Why don’t college students stop the hazing? Because of what we taught them as kids.

Children learn lifelong lessons in elementary school, which is why we need to stop teaching them to be silent. Instilling in young children the importance of speaking up helps better prepare them for when they're inevitably confronted with moral decisions and peer pressures. Yet we consistently fail to do this

– and when those confrontations come up, people don't do the right thing.

Such was surely the case at Towson University, where Alexander Cantor, now convicted of hazing, forced a fraternity member to drink an unknown substance that destroyed his tongue, esophagus and stomach. Such was surely the case in the death of Timothy Piazza at Pennsylvania State University, as his fraternity brothers watched him injure himself repeatedly without calling for help. And such was surely also the case at Cornell University, where its oldest a cappella group was ousted for hazing rituals requiring new initiates to put Icy Hot on their genitals. And in so many stories of hazing and binge drinking leading to injuries and fatalities. In all these stories, even a single student who had been taught to speak up and report to the authorities could have changed the outcome.

As a sociologist, I teach college students about the power of groups on individual behavior, and the role of authority figures in silencing individual dissent. As a parent, I see it firsthand.

My daughter's lessons in silencing came quickly in kindergarten. "Mrs. B.! Michael is about to shove Nicholas off the slide, and Nicholas is screaming," said my 5-year-old daughter, who was still adjusting to life in school, having spent the first five years of her life at home with us. The teacher, my daughter reported, responded, "Honey, you should mind your own business, and Nicholas will mind his."

Ashamed and confused, my daughter came home and told us about this incident. She couldn't understand why a teacher would reprimand her when she was simply trying to save another child who appeared to be in physical danger. This would not be her last lesson in silencing.

The following year, the teacher's assistant sat the 6year-olds down to tell them they would now have to fill out a "tattle report" every time they had a complaint. The report required these kids to know how to spell their name, address, phone number (and be able to write it all down). Next, the report asked them to write three "nice" things about the person they were "tattling" on. The last two lines on the report provided space for the student to register their complaint.

A lesson in bureaucratic red tape for 6-year-olds is certainly disheartening, but there was a more sinister lesson learned that day as well. As my daughter informed me, in no uncertain terms, the lesson they had learned was: "If you fill out the tattle report, then you're going to be in trouble with the teachers, because it's bad to tattle on someone." The connections between this early childhood lesson and the underreporting of sexual harassment, for instance, later on in life are hard to miss. Research on sexual harassment consistently shows that women and girls underreport these incidents, not only from having normalized these experiences but also from fear that they would be held responsible somehow.

I didn't attend school in this country, but given how much I've taught on the topic of bystander phenomenon (people who witness horrible events but don't intervene or seek help), I was deeply struck by these experiences. We had done everything we could to teach our daughter to speak up and speak out. We had taught her that it doesn't matter if someone isn't doing something bad to you - if they're doing it to someone else, you should tell an adult right away. And despite having a large vocabulary and having a younger sister, she had never used the words "tattle" or "tattling"; in fact, she didn't know what they meant since she had never heard us use them. In her first couple of years in school, she had learned that not only did "tattling" exist, it's bad.

Some classrooms use a stuffed toy (a "tattle turtle," "tattle tiger" or anything that starts with the letter "T") or a picture (George Washington or Ruth Bader Ginsburg) to which kids can tattle. Many classrooms have posters designed to help children distinguish between "reporting" (helping someone get out of trouble) and tattling (getting someone in trouble). But, clearly, helping someone get out of trouble sometimes results in getting another in trouble. How are children to make a decision in those situations? The message is clear: Children's complaints don't deserve adult intervention. An inanimate object – a stuffed toy, a photo or a poster – can give them all the help they need.

There are books, too, that teach young children that tattling is horrible. In these books, kids often grow extra body parts as punishment for tattling (a tail or an extra long tongue, for instance), have no friends and are even disliked by some family members. Their redemption comes only after they learn not to tattle. The message, once again, is unrelenting: It's not the person doing something wrong who's at fault; it's the people complaining who need to change their behavior.