Op-Ed Column
Hazing: A Human Rites Violation
by Hank Nuwer

    Groups with high status see a need to exert power over newcomers. Should allegations against McGill University’s football team prove true, sexual hazing was the barbaric ritual of choice. While vile acts in high school sports programs began getting media attention in the early 1980s, and increasing during the late 1990s, relatively few colleges have faced the sordid reality that males sometimes assault or sodomize males while hazing.
    No one can predict which team or school is going to be caught with a victim’s pants down. However, the dark truth is that some athletes, even some coaches, perceive themselves to have the right to certain excesses. Hazing is one of those excesses.
    Most hazing is non-criminal. About 20 percent of all athletes endure acts that fall into the category of severe, even criminal, physical or mental abuse, according to a 1999 U.S survey.
    While it is disturbing for parents and the public to learn of sexual hazing, psychologists say most sexual hazing likely goes unreported. Nonetheless, it would wrong to overstate the problem, given that many sports programs have no initiations or positive initiations—or, albeit foolishly, confine hazing to rookies wearing silly clothing or doing acts of servitude.
    Yet such incidents are disturbing, and sometimes the press amplifies the injury done to victims by printing the name of the sexually hazed youth, or identifying him with unmistakable details (e.g., the son of a CFL player).
    Recent sexual hazing cases involving U.S. athletes have seen rookies sodomized with pinecones, fingers, pencils, broom handles--even to the point of rectal tearing. Female sexual hazing and simulations are rarer but do occur.
    The humiliation of other people during ordeals is an “entertainment” staple on TV reality shows. As the Canadian Airborne Regiment initiation scandal of the 1990s demonstrated, males who purportedly despise homosexuality in their ranks nonetheless coerce newcomers into dancing nude with other males or into simulating fellatio or sodomy.
    Hazing can be deadly. Fraternity and sorority hazing has seen at least one death by hazing the past 35 years. Even on-the-job (restaurants, oil rigs, police, firefighter) hazing has risks, as was seen in 2004 when a Texas man was sentenced to 18 years following the death of a new worker hooked to a cable.
    Some educators put on hazing prevention forums for athletes, fraternities and general student populations across North America. Fraternities, suffering way more deaths than do sororities and athletic teams, have educated new members for years, though sometimes all the efforts go to waste when undergraduates and alumni haze behind house doors.
    Silent until recently, the collegiate athletic powers-that-be have mobilized to stave off the alcohol parties, partial nudity, and assaults linked to hazing. In September, the NCAA finally addressed hazing in its national newsletter. Last June the National Association of Collegiate Directors of Athletics attacked hazing in its general session. Some major athletic powers such as the Universities of Michigan and Illinois incorporate hazing prevention workshops into leadership programs for team captains. And the National Federation of High Schools has taken anti-hazing programs directly to high school athletes the past three years.     
    And while anti-hazing activists and campus violence watchdogs urge coaches to keep an eye out for hazing in locker rooms, team buses and training camps, many coaches say policing is impossible.
    When a McGill athletics director told the Globe and Mail “you can’t follow them around with handcuffs, watching what they’re doing every minute,” his view generally reflects, rightly or probably wrongly, what is said in coaching offices everywhere. Such a view, following sexual attacks on women at numerous campuses such as Colorado in recent years, also has led watchdog groups such as Security on Campus and the national institute of Sports Reform, to point accusing fingers at athletic departments for recruiting potential violent and/or sexual offenders in the interest of winning.
    History shows us that only widespread student disgust in which student leaders with perceived status such as athletes and Greeks suddenly find hazing uncool can make any real difference. Prior to 1930, deaths of U.S. collegiate freshmen and sophomores during initiations were more common than deaths in fraternities. But when high-status students in the 1920s threatened to quit their clubs to protest hazing, the intensity of such hazing greatly diminished, and only one death ever occurred again.
    Can there ever be an end to hazing, which after all, existed in the fourth century  at a Carthaginian school and was once a shameful Canadian staple in junior hockey and collegiate orientation? Having written about hazing since the mid-1970s, I see the following as essential to curtail hazing:
    --Annual surveys by colleges to assess the scope and range of hazing activities by high-risk groups on campus.
    --Zero tolerance, expulsions and charges for criminal hazing activities involving nudity, alcohol, or sexual abuse.
    --Educational programs teaching bystanders on campus how to confront and intervene when t a dangerous hazing is in progress.
    --A means for students and faculty to report hazing anonymously.    
    --Banishment of alumni, including former athletes, who encourage players to maintain hazing as tradition.
    --Counseling programs to help students psychologically injured by hazing.
    --A societal change in attitude to see those who report hazing as heroes, not primarily victims.
    --Public condemnation of faculty members who have abdicated their responsibility to oversee the social activities of undergraduates, handing off this important responsibility instead to outmanned, low-in-status student affairs professionals.
    --The firing of athletic directors, coaches, campus police, faculty and college presidents proved to have known about criminal hazing without taking steps to punish it.
    McGill won’t be the last blue-chip program to have a hazing scandal.
    A respect for human rights must replace human rites.

Hank Nuwer is the author of four books on hazing, most recently The Hazing Reader (Indiana University Press). He is also a contributor to Making the Team: Inside the World of Sport Initiations and Hazing by Jay Johnson and Margery Holman (Canadian Scholars’ Press Inc., Toronto).  This piece was published with edited wording in the Toronto Globe & Mail.

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