There will come a day when we view hazing as we now view stoning. We will wonder how a civilized society could have expected college freshmen to endure months of torture and risk death to join a fraternity — how it was deemed inevitable, even necessary, and laughed off as boys being boys. But we are nowhere near that day.
I am writing amid hazing’s golden age in which pledges are burned with cigarettes and torches, stomped on, beaten, locked in closets for days at a time and forced to consume entire bottles of vodka, live animals and their own excrement. State laws and campus policies have not yielded the desired results. Traumatized pledges who quit halfway through the process still warn of the horror stories and yearly deaths still surface in newspapers.
Certain fraternities have been caught hazing, and we can safely assume their guilt. We know Tulane’s Pi Kappa Alpha chapter poured boiling water on their pledges. Thousands of fraternities have never been reprimanded. We have no idea how many are humane and how many are simply good at keeping their pledges silent.
If the quantity of hazing exceeds our estimates, so must its brutality. We are now moving into even foggier territory, since when an incident leaks, and we get a glimpse into the secret world, we often learn that kids were merely “hazed” — the vaguest of verbs.
The word exists to ease our consciences. We cannot stomach the idea of our kids beating, gagging, torturing, raping, blackmailing and murdering each other, so we call it hazing.
There is a notion that the most despicable forms of hazing are the hardest to cover up; it is the reverse. The worse the hazing, the less likely someone will snitch. Shame is the best guarantor of silence. For good reason, modern forms of hazing seem especially cruel. The fraternities have, in the face of new laws, gotten smarter. They have turned hazing into a humiliation ritual — something that the victim, too, wants buried.
If this seems like a stretch, consider why so many of the incidents in the papers involve eroticism. Sexual assault traumatizes its victims. The kind that defies the victim’s sexuality, as in fraternities, can be especially shameful. In forcing straight men to assault each other, the frats create a collective shame. The kid who reports it exposes not only his own but everyone else’s trauma.
With all kinds of humiliation, every new victim, rather than increasing the risk of a leak, reinforces the will to secrecy. Public outrage, therefore, achieves the opposite of its aim. It tries to deter fraternities by tightening the rules on hazing.
All this does is eliminate the softer forms of hazing — the mile runs, the wall sits, the push-ups — that pledges have no problem confessing. The fraternities, grasping the danger of a leak, resort to methods of hazing that are easiest to keep within the house — that is, the most wicked ones.
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