Oh, why they still haze

Some of my closest friends are fraternity members, though I am not a member of one. I have been recruited twice, once in undergrad and another in law school. In both instances I graciously declined.

My parents had listed fraternities as one of those reasons why they discouraged me from pursuing my law studies in Manila. Deaths from hazing incidents and fraternity-related violence in the nation's top universities were already in the news at that time.

Being the stubborn person that I was, I applied for and landed a slot at the University of the Philippines College of Law in Diliman. Yet it was not until I became one of only six students who passed a midterm exam in a class of about 30 students that a major fraternity took interest in recruiting me.

It felt like an honor and privilege, of course. The fraternity had senators, justices and eminent lawyers from the country's top law firms in their roster of alumni members. Yet I had never really seen the need to join any fraternity, not even when I knew that it could open the doors wide for my career to develop in the future.

I had a more personal reason though. I barely had time off between my full-time law school schedule and my work schedule. So I knew I could not afford to take the physical risk of a violent hazing.

I already knew the severity of torture a neophyte had to undergo from tales of classmates who walked into class one Monday morning with a limp, wearing long-sleeved shirts the entire week in order to hide those arms, to borrow the words of dark fiction author Douglas Thompson – bruised black and blue like a cheap tattoo.

Eventually, overfatigue from double shifts of work and study forced me to take a leave of absence from law school and brought me back to Cebu where I later decided to continue my law studies. There were still fraternities in my new school, but they were the "milder" type I guess.

Prominent, notorious, or less-known, many fraternities still abide by the culture of physical torture that usually characterize hazing rituals. Not even with the passage in 1995 of Republic Act 8049 or the Anti-Hazing Law. The ritual has existed for centuries. Neither law nor social condemnation will make it fade away. A cursory look into the history of hazing even brings us back much earlier to Plato's academy and later to the European universities during the middle ages.

Students would have to "submit to brutal hazing by older students" in rituals which had become part of the culture of universities. The purpose, according to Prof. Hank Nuwer, a scholar-lecturer on hazing as a social problem, was to "teach newcomers precedence." The practice later evolved into hazing rituals done by Greek-lettered fraternal orders.

This dark side of fraternities notwithstanding, it is hard to ignore that in so many ways fraternities serve the community, and have nurtured strong bonds among its members toward common causes, personal or social. But why would they still resort to age-old violent rituals that could turn fatal?

The need to belong, a natural inclination toward hierarchical order, to weed out the weak from the strong, to build solidarity within a group in a short period of time, the sense of cohesion felt from sharing a common secret experience – these are some of the factors identified by social scholars that constitute our society's implicit tolerance of hazing.

I once asked my best friend in law school, now an alumnus-member of a prominent fraternity, on what he thinks about hazing turning fatal. When a person makes a decision to enter a fraternity, my friend said, he very well knows that he is taking a risk. If he dies, no one should be blamed.

Let me turn the tables on that argument. When fraternity members hold hazing rites on their recruits, they very well know that it could turn fatal. That they took a similar risk that the recruit took for the sake of tradition, they should also be responsible enough to face its consequences.

In the case of neophyte Horacio Tomas Castillo III, a first-year law student of UST whose battered, lifeless body was found dumped on a sidewalk in Tondo after a night of "welcome ceremony" by Aegis Juris: Where is that accountability now?