Hazing And Community
Over the weekend while I was at the gym, there was a show on TV about hazing. It was so absorbing I did over an hour of cardio so I could see the whole thing.
As part of the show, they discussed recent incidents of hazing in American high schools and colleges. In one incident, a girl’s sports team began what was supposed to be an initiation (disturbingly filmed by onlookers) that turned into a violent hazing incident in which at least three students were seriously injured, including one girl whose ankle looked as if it has been snapped (her foot was dangling at the end of her leg) as people carried her away. The incident lasted over an hour and for most of that hour, onlookers cheered and filmed the attack. Several of the older girls were suspended from school and lost their right to play sports.
In another incident, a football player was hazed as a “birthday ritual” in which he was stripped naked, his arms and legs duct-taped so he couldn’t move, then other players delivered a “birthday spanking” which including shoving the empty roll of tape between his buttocks and hitting repeatedly. Criminal charges were brought in the case - including against the coach who was in his office a few feet away while the attack was taking place. (IMHO the coach knew what was going on and was probably involved in planning the attack; he just didn’t give a shit what happened; when criminal charges were brought against him, he complained that his reputation was ruined; I think he got off easy since he was eventually acquitted.)
A third incident involved a fraternity where a pledge was so severely hazed he eventually died - the details were sketchy (and I was getting tired) but apparently he was found in the basement of the frat house in a coma. It was clear he had vastly over-consumed alcohol but there were apparently other injuries that could not be easily or readily explained.
As part of the show, the producers interviewed a psychologist who has written about hazing. She said that social pressures often keep the victims of hazing silent since speaking out against the hazing means one will be rejected by the group. Male victims of hazing in particular are reluctant to speak out since they will be perceived as unmasculine and weak since groups that practice hazing often teach and ethos that “real men” can tough it out.
I am disturbed by accounts of hazing. No matter the gender of the participants or the setting, hazing involves intense humiliation and degradation, often has a disturbing sexual undertone. Victim account so often involve being stripped naked or to their underwear, then posed or forced into uncomfortable positions. Other persons around them are dressed. In the case of the women’s sports team, the incident started off with the younger girls in public with garbage and mud and whatever was around smeared into their faces and hair. Male hazing victims (as happened at East High) often suffer sexual assaults - the East High case involved an older student who is now charged with forcible sodomy (that’s slightly misleading since the law doesn’t define sodomy solely as anal penetration); the older student rubbed his penis and testicles on the face of the younger student. Such assaults are all about gender and power and dominance. In the East High case, its difficult to avoid hearing the message of the attack. The victim is intended to be humiliated and sexually shamed. He is supposed to feel emasculated by the attack. Speaking out against such attacks is often treated as emasculating as well. It’s a catch-22.
The TV show recounted the way in which the victim of the “birthday ritual” was ostracized after he spoke out against the incident. The community turned against him and his family - accusing them of undermining the school sports program, of damaging the community. The members of this community were actually upset that his going public with the assault hurt their town’s reputation and the reputation of the school. I’m not sure where to begin untangling that response. People in their community were willing to accept - even tacitly encourage - hazing as a price for having a good high school football team. They believed it was worth it. The upside was that school officials came down hard on hazing - with the full support of the school board. But the attitude of the community - that by breaking the silence around hazing the player had hurt their town - suggests a deeper problem. What kind of value system accepts a level of sexualized violence against adolescents as the price of having a good high school team? If community pride is built on hazing and violence, is that a community worth living in?
It’s not a cliche to say that in many small towns, the local high school teams are a huge source of pride and identity. (There is a hierarchy as well - boys football, then basketball, wrestling, baseball, then maybe any boys team, then possibly the local band, then the girl’s teams.)Â
The high school team becomes a primary symbol of the community. Americans want to believe that bad things don’t happen in our communities, a trait especially pronounced in small towns. When my family moved to Kamas, local town fathers righteously informed us that there were no drug problems, no teenage pregnancies in school, and that were problems “in the city.” We hadn’t lived in Kamas long when we realized those statements were laughably untrue. But, people continue to move to Kamas to this day believing that such problems don’t exist there - they exist elsewhere, out there in the “big city.” In such an environment, accusations of hazing become a threat not just to the football team, but to the entire community’s ability to see itself as virtuous. Defenders of the community’s virtue and goodness will argue that such incidents are bizarre exceptions, deviations from an otherwise good norm brought on by outside forces or encouraged by the victims. TV, movies, music become the villains since acknowledging that the town itself has encouraged hazing is too difficult. In the burbs, the identity issues might not be as keen, but the dynamic is similar - grounded in a belief that bad things don’t happen “here”.Â
It’s not uncommon in hazing incidents f0r parents and other authority figures to defend the perpetrators saying things like, “They’re good kids.  They don’t deserve to be punished so harshly.” In the case of girl’s team, the school’s original plan was to expel a number of the older students - meaning they would not graduate. Parents complained that was “too harsh” and unfair to them and would ruin their futures. So the school relented. In the “birthday ritual” case, the mother of the victim complained when the perpetrators received saturday detention for their actions. She pointed out that the punishment was the same as someone using their cell phone on campus.
Minimizing, excusing, and questioning the credibility of the victims in hazing cases is all about maintaining the image of the community - and the self. People want to see ourselves as fundamentally good. Our community becomes a mirror of ourselves. If we acknowledge that bad things happen in our communities, we have to acknowledge that we are capable of doing bad things. And that’s not a comfortable place for any of us.
