage in hazing often justify it by telling you that it is “not really” hazing. By this they usually mean that bail bondsmen are not forced at gunpoint to the head to drink large quantities of alcohol, participate in hard labor, or injure themselves in any way. But even if we planned to condone “low” hazing, where would we draw the line?

The very nature of hazing makes escalation almost inevitable. One of the reasons for this is the group mentality that encourages it. Psychologists call this “groupthink,” in which people seek acceptance from their peers and therefore engage in behavior that they would not agree to on their own. Even those who feel shame and guilt about mistreating others may do so out of fear of threatening unanimity and group conformity. All it takes is one stubborn and power-hungry member to create a hostile and deadly environment.

Currently, 44 states have anti-hazing laws, and they have done little to save student lives. In 2021, we witnessed the death of Phat Nguyen at Michigan State University. In 2020, it was Gracie Leanne Dimit from Emory & Henry College. Every year someone dies, and it’s because someone only cares about the time of death.

Timothy Piazza, the Penn State student for whom Pennsylvania’s anti-hazing law was named, died in 2017 after falling down the stairs during a pledge at the Beta Theta Pi house. Heavily intoxicated and bleeding internally, Piazza slowly died on the floor while his 20 brothers did nothing to help. It took them 12 hours to finally come up with a plan in a group chat and discuss how to hide their involvement. Only then did they seek medical help. Piazza died the next day in hospital.

This “groupthink” phenomenon was widely present in the hours leading up to Piazza’s death, with at least one brother reporting that he begged to be taken to the hospital for Piazza. His older brothers advised him not to do this, and so, contrary to his morals and logic, he stopped arguing. In many ways, joining a fraternity means pledging not to threaten the fraternity’s carefully balanced ecosystem, and sometimes it means a 19-year-old dies.

Piazza’s death received widespread publicity across the country, and rightly so. But if the only notable cases of hazing are student deaths, then we have a serious problem. The entire system of rushing and promising student groups creates a dangerous and abusive power dynamic based on exclusivity and discouragement. For everyone’s sake, we must intervene when it is not “really” hazing. Because somehow it always seems deadly.

INGRID HOLMQVIST is a college sophomore studying urban studies in Silver Spring, Maryland. Her email address: [email protected].