I don’t want to get into a debate. I want to know what the objections are to hazing. It appears that the participants voluntarily enter this yearly tradition on their own, knowingly and willingly. It’s a rite of passage that they endure for the sake of gaining status in whatever organization they seek- a fraternity, a sports team, whatever. It is clearly demeaning, or scary, unpleasant - that is apparent, and that is part of the whole concept. If it weren’t, what would be the point? But since the participants CHOOSE to do it, why do outsiders object to hazing, itself? I understand that hazing has gone overboard in some instances. That’s not my question. People drive too fast and die, too. We don’t ban driving. What is the objection to hazing, per se?
You cannot consent to having your rights taken away (to use the American, they are inalienable).
You cannot consent to being killed or injured.
You cannot truly consent without prior knowledge of what you are supposed to be consenting to, consenting to ‘being humiliated or scared’ really isn’t good enough. Consent is only truly given when it is informed and reasoned.
You wouldn’t expect a doctor to ask you to consent to surgery by saying ‘Yeah, it’ll be a bit frightening and it’ll hurt alot’. We insist that they provide full information, including exactly what they plan on doing, the expected outcome and the potential risks.
The people who do the hazing do not provide those things and as such it is not possible to give informed consent.
Add into the mix bravado, peer pressure, alcohol and other intoxicants and you have people who cannot give any form of consent no matter how much information you give them.
So, I don’t think it’s correct to say that ‘hazing’ is a consensual activity.
You’re in one, deal with it. (OK, conceivably this could get moved to IMHO instead of GD, but it’s certainly not a GQ unless you want a statistical rundown of the objections that have in the past been raised to hazing).
I myself do not have across-the-board objections to hazing, but it can be bad in several ways:
a) I think it is a bad thing when membership organizations dominate a social scene to the point that folks feel like they have to belong in order to have a social life, and then those membership orgs demand the right to humiliate applicants (usually in a public environment and make them grovel to be allowed in. Admittedly, this “bad thing” can’t be blamed on the organizations while leaving the [del]lemmings[/del] applicants free of responsibility for their own participation…but it’s not as simple as “voluntarily entering into this on their own”, either. Example: fraternities and sororities “colonize” a college campus; the orgs gradually acquire a lot of clout via ties to alumni (among whom are faculty members and potential employers), and they also help each other do homework and other academic projects (in ways ranging from strictly legal & legitimate study-sessions to “we have a professional on payroll who will write that paper for you”). So on this campus, it might be, if not quite academic suicide to not pledge, at least an act that would make it difficult to get professors to be on your dissertation committee, to get a grant, to get a summer internship of the best sort, get a job offer, and so on.
b) Then there’s the escalation upwards from “we make you recite silly slogans while balancing on one foot” to “we make you lie naked on the top of a car and drive around at 90 mph weaving through traffic” and etc. Mix this in with a) above and stir and you’ve got dead people who are dead victims of an ugly and cruel system.
Be all that as it may, I am not (as I said) absolutely opposed to hazing. I got hazed when I joined the Boy Scouts. It was harmlessly nondangerous, I wasn’t humiliated in front of anyone except other Boy Scouts (and mildy), and there were no nasty penalties for not becoming a Boy Scout that made me feel I had no choice.
The problem isn’t with the person agreeing to do it. If a man purchases a slave, just because the slave might have sold himself into slavery, still it is the buyer who is being willfully evil.
Any group that fundamentally requires people to submit to the enjoyment of those who have suffered through the ranks the longest, so that they can sit at the top and revisit it on all those to come is, at heart, a dirty secret in the hearts of everyone involved. It is a system set up by children who have no idea how to organise things beyond that the biggest and strongest can do what they want, then written down and made into law. And as a process of children, and something honed over time to enforce and reinforce that power, you are ending up with something that will always eventually end up as something dark.
Any group which has hazing and lasts over several leaders will always run the risk that someone smart and cruel will end up in the lead. From there you get cases of organized harassment, girls drugged and raped, etc. Of course it is up to you if you are willing to believe that.
Hazing at the middle school or younger age is pretty much par for the course, but high school and beyond I would be very much worried about anyone who felt the need to indulge in such rituals. By that age, anyone should have outgrown a need for such childish behavior, and it should be repressed for the same reasons adult society doesn’t run on it–it promotes poor behavior and abuse of position and rank.
I would be willing to bet that hazing is one of the reasons that the government stopped drafting soldiers. Boot camp turns into a hazing ritual with unwilling conscripts, and you end up with things like Full Metal Jacket.
http://hazing.hanknuwer.com/chronology.html
http://hazing.hanknuwer.com/hsh2002.html
http://hazing.hanknuwer.com/cf2002.html
http://hazing.hanknuwer.com/cf2002.html
http://www.tennessean.com/local/archives/05/01/64600635.shtml?Element_ID=64600635
Most objections I’ve heard have centered on alcohol. Fraternity and sorority hazing routinely involves underage drinking (which in itself is liable to ignite horror from some people). And every so often there are news stories about pledges drinking themselves to death during hazing rituals.
Not necessarily. In many cases, the hazee doesn’t feel like he has a choice. Peer pressure, family pressure, or career choice can make a person feel that membership in a particular organization or sports team is required.
Also, as Szlater already said, victims of hazing aren’t typically told in advance exactly what they’re agreeing to. They may think they’re going to have to draw a picture of a wyvern on their butts and moon the cheerleaders, when the actual hazing consists of being stripped and caned after drinking a full bottle of 151 rum.
Remember too that a lot of the barriers to hazing are organizational, rather than legal: most universities have a policy that they don’t want to be associated with organizatoins that practice hazing, and if you want the university’s support (which you need to function), then you have to agree to play by their rules.
From the University’s standpoint, the objections to hazing run from the practical (potential lawsuits, not to mention the disruption and general PITA factor) to the philosophical–hazing is about humiliation and conformity–goals that are antithetical to that of most universities.
Some fraternity hazing, if done to prisoners, would violate the recent US anti-torture law. It seems rather twisted that you can do things to pledges that you can’t do to prisoners-of-war.
The whole reasoning behind hazing (as they told me before I quit the Sig Eps,) is that you break down a man’s image of himself and the world, then you rebuild him in the mold of a good man. I don’t believe it consistently works, if it ever does.
Why do you excuse it for younger people? Maybe that’s one reason it persists. Some kids get a taste for it, indulge in it with minimal interference, and then we wonder why they don’t stop when they’re older.
<Barney Fife> Nip it in the bud. </Barney Fife>
Because you need to get a taste of schoolyard rules at at least one point in your life.
I think the danger sometimes involved in hazing is one reason for the objections. There’s the whole “tie one end of a (supposedly overly long) piece of string to a brick and the other end to your schwanz and then throw the brick out the window as an act of trust.” I understand this to have had unhappy results on occasion. I was also told on hell night at a frat I pledged in college that a certain brother had, the year before, put someone in the hospital while giving the pledge “his swats.”
So, from this (yes, Hunter, I do wish to generate a list, which is why I posted here), I think I’ve learned that some objections to hazing really relate more to the organizations that to the hazing, seeing them as intimidating and too powerful, and/or holding childish moral standards and being in a position of reifying and codifying them as law and statutes, which is a concern for some.
Others see hazing as bad because it is potentially dangerous or even deadly, although one of Sage’s links is to an article about conscripts, not volunteers, which is certainly a different issue.
Many of the posters mention alcohol as an exacerbating factor, clearly so in many of the cases cited, although I’d suggest that the issue is alcohol, not hazing.
I find myself seeing participating in hazing as a matter of individual choice and am still bothered by the urge to outlaw it, but elaborating my view would be a violation of my OP and would constitue debate, so I will not continue. However, I appreciate the views so far, find them most interesting, and will continue to read if there are more posts.
Historically, the problem with much hazing was that it was completely involuntary, being based on class standing. Fortunately this type of hazing doesn’t seem to be so common anymore, but a hundred years ago things were different. I’ve seen college and high school yearbooks from the era (Cal Berkeley and Los Angeles High School, to be specific), and it’s clear that freshmen of both institutions were derided as plebes and scrubs, and possibly threatened and beaten. In one incident at LAHS, when they used to have “Field Days”–all the classes would spend the day competing in various athletic events–one lower class adopted colors for the day which happened to be the same as the seniors’, and had their “optics adorned with the somber shades of black and blue” for their trouble.
A person shouldn’t have to endure beating and humiliation as a condition of being on the football team, in the band, or even in a fraternity. Now regarding the last, there’s nothing wrong, IMO, with requiring pledges to defer to the active brothers or sisters, but there’s no excuse for physical endangerment and the infliction of injury.
“Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion” by Robert B. Cialdini has some good information on hazing rituals. The jest of it is “persons who go through a great deal of trouble or pain to attain something tend to value it more highly than persons who attain the same thing with a minimum of effort.”
I would like to distinguish between a rite of passage or membership ritual and hazing.
The rite of passage is either to gain you membership into something, or as an acknowledgment of an achievement. Graduation ceremonies connected with various levels of schooling, complete with the traditional robes and hats and marching about is one example.
Now, one of the “rite of passage” rituals I went through in life involved the traditional shirt-cutting after a pilot’s first solo. Here in the US, the tradition is to cut the back of your shirt off and embellish it with your name, date, location, and “Congratualtions, first solo” or words to that effect. The fact my first solo was in the middle December and I’m a woman made no difference - they still cut the back of my shirt entirely off. And that does start to sound a lot like hazing, EXCEPT –
- You are informed of this tradition early in your flight training
- When you’re getting close, they tell you to stop wearing shirts you are fond of
- It is tactfully suggested that women might want to start wearing two shirts or perhaps something under their shirt that would not be embarassing to show in public
- If someone truly objects no one is forced to do this. There is no penalty for avoiding it, you still have your first solo, lots of congratulations, and you still go on to be an all-growed-up pilot later on.
HAZING would be if you were kept ignorant of this tradition, after your solo you were grabbed by several people, blindfolded, stripped of your shirt, and made to parade around half-naked for some time, and if you objected at any point you’d be kicked out of flight school.
The difference is that in the first case you are aware of what’s happening, some care is taken to keep you from losing an object you value, your dignity, or your modesty, and you truly can opt out with no penalty. None of that applies in the second case.
In addition, hazing rituals involving young people, particularly in numbers large enough to compose a mob, can easily get out of hand. Between the secrecy (which makes participants reluctant to call for help), the inexperience both with the world and with making sound judgements, and the power trip that can come from dominating another human being the perpetrators can easily go beyond the reasonable. Add in alcohol or other intoxicants it only gets worse. Combine that further with any sort of food/water deprivation for an extended period and you wind up with physically and emotionally stressed people under considerable peer pressure to do things they might not ordinarally do.
In sum, people object to hazing (as I’ve defined it) because people can and do get hurt or killed when the hazing goes too far.
I think people do feel a need for rituals and rites of passage, but they need to occur in circumstances where there is outside monitoring of some sort and with assurances that participants are truly informed prior to participation, they can opt out, and they are done in a safe manner. Teenagers or college students doing hazing on the sneak do not meet those standards.
I’m not sure things have changed that much. My kids’ high school seems to have revived the practice of hazing freshmen. To the OPs point, I think it’s a stretch to say that joining the high school student body is voluntary. I’m sure the idea that “all things worth having are worth working/suffering for” is at the heart of this, but it quickly evolves into sadistic glee at the pleasures of kicking the shit out of the weak. Not that uplifting, overall.
The North-American Interfraternity Conference, representing 68 national fraternities, has a list of nine expectations that it expects all members to follow.
I’m guessing that if the all fraternities expelled the members who failed to meet those expectations, they could sell their empty properties for a healthy profit.
oops, didn’t finish the post - none the less, another reason that hazing is objected to - a formal statement on behalf of a formal organization. Thanks, Walloon. C.
A guy I went to school with was ‘hazed’ at the warehouse he’d just joined.
This involved pinning him down, pulling his pants down, and forcibly inserting the handle of a hammer into his rectum.
He required emergency surgery and several internal stitches.
That’s one reason I can see to object to it.