Written by Madisson Ball
It’s an October morning in 2019. Flavia Tomasello is waiting in the campus bookstore at Cornell University for her 18-year-old son, Antonio Tsialas, who was to meet his mother on campus for parents weekend. He’d been in attendance at a Phi Kappa Psi party the night before, alongside dozens of freshmen who were urged to drink in a seven-room alcohol fuelled challenge.
Hours go by, with no answer from his phone. His mother is now worried. Meanwhile, Tsialas is lying dead and yet to be found in a shallow pool of water at the bottom of a vast gorge, metres away from his brick fraternity house.
It’s February 2017. Sophomore Tim Piazza is unconscious on the stairs of his Beta Theta Pi fraternity house at Penn State. After a night of heavy drinking and games, Piazza fell down the house’s flight of stairs. He suffered a lacerated spleen, an abdomen full of blood, and multiple brain injuries. His frat “brothers” fail to call 911 for 12 hours. He has now passed away in hospital.
It’s March 2021. 20-year-old Stone Foltz is a new member of the Pi Kappa Alpha fraternity at Bowling Green State University. Foltz has died in hospital after an alcohol-related initiation party left him in a critical condition.
The harsh initiation behaviour now referred to as hazing plagues colleges in the United States, even after years of warning.
According to HazingPrevention.org, the common college fraternity behaviour known as hazing is defined by “any action taken, or any situation created intentionally that causes embarrassment, harassment or ridicule and risks emotional and/or physical harm to members of a group or team, whether new or not, regardless of the person’s willingness to participate.”
Hazing is categorised by more than just alcohol poisoning. Other examples include beatings, branding, paddling or other physical acts against new members, a requirement to stay awake for a prolonged period of time, humiliation or isolation of new members, a requirement to eat something you wouldn’t usually eat, illegal activities such as a requirement to steal items from a store as part of a scavenger hunt, and more.
The behaviour particularly occurs in college sporting teams, Greek life, clubs and honour societies. University of Michigan’s Dean of Students page mentions that the common factors found in hazing cases include a power differential between those in a higher group and the outsiders who are trying to join the group, the behaviour is often is an initiation process or traditional rite of passage, and that the participant’s willingness to engage in the behaviour does not absolve responsibility from either party involved.
Most colleges now have rules in place to prevent these deadly circumstances in their Greek life institutions, but it still takes place. Even today. 55 percent of college students who are involved in Greek life, clubs and other organisations have experienced hazing. Unfortunately, there are deaths across the United States to prove it.
Michael Younis, a third-year student and Residential Assistant at Louisiana State University, says he was surprised when helping a fellow resident into his dormitory at 4am turned into a police investigation.
“One Thursday night, I was up at like 4am and I decided to check Groupme, which is basically like our floor's group chat. When I looked, one of my residents was asking if someone could let him in because he locked himself out. So, I told him I would, and he was in shock that I was even awake. And I just asked him, where were you? What had you out so late?” he said.
“When I asked him why he was getting back so late, he told me that he was taking a test to get into a fraternity. And since he didn't pass it the first time, the incentive to pass it the second time was to basically make you go and take the exam at 4am on a school night.”
Younis says he didn’t suspect anything at first, until he alerted his boss. Even he didn’t realise that hazing wasn’t just defined by games that involve alcohol.
“The next day I had a meeting with my boss, and I told him about this incident. He told me to write a report about it, and then the police contacted me like one or two weeks later. They wanted me to just tell my side of the story, then they were going to reach out to the resident and talk to him as well get his side of the story. After that, they were going to investigate the fraternity. It was crazy.”
Some may call it a rite of passage, and some may express their wishes to take part in the behaviour to earn their spot. In August 1993, CNN’s Dr Sonya Friedman conducted a live interview with a young hazing victim, named James Gill. Dr Friedman said that the main reason students participate in hazing is to belong to a brotherhood.
Mr Gill spoke about the damage that a fraternity left on him after he was kidnapped and forced to drink a large amount of alcohol in a college fraternity pledge during “Hell Week”. When he asked to leave, he was told to drink “just one more,” until James ended up crawling back to his dorm room, sick.
“When you start pledging, [you have an] understanding that these people are going to be there for you. You’re kind of saying, ‘Over the next eight to 12 weeks, I’m going to put my trust in your hands.’ And when things of this nature – and a lot of things besides this go on … you start to wonder if you’re trusting the right people.”
But it’s the tradition of initiation and pledging to be part of something greater than yourself, that keeps the new student members coming back. Even if pledging means you’ll have to withstand violence.
“Fraternities and brothers that have been involved with a fraternity for several years, several semesters feel that by torturing you, by disciplining you, it makes you stronger as a group. And when you’re pledging, you lose your individuality, or you’re supposed to lose your individuality and become a member of your group, which is your pledge class,” Gill said.
For those new generations that are likely to join a college group or fraternity in the future, the prospect of the conditions improving is unlikely.
A study conducted by Dr Susan Lipkins, a psychologist who specialises in college conflict and violence, revealed that Greek leaders and their institutions rarely acknowledged that the forced pledging behaviour is, in fact, hazing.
However, the study did also uncover that a third of these Greek life leaders agreed that the use of humiliation is significant in the initiation process. Almost the same number of leaders admitted that paddling and extreme alcohol consumption was also a crucial part of the pledging process.
Dennis Jay, a Fraternity hazing victim who also spoke with Dr Sonya Friedman, said that the behaviour in his fraternity had been going on for generations, and he was surprised that nobody had gotten hurt before he did.
“It was, like, a ritual-type thing. The fraternity had been doing it for years, and everyone had done it, you know, all my pledge brothers … In the whole fraternity, everyone had done it before me, before me, before me, and it was two nights before I was supposed to be initiated, I figured, you know, it’s something everyone’s done. It’s something you need to do to be in the fraternity, and I felt it was, you know, my duty to drink until they told me to,” he said.
Jay found himself in a hospital with a fatal blood alcohol reading of .48, after he won a fraternity initiation drinking contest.
“We were blindfolded and forced to drink until we vomited. It’s just that kind of situation that’s way too dangerous, and no one realises it.”
So, if the behaviour is unrecognised and considered a generational obligation, how is it being stopped?
Are Greek leaders learning from their mistakes? Are the college institutions actively working to prohibit this lingering problem within the college way of life?
The short answer to this is yes, colleges do have prohibitive measures in place. Although, whether these measures are effective enough to restrain hazing from taking place is debated.
Elizabeth Shayler, Assistant Director in the Office of Fraternity and Sorority Affairs at Lehigh University, says that the culture on campus affects the student’s ability to stand up and report the behaviour.
“The thing about hazing and the way that it normalises interpersonal violence and the standards around alcohol that this culture has created … is that it really impacts not only the campus community, but the different sub communities. So, the greek community, the athletic community, etcetera. And it creates those norms where being a bystander just becomes increasingly okay.”
Shayler says that standing in and conducting conversations with these communities is important to educate students on their safety and ensure that party and initiation situations don’t increase to violence.
“The thing that we talk a lot about with our students is intent versus impact … It could be in terms of what they’re trying to accomplish being done in another way and helping them think through that. Even with some of these minor behaviours, we have to ask how that’s a slippery slope and how that opens the door then to try new things and to get closer to some of those more violent behaviours.”
Jim Scott, the Vice President of Student Life and Enrolment Services at Georgia State University, spoke on CNN’s program about the work being done amongst college communities to educate students and stop hazing traditions.
Scott stands by the University’s hazing rules and claims that a “great deal of change and awareness” is being done in the college community to combat what is an entirely widespread culture.
“There are educational programs that are initiated every year with fraternities and sorority leaders. States have initiated legislation to actually ban hazing and take legal action against those found responsible,” he said.
“The national fraternity and sorority organisations and executive directors have also put into place rules and regulations regarding hazing. I think institutions are making a sincere effort through enforcement, as well as educational programs to try to deal with the problem.”
But despite the work done by institutions to stamp out hazing, expert and editor of Hazing: Destroying Young Lives, Hank Nuwer, points out that often when offenders are expelled from their college, close to the entire school (or at least, the group they’re affiliated with) would walk them down to the local public transport and treat them as a departing hero.
Unfortunately, as much as universities and their institutions will work to call for an end to the practice, Nuwer says that the support for the organisations and their rituals among leading alumni has stunted any progression and real reform in Greek life, meaning it will be difficult to ever see an end to hazing.
Credits:
Bunch of Drunken, Obnoxious Frat Boys by Clinton Steeds. No changes were made. Link: https://www.flickr.com/photos/cwsteeds/4877473706.