Hurt people hurt people
ROY feels his heart beating wildly. He recalls the instructions given him by the frat leader. He must walk through two rows of frat members who will beat him with wooden paddles. He remembers asking his classmate who lured him into joining the fraternity, “Will I survive the beating?” The reply was calculated to mock his machismo, “You are not a sissy, are you?”
Roy repeatedly tells himself: “No, they will not really hurt me. We are brothers.” He braces himself, takes a deep breath, and starts walking towards the eager frat members. Anticipating the first painful blow, he decides to back out, but his feet have a will of their own, dragging his hesitant body into the rows of impatient ministers of this savage initiation rite. Two days later his swollen, badly bruised body lies in a hospital morgue.
Why do fraternities perform such brutal initiation rites among its new members and why do the latter submit themselves to such ordeals?
In traditional societies, an initiation rite is a symbolic act of formally inducting someone into adulthood. This rite of passage, often marked by intense pain and suffering, is supposed to lead the initiate into a deeper sense of identity and a strong feeling of belonging to his group. Those who survive the rite acquire a certain status that brings with it respectability, power, or authority over the non-initiates.
Mircea Eliade, the great historian of religion, considers such rites as rooted in something universal in the human psyche – the desire to link oneself with a transcendent or ultimate value that gives a person a sense of destiny or purpose.
Sadly, in our literal-minded society, many rituals have lost their transcendent dimension. What used to be solemn ceremonies involving objects and actions that are bearers of lasting significance, initiation rites today have focused on painful ordeals that intimidate, humiliate, or physically abuse those who want to join a group. In many fraternities especially, hazing has become a sadistic ceremony that injures, maims, or even kills.
Devoid of their original meaning and function, and carried out with no transcendent meaning attached to these rituals, initiation into a fraternity becomes equated with savagely beating neophytes to enhance group solidarity and a feeling of brotherhood. The presumption is: the greater the pain, the deeper the sense of brotherhood.
More often than not, though, what hazing creates in frat members is not solidarity and brotherhood, but the desire to get even. As the saying goes: “Hurt people hurt people.” Frat members who have been physically hurt and emotionally scarred, inflict on future initiates the same excruciating pain that they had suffered. Hazing promotes a warped sense of brotherhood based on fear and an obsession for power and control.
It is about time that the government strictly enforce the anti-hazing law. A society’s culture is shaped by the worst behavior it tolerates.