I think my prior posts set out at least one definition of what I consider hazing. Not just any initiation ritual would be hazing. It would have to be extreme physical, mental, or emotional distress, such as humiliation, pain, or something that could result in injury of death. Beatings, forced nudity, sexual humiliation, something involving extreme physical feats, excessive alcohol ingestion, something to do with noxious substances (urine, vomit), law-breaking, etc. Harmless rituals like singing or reciting pledges or runninh simple errands aren’t hazing in my mind.
I think that there is an assumption that hazing takes place within the context of membership in an organization or institution of some kind. If it’s just a group of friends not sharing some kind of affiliation engaging in this kind of behavior, it might be extraordinarily stupid, perhaps even punishable, depending on whether they were subject to some kind of code of conduct or liability, but I’m not sure I would call it hazing.
If you threw someone into a pool and he drowned, would you expect to be held responsible?
Well, I think that’s a pretty high and strict definition. My pledge manual gave several examples of practices that were considered hazing and were forbidden. Some I would have considered fun. But I still think that they are hazing. The problem is that mild hazing leads to less mild, and it ramps up until something bad happens. Then it gets cut out completely.
The problem was (and I’m assumming, probably still is) that if 3 or more fraternity members were involved, then it was considered a fraternity event. [Eg. Me and my 3 roommates (all brothers) couldn’t have a keg in our appartment because it would be considered a fraternity event, and we could get our charter pulled.] Also, my college’s IFC didn’t think that hazing could only be done to a pledge. So if 2 brothers peer-pressured a 3rd into drinking 21 shots in 21 minutes, and it went bad (as, I would imagine, it usually would), then the fraternity was also liable. *
Somewhat, I would say. I can’t imagine it happening, but I guess if he hit his head on a rock somehow, I would be partially responsible. Since I would not have been attempting to physically harm him, I think it would be a terrible accident and I’d probably be able to avoid the chair.
Wait… are you saying that this IS hazing? Or that it’s only hazing if something goes terribly wrong?
[OT] Incidentally, this is why fraternities have to pay a lot of money for insurance. If the 21 shots kid dies and he and the 2 friends are just friends, then there aren’t deep pockets for the parents to go after. But if they all belong to the same fraternity, then the parents can go after the chapter and the Fraternity as a whole. So brothers have to pay dues to pay for insurance, which leads to accusations of “buying friends”.
As I said before I believe that initiation rituals should be public, regulated, safe, and under the direct supervision of authorities. That would help suppress tendencies to ramp things up.
Well, under my definition, there is s shared affiliation, so sure.
Throwing someone into a pool is an inherently dangerous act. At the very least it’s assault.
I’d say any act that involved one person submerging another in water or bodily throwing that person in uncontrolled or unsupervised circumstances is inherently dangerous.
The main problem was the zero tolerance issue and the way the command tried to carry it out. Anyone he turned in would be kicked out of the Navy and basically have their lives ruined. Early on several members of the crew tried to negotiate a deal to come forward and be punished if that end the issue. They were told no. That put the kid in the position of ruining the lives of people he considered friends (and he did consider them friends, believe me) or screwing over the entire crew by keeping them on the boat instead of home with their families.
Here you have no idea what you are talking about. Dolphins are a pin you earn when you qualify as a submariner. You have one year after being assigned to a sub to earn them. They signify that you are now officially part of a submarine crew. Tacking the on means hitting the pin into you chest. This guy would have had a bruise on his chest and possibly two small wounds where the pins can break the skin. He would most likely been very proud of it. I was proud of mine, and everyone I knew in the service was proud of theirs. Crew members no one liked didn’t get their dolphins tacked.
I understand and agree with the need to stop this because people are idiots. Most of the time, tacking leaves nothing but a bruise that fades in a few days and feeling of belonging to the group. You know you are one of the crew. That is important in a situation where you can make a mistake that can kill everyone on your boat. A submarine holds about 100 people who depend on each other to stay alive.
But as I said people are idiots. A punch on dolphin doesn’t hurt much more than running into a door knob, but some people up the ante and I have heard stories of morons using heavy wrenches or swinging on pipes to kick the new guy in the chest.
I can’t disagree with this. My point was that while cracking down on hazing may be necessary, trying to completely wipe it out in a hamfisted manner the way the navy did can backfire.
Oh, I get it. Something very similar happened to my brother when we made Airborne. (He also began calling me a dirty, filthy leg.) I would consider this hazing, but the relatively benign kind of hazing that you know that you are signing up for.
Yeah, that’s assholish, and a huge leap from a punch or slap. It doesn’t seem difficult to me to have a peer-established rule that only hands are allowed. I don’t remember the exact story that my brother told me, it was over 20 years ago, but I think all of the punching happened right as he got pinned (without the 2 whatchamacalit’s cliped onto the points). Were the pipes and wrenches being swung at the ceremony, or days later when the 2 whatchamacalits would have been attached?
I was in in the mid to late 90s. Tacking was officially forbidden. It would normally happen over the course of the day. Basically when someone saw you in for the first time wearing your pin they would congratulate you and tack them on. After the first day, you would only wear the pin in dress uniform and wear a patch in working uniform, so this had a built in time limit. The wrenches and feet thing would happen in the engine room. Machinists Mates tended to play rough.
I don’t understand it either. If someone form a group hurts me, and that action is sanctioned by the group, my reaction is one of wanting to get them back. And yet I’ve never heard of upperclassmen being worried about being hazed by their lower classmen.
I could understand how, if you were allowed to get back at the upper classmen, it might work as a bonding exercise. But without that, I can’t see how it doesn’t just create enmity, and, as mentioned escalate indefinitely. Unless every frat boy winds up with Stockholm syndrome or something.
Oh, and OP, while I never experienced it personally, I have at least seen stories about it. What flabbergasts me is not that it happens at colleges, but at high schools. That almost certainly has to be led by the adults. At least at college, there’s the idea that the adults don’t know–because, if they did, hazing was a mandatory reporting offense. (The quoted reason was that it was quite likely a hazed student would sue the school, and that it had happened before.)
Oops, I forgot something. I mention the group thing because, if it were not sanctioned, my reaction would be to try to get the person kicked out. Plus I forgot to mention that I might not actually act on my desire to get them back, but I would, at the very least, leave any group that condones that sort of thing.
I don’t see that “zero tolerance” was a problem. There are plenty of things that zero tolerance applies to in organizations and institutions. The problem was with how that zero tolerance policy was implemented.
Maybe they shouldn’t have done it then, knowing that there was a zero tolerance policy. I’m having trouble working up much sympathy. I’m sympathetic toward the person who committed suicide, because obviously he was suffering from some serious problems. But I’m not sympathetic to those who put them in that position.
Thanks for the information. However, I don’t really see how anything you said contradicts what I said.
Yeah, there are things that people like that organizations should still put a stop to, because people apparently don’t always have the best judgment. And I would say this applies even before such practices escalated. I see no reason to tolerate people being hit in the chest so that they’re bruised or cut by the pin. Even if, or maybe even especially if, that kind of thing makes them feel pride. Better to sublimate that pride to a public ritual that is supervised by authority figures and which doesn’t involve physical injuries, regardless of how minor.
Perhaps the Navy ought not to be allowed to run the Navy.
[I can’t be arsed to fix the coding on this]
I think that the main gist has been covered already, but I’ll give my own take on it.
Most fraternities were founded around the time of the Civil War. Mine was founded just before it started. After the war was over people realized a fact about enduring hellish conditions: Going through hell tends to make you form a tight bond with those that go through it with you. This was the original logic behind hazing: The harder the pledge period is, the tighter the bond. There are 2 obvious and logical problems with this:
[ol]
[li]1.) Since the hellishness is mostly artificial (i.e. There’s a difference between fighting a war and pledging a fraternity), the effect is somewhat diminished.[/li][li]2.) The bond that is forged is equally balanced by the hatred for the upperclassmen that created this artificial hell. So, while you might form a tight bond with those in your pledge class, you have an equal lack of a feeling of bonding with the upperclassmen. So, instead of having a tight-knit brotherhood, you have a number of tight-knit pledge classes who[/li][/ol][ol]
[li]a.) hate the elders of the group, and [/li][li]b.) feel like they are entitled to put the next pledge class through the same kind of hell.[/li][/ol]So the cycle continues. When pledges are going through this artificial hell they are thinking “I can’t wait to be on the other side of this.” Because nobody wants to go through the hazing, and then find out that they aren’t allowed to ‘pay it forward’. “I did it like everyone before me. This next class should do it too.” That would be like finding out that you are the last to join a pyramid scheme. That would be like getting stuck with the hot potato. That would be like congressmen voting themselves a pay cut. That would be like taxpayers saying “Yeah, let’s raise taxes. We need to pay off our parents’ debt and I don’t want to leave any debt to my children.”
…so it continues, until it gets so bad that it has to be squashed like kudzu growing up the side of your house.
Maybe you have never been in this type of situation, but that is not at all how it works. You feel pride that they are doing this to you and you can take. Whether you agree with it or not, joining a group through a hazing ritual is something the people being hazed usually want. It means you are accepted by the group and are part of it. If you are not hazed, then they don’t want you. If you don’t want to be part of the group then they will not want you either, but it never works that way.
My only real hazing experience was on a submarine(unless you count boot camp). That is an environment that most people will never experience. You can spend up to 3 months under the ocean with the same 100-120 guys in a metal tube. You can’t get farther than 300ft from any of them, ever. You are breathing recycled air and sleeping 18 inches apart, stacked 3 or 4 high in bunks smaller than coffins. You are on an 18 hour clock which means you can never get a good night sleep. Things are either boring as hell or deadly serious. You are so deep in the ocean that the escape hatches are only good for a place to hide out. If you are lucky there is a exercise bike stuffed between 36 inch high pressure steam tubes so you can get some exercise. The fresh fruits and vegetables can last a week, the frozen food a month or so, then you are on dehydrated and cans. And you still need to be able to safely operate a nuclear reactor the whole time. If you aren’t a part of the group, you will go crazy. You can’t be some above it all, too cool for school, iconoclast in that kind of situation. You are part of the crew, or you shouldn’t be there.
The problem with the that, and many other zero tolerance, policies was there was no room for judgement. The kid involved was not hurt or traumatized by the hazing, but the punishment for everyone involved, not matter how light the tap, would have been an other than honorable discharge. Aspirin should not be treated the same as cocaine on school grounds and tapping a pin should not be treated the same as sticking a grease gun up someone’s ass.
:rolleyes: Look, there is a reason groups haze. The reason is that it works. It doesn’t have to be stupid, reckless, or brutal to work, but it does work. Groups that haze are tighter than groups that don’t. And in my experience, you usually don’t hate the hazers unless they are over top sadistic.
Maybe basic training sergeants from nearby military bases could come teach fraternities and sororities how to haze, and also train submarine crews and so on? Since they seem to be the experts apparently? National fraternity organizations can employ ex military personnel to go around giving the training to the universities not sufficiently near to a military site…
To emphasize that the purpose is unit cohesion rather than payback, for one thing. And to weed out and disallow from participation the excessively vengeful or intemperately cruel.
Funny, I feel like I’ve been accepted into social groups without having to suffer physical, emotional, or mental pain.
Groups that commit ritual slaughter and cannibalism together, I’m sure, are tighter than groups that don’t. And, hey, such groups did it because it works.
The point is that we draw the line somewhere. And perhaps your having been in that situation personally gives you a skewed perspective of exactly where that line should be drawn.
Well, cannibalism aside, the military does indulge in ritual slaughter, or at least that’s what they train for - to push the various buttons and pull the various triggers to end the lives of other people.
Like many who have been in that situation, Strassia stops short of fully explaining it. At some point, I imagine, you have to stop examining such a situation and simply go with it.