Four Students Dismissed in Hazing Incedent.

[Halfcentaur]

Back in the 60's some college punks were arrested after they stripped a boy naked and forced him outside the car in the middle of Atlanta. The police arrested him but after hearing his explanation they dropped the charges and arrested the punks. Hazing can get out of hand.

I love your myriad use of the word "punks".

 

[Susheel]

The word is American, the practice goes back before there was an America.

In India, it's called "ragging". A tradition they inherited from the British schools. There are cases of freshers being brutally abused every year and a hue and cry is made about it. Six months later the victim (if still alive--there have been cases of deaths and suicides from the humiliation) has transferred to some other school and the perpetrators are back with little more than a slap on their wrist.

In some colleges the ragging takes on caste dimensions as the minority lower caste students are set upon by upper caste students. This happens primarily in the non-urban regions.

However there are instances like my small town college. A friend's son was ragged on his first day, the kid goes home and meets some of his "friends" in the evening and speaks to them of his first day at college. These friends pay a visit to the college hostel at night and have a longish "talk" with the raggers who decide that they terribly have to go home for a week and come back all changed and "nice". Funnily enough this was the same college I studied in and there was no ragging there at thattime. From what my friend says, there is no ragging now either.

 

[Bikewer]

When I started working in campus law enforcement around '79, hazing was very common, especially in the fraternities.
However, after two hazing-related deaths at schools around the state, harsh legislation was passed.
The university's administration saw that tolerating the practice could result not only in lawsuits but criminal prosecution....
As a result, there is now a "zero tolerance" policy and hazing, if it takes place, has been driven deep underground.

 

[ddt]

Is this an American thing, or is this 'tradition' elsewhere as well? There's no such thing as hazing in the Norwegian education system, nor did I ever see it in the Norwegian military, neither from enlisted soldiers nor NCOs/officers.

It's very much also a Dutch tradition among "traditional" student societies. Most Dutch will be acquainted with the hazing scene in the film Soldier of Orange, which depicts a true incident from 1937 of Erik Hazelhoff Roelfzema, the writer of the book the film is based on. Watch until the very end:



Membership of such societies was near-universal in those days, but dropped like a brick in the 1950s and 1960s with more, and less rich, people going to university and reports of hazing incidents; like the one where 200 freshmen were crowded into an attic and the ringleader shouted "Let's play Dachau", and another where a freshmen died from a hood full of soot he had to put over his head.

Hazing went out of style for a while, or at least the brutal aspects of it, but the last 10, 15 years it seems every year there are some reports of excesses, sometimes deadly. In 1997, a freshman died after drinking a liter of gin. Then alcohol was prohibited. In 2005, a freshman slipped into a coma from drinking 6 liters of water.

 

[Sam.I.Am]

On the Dolphin pinning (called tacking in the USN): It was just starting to get seriously frowned upon in the late 80's. Before that it was common and (while not mandatory) if you didn't at least make an effort to make yourself available for getting them tacked on right after you got them you had a harder time of it for at least a few months as people teased you and essentially verbally questioned your manhood. Nobody was forced to do it that I ever saw or heard of.

Generally speaking you got them tacked in one of three ways (for the sake of clarity I'll just call it soft, medium and hard).

Soft was a light tap similar in strength to a soft to medium knock on a door. It didn't hurt at all. Medium was closer to what most people would equate to a medium shove to the shoulder. It didn't really hurt but they could add up as the backings on the pins would work their way through the brass and start to prick your skin. Hard was basically a hard punch and did hurt a bit (I saw a few dolphins broken that way).

Soft was by far the most common method. Medium was usually reserved for the people you worked with in your division and maybe some of the people who gave you checkouts and you had to keep coming back to them because you didn't know the material (wasting their time in the process). Hard was pretty rare and could get you a stern warning by the Chief of the Boat depending upon the circumstances.

The hazing itself wasn't really the tacking though. The hazing was the lead-up to the tacking. Telling the new guys some BS horror stories about people having the metal tips embedded in their chests after they snapped off and so on (all of which never actually happened of course) and then just before the tacking where some guys would take elaborate steps to position the new guy against a bulkhead or locker and take a few warm-up (aiming) strokes and then soft pin them on. Stuff like that.

I should add that there were a few instances that I saw that were pretty hard on the guy but they all brought it upon themselves with the attitude they brought onboard with them. That had a lot more to do with the close environment and how the person behaved over the previous months than the hazing itself though. If you rubbed a lot of people the wrong way by being cocky or trying to pull rank as a non-qual you certainly had it rougher in a lot of ways.

 

[crimresearch]

Pinning was once for insignia, like the Navy dolphins, or the Army's blood wings.

Tacking was a punch in the arm so that newly a earned rank patch 'doesn't fall off'.

Another tradition was carrying a 'charge book' for those expecting promotion to E-7.

This was before anyone took banning such things seriously. After the prohibitions, I get the sense that people just borrowed cool sounding names for various hazing/initiation actions.

 

[Sam.I.Am]

Pinning was once for insignia, like the Navy dolphins, or the Army's blood wings.

Tacking was a punch in the arm so that newly a earned rank patch 'doesn't fall off'.

Another tradition was carrying a 'charge book' for those expecting promotion to E-7.

This was before anyone took banning such things seriously. After the prohibitions, I get the sense that people just borrowed cool sounding names for various hazing/initiation actions.

The term tacking was also used for a crow (rank insignia) but we never called hitting a set of dolphins "Pinning". Pinning was what we called it when the CO put them on you and it was a semi-formal ceremony.

Before it was frowned upon, in addition to the charge book there were a few cases of some guys who were awaiting getting frocked as a chief to wear a combination of dungarees and Khakis... sewn together vertically along the gig line. That was an at sea thing though. There were other traditions that the chiefs followed in the initiation but those were mostly behind the closed doors of the chiefs quarters.

 

[Morrigan]

The whole subculture of hazing is something I'll never understand. Any group that forces me to do something stupid, humiliating, painful or even dangerous, is not worth joining to me. Why would anyone subject themselves to this?

 

[Sam.I.Am]

The whole subculture of hazing is something I'll never understand. Any group that forces me to do something stupid, humiliating, painful or even dangerous, is not worth joining to me. Why would anyone subject themselves to this?

It's a guy thing. If you looked closer you'd see that it happens mainly in male dominated environments and is usually done by males to other males or to females taking on a male role.

Females have their own version of hazing but it's in a completely different manner. Don't have the right clothes, shoes or purse? There's a social price to pay for that. Choose to not have a baby? There's a social price to pay for that too. It's different of course but in a macro sense it's all pretty much the same thing.

 

[ZirconBlue]

There were other traditions that the chiefs followed in the initiation but those were mostly behind the closed doors of the chiefs quarters.

Hubba hubba.

The whole subculture of hazing is something I'll never understand. Any group that forces me to do something stupid, humiliating, painful or even dangerous, is not worth joining to me. Why would anyone subject themselves to this?

I feel similarly. This is one of the reasons I made no effort to join a fraternity in college.

 

[Sledge]

It's a guy thing.

Stupid guys only need apply.

 

[Sam.I.Am]

Hubba hubba.

Hah! I knew that that would come out wrong. No, not in that way.

 

[swanjackal]

Being from the UK, the only type of haze/hazing I underwent was the Jimi inspired "Purple" one.

 

[Sam.I.Am]

Stupid guys only need apply.

I wouldn't say that. It's just another form of a group collectively deciding who fits in your group and who doesn't. That's pretty much a universal human trait. Hazing is just one form of doing that and it's not necessarily a bad thing in and of itself. It's when it goes too far that people start to have a problem with it. "Too far" is of course a subjective measurement and what you might consider to be going too far isn't seen that way by others. I've seen guys with fraternity brands (like what you might see on cattle). To me that's going too far but for them it's the price that they were willing to pay to join that group. To each their own I say (as long as it's not life threatening of course).

 

[Morrigan]

^ To each his own, sure... I still think they're idiots, though.: P

It's a guy thing.

Maybe. I know guys who feel similarly as I do, though.

Females have their own version of hazing but it's in a completely different manner. Don't have the right clothes, shoes or purse? There's a social price to pay for that. Choose to not have a baby? There's a social price to pay for that too. It's different of course but in a macro sense it's all pretty much the same thing.

Nonsense. I don't wear fancy clothes or accessories and I don't have children. I don't feel like I'm paying any "social" price. What kind of society do you live in FFS?

 

[Sledge]

I wouldn't say that. It's just another form of a group collectively deciding who fits in your group and who doesn't.

I kinda figured the training and selection processes had already done that.

 

[Sam.I.Am]

Nonsense. I don't wear fancy clothes or accessories and I don't have children. I don't feel like I'm paying any "social" price. What kind of society do you live in FFS?

Just because you have chosen to not (or are not able to) join those groups doesn't mean that you would be able to join those groups (if you chose to at a later date) without meeting some form of what that group considered acceptable behavior(s). If at some point you did decide to try and join and were refused because of that then yes, you would pay a social price in one form or another even if it's simply not being able to be considered a friend by those people.

Now that's not to say that that social price is worth it for you to go through the effort of joining that group or that you will even be negatively affected by not joining that group but it is still there even if it's negligible in its consequence.

 

[Morrigan]

I have no idea what you're trying to say here. What groups are those, exactly? Initially you spoke of a "social price", not joining a specific group. Sounds like shifting the goalposts. But anyway, as I already said initially, any group that would force me to do something stupid/humiliating/painful/anything that I don't want to do, is not a group I'd ever want to join anyway, so there is no "social price" being "paid". That's my entire point.

 

[Sam.I.Am]

I kinda figured the training and selection processes had already done that.

Not really. On paper certainly but there are other things to consider that no amount of training or selection will determine before they actually start to do the job. We aren't talking about flipping burgers and then going home here. There is a sub-culture that is fairly complex that you simply can't teach in a classroom in two months along with everything else that must be taught. As it is they spend 12+ hours a day on classwork and studying to learn the basics.

Selection weeds out the obviously unfit (both mentally and physically). Training weeds out the mentally and possibly the physically unfit even more but the final vetting has to happen by tossing them into the pool and seeing if they can swim and get along with the other fish already there (metaphorically speaking of course). Some people simply can't hack the rigors of some jobs through no real fault of their own and the only way to find out is to put them through it and see how they do.

I've seen guys who, if I were betting on it, I would've said that they weren't going to make it and they came out of it with flying colors and I've also seen guys who I would've put money on them having no problems that ended up having nothing but problems. You simply can't always tell right away so you always give them the benefit of the doubt at the start.

 

[Sam.I.Am]

I have no idea what you're trying to say here. What groups are those, exactly? Initially you spoke of a "social price", not joining a specific group. Sounds like shifting the goalposts.

No, no goalpost shifting required. If you aren't looking to make a goal then of course you won't make it or miss and it won't effect you in any significant way. You have simply chosen to not enter that game.

But if you have chosen to enter the game then you do have to at least attempt to make it through the goalposts and depending upon the game, the type of goalposts and how you get there are going to be different from each other. Just like in football or soccer.

Does that make more sense?