This year’s Hazing Prevention Week brought more than just an important public awareness message about the dangers of a pervasive yet under-examined ritual. On September 27th, the bipartisan “Stop Campus Hazing Act” passed the House of Representatives, edging the country closer to eliminating hazing on college campuses where its strong hold on Greek life and other membership organizations has led to trauma and tragedy.
But while anti-hazing advocates applaud the new legislation, experts warn that enforcement efforts must be paired with evidence-based prevention strategies. Doing so requires an understanding of the complex context within which hazing occurs and proliferates.
The Timothy J. Piazza Center for Fraternity and Sorority Research has been working on this challenge for several years. Founded in honor of a young man who lost his life to hazing in 2017 at Penn State University, the center engages researchers from several universities to examine how to prevent hazing while promoting a healthy and safe environment within fraternities and sororities as well as student groups and athletics. In September, researchers at the center published a new report in New Directions for Student Services:
The monograph offers a literature review woven through eight articles, exploring the motivations for hazing and the complicated challenges involved in preventing it, including the lure of belonging and acceptance. “There is a human nature element to this problem that we really haven’t yet attacked” said Dr. Patrick Biddix, one of the lead authors on the report. “It is about people’s desire to belong – especially young and vulnerable people who will do whatever they feel is important to fit in. Hazing takes advantage of that vulnerability.”
Biddix is a research fellow at the Piazza Center, a professor at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville and an advisor to a national sorority organization. In college, he held leadership positions in his fraternity and, later, spent many years as an advisor to fraternities and sororities at Washington University in St. Louis. The experience helped him both understand the nuances of hazing and conclude it needed to be prevented, not mitigated.
“In the past, we’ve approached hazing as helping students understand the difference between what is acceptable and what is high-risk behavior,” said Biddix. “But we quickly realized that it was confusing for students to pick and choose what may be ok. That is why we are now so focused on prevention.”
Another co-author on the report is Dr. Emily Perlow, Assistant Vice President and Dean of Students at Worcester Polytechnic Institute (WPI). She says a key part of her day job focuses on “ensuring that students are having a positive experience on campus that keeps them whole and helps them feel a deep sense of belonging.” As a student, Perlow was also a leader in her sorority and says she was motivated to produce the report to help support student leaders and practitioners on campus who are working on these issues.
“We wanted advisers, coaches, and all those working in student organizations to have evidence-based information that was more widely accessible than a series of academic journals,” she said.
In doing their research, Perlow and Biddix, soon found that the hazing literature, which was only a few decades old, provided information about the incidents of hazing and the demographics involved in it, but had very little in the way of prevention practices, unlike the prevention literature of other public health problems on campus such as sexual violence and excessive drinking. Adding to the lack of evidence-based guidance on prevention, was the inconsistency in both the definition of the term “hazing” and the way in which people understood and perceived its risk.
As the authors point out, hazing has “a storied past” reinforced by media images depicting romantic notions of young people bonding over shared adversity as a means of acceptance. But what is presented as “good old-fashioned college fun” is a significant safety threat on college campuses. Hundreds of families have experienced the unthinkable grief that the Piazza’s endured from “bonding gone bad” where life-threatening alcohol use and high-risk behaviors have injured, traumatized or killed young people in the spirit of belonging. In sororities, “mean girl” behavior and practices of exclusion cause emotional abuse. And yet, the practice persists.
The report states “At the college level, hazing, which includes high-risk drinking, social isolation, personal servitude, and humiliation, occurs across a range of student groups.”
And while hazing is wide-spread – more than 55% of college students involved in clubs, teams and organizations experience hazing – few students acknowledge or even understand they have been hazed. In other research cited in the report, “26% of students belonging to clubs, teams, and organizations indicated experiencing at least one hazing behavior, yet only 4.4% identified it as hazing when asked directly. This dissonance between student experiences with hazing and their ability to label it is problematic for prevention.”
For the authors, this is where words matter. Differing and sometimes contradictory definitions of hazing have been unhelpful at best with legal terms or policies pertaining only to one organization leaving students with mixed or unclear messages. With misunderstanding comes an opening to sidestep accountable. The report quotes students as concluding, “if everything is hazing, then nothing is hazing.”
Hazing is fundamentally about power. It’s about exerting power over less powerful individuals.
With the input of experts like Perlow and Biddix, the Piazza Center has developed a definition for hazing that captures its complexities and motivations.
“Hazing is a power dynamic behavior aimed at screening, fostering bonds, or establishing standing in an organization that risks the health and safety of individuals, causing deliberate or unforeseen physical and/or emotional harm counter to organization purposes.”
Perlow reiterates the message saying, “Hazing is fundamentally about power. It’s about exerting power over less powerful individuals. And it is not just about the joining process. It is also a way to establish status in the organization.” She believes the Piazza Center definition has distinct components that strengthen its effectiveness when used in prevention strategies, largely because it resonates in some way with students.
In including “unforeseen” harm, the authors allow for the many cases where carelessness or lack of maturity drive the behavior. “A lot of times students are not thinking about the risks inherent in some of the activities they are engaging in,” said Perlow. “It doesn’t take them off the hook – there’s still responsibility, but in some cases, it is important to understand there is not an intentional effort to harm.”
Another distinction written into the definition is aimed at getting students to understand that hazing practices are inconsistent with the organization’s mission and goals. In defining “counter to organization purposes” the authors offer an example. “You are not an athletic organization so why are you ordering forced calisthenics in a fraternity house basement?”
Perlow says students understand when the negative consequences of hazing overtake the desired intent. “I think there are some components of the hazing process that achieve really powerful outcomes,” she said. “You go through a really difficult, adverse situation and you feel a sense of closeness with others who went through that with you, but we really don’t need to be enacting trauma to create bonds with one another.”
In working with students, Perlow validates their desire to achieve positive outcomes from hazing – like having strong relationships with others -- while getting them to question and change their hazing behavior. “Students can wrap their brains around the idea that if I’m not taking away the outcome they care about, they’re pretty receptive to changing the tactic.”
Perlow’s behavior change example is part of a public health approach to hazing prevention that is outlined in detail in the new report. Like other public health challenges, hazing is largely affected by environmental factors including messages that include the tacit approval of authority figures. The authors argue that with the clear definition of hazing, “stakeholders can develop preventative strategies that empower students to challenge, reject, and reshape environmental messages that mischaracterize hazing as positive, normalized or expected.”