Gender & Hazing

Bad Girls, Bad Girls, Whatcha Gonna Do?
Lyn Mikel Brown, Ed.D.

No more sugar and spice and everything nice. Suddenly the U.S. is filled with mean and nasty girls. Recently there have been a number of popular books that tell us, in the words of a New York Times Magazine cover story, that “girls just want to be mean,” and give advice about “how to tame them”(Talbot, 2002; See e.g., Simmons, 2002, Wiseman, 2002). And now after much talk about “relational aggression” comes the ultimate girl fight, full-scale “savagery in the Chicago suburbs” as Newsweek reported it (Meadows & Johnson, May 19, 2002, p. 37). Junior girls from the privileged Glenbrook North High School paid for the right to be hazed by senior girls at the annual “powder puff” football game. After the beatings and humiliations ended, five girls were sent to the hospital, one with a broken ankle, another with a concussion so serious it caused memory loss, another to receive 10 stitches in her scalp. The events were videotaped and the news story went international.

Books and reports that depict girls as nasty, catty and mean are so provocative because they relay something both disturbing and familiar. This is exactly why such a caricature is dangerous. Fundamentally, it’s the same old same old. It’s familiar because it conforms to all the old stereotypes we have of girls and women—as deceitful, complaining, and jealous. It’s familiar because it’s an old story about the essential nature of femininity—“girls will be girls,” naturally and indirectly mean; it’s a stage all girls go through and from which most never emerge. And it’s familiar in its trivializing, simplistic notions of girls’ anger and aggression. Girls fight about popularity and boys and clothes. The fighting is all so, well, “girlish.” They cry and as one author of a book on girls’ social hierarchies explained, “I really do hate it when their faces get all splotchy, and everyone in gym class or whatever knows they’ve been crying”(Talbot, 2002, p. 26).

This shift in the popular press from nice to mean and nasty girls in recent years is very interesting and worth wondering about--this either-or, girl as victim or girl as aggressor, good girl or bad girl. It’s a false dichotomy with a long history that effaces complicated realities. For some time now feminist scholars have been interrogating this and other binaries by connecting constructions of girlhood to social and cultural context, history, and the material conditions of girls’ lives (e.g., Brown, 1998; Diamond, 2000; Fine, 1992; Fordham, 1993; Hey, 1997; Lamb, 1999; Leadbeater & Way, 1996; Fine & Macpherson, 1992; McRobbie, 1991; Phillips, 2000; Tolman, 2003; Walkerdine, 1997; Way, 1996; Ward, 1996). We know that what it means to be a girl is contested territory. We know that the differential ways power and privilege flow through the social body shape girls’ realities, and that there is no typical girl, not even a typical white girl.

In spite of this research, the “phantasmatic idealization” (Butler, 1991, p. 21) of what a girl is supposed to be seems to have a stranglehold on the cultural imagination. When I saw the Barbie doll-like images that saturated the mean girl coverage, and as I read about the near obsession with indirect forms of aggression, I knew that the target audience was middle class white girls (in fact, the Glenbrook incident received such attention because it alone interrupted the usual story of privileged white girls’ verbal aggression.). This is “symbolic annihilation” (Dines & Humez, 1995): the tendency to ignore certain groups altogether or only to represent them in ways that fit our socially rooted conceptions of them. In this recent story of girls’ meanness, we not only completely erase girls of color but we also symbolically annihilate white girls.

This view of girlfighting as psychological and relational warfare has thus done little to challenge sexist or racist stereotypes. Girls remain firmly and obsessively entrenched in the psychological and relational. Left out of discussions about relational aggression, racist assumptions about girls of color and physical aggression remain unchallenged. Popular books on the issue even seemed to undermine their own attempts to affirm the power of relational aggression to cause girls long-term emotional and psychological damage. Adding pejorative labels like “fruit cup girl” to the lengthy list of dismissive terms adolescent girls already have for one another, even with the best of intentions, only reaffirmed girlfighting as trivial (Wiseman, 2002). When rooting out inevitable girl meanness becomes the singular goal, we risk losing the bigger picture. Let’s catch, label and fix “it” and then what? We’ll have our girls back? And which girls are we talking about? Neither the literature on relational aggression nor the popular accounts of the ways girls enact it on each other address the larger issue of power. Little consideration has been given to the fact that a girls’ social context, the options available to her, and the culture in which she lives will affect how and why she aggresses. No substantive consideration has been given to the fact that the anger that underlies girlfighting might have something to do with oppressive conditions girls experience in their daily lives and that social location affects the nature and degree of these injustices.

I’ve been researching and writing about the complexities of girl’s friendships and girlfighting for the past few years.ⁱ But since my project has come to fruition in the midst of this mean girl media frenzy, I’m faced with the complicated task of both acknowledging girls’ real and justified anger and aggression and the negative horizontal forms it takes and welcoming girls’ public release from “the tyranny of nice and kind” (Brown & Gilligan, 1992). I’m conscious of the marketable temptation to make girls’ treatment of other girls tantalizing or titillating or to contribute to a dangerous “girls will be girls” message. Indeed, as we’ve seen, girlfighting grabs our attention when it takes extreme forms, as it so often does in the media. Because fighting among girls or their adult women counterparts is considered at once shocking, shameful, and funny, it’s laced with eroticism and becomes the fodder of sit-coms, talk-shows, and soap-operas. This is the motivation behind women’s prison movies, various forms of female wrestling, stories about cheerleaders or beauty queens who go awry, soap-opera back-stabbing and Jerry Springer-type “bitch-slapping.” As a white high school girl from rural Maine explained to me: “guys see two girls fighting and think they’re getting passionate and maybe the girls might start kissing and maybe the guys can get in on it.” “Guys invented the concept of jello-wrestling,” her friend agrees, “so that they could watch girls fight.”

In fact, it’s important to appreciate how the culture, from a very early age, sets girls up for such horizontal violence (Friere, 1970/1992). When I ask fifteen-year-old Bahtya, Jewish and middle class from New York City, about why there’s so much in-fighting in her public high school, she says, simply:

It’s the popular thing to do. TV, media, newspapers, it’s like they teach girls you’re supposed to fight. And if anybody had any commonsense in their head, they’d know you don’t have to fight with the girls in school. . . . Like I mean, you watch TV, you watch MTV, you watch anything, and there’s always a fight going on between the popular girls at school. A lot of it is, I mean, you get into a fight and the whole school knows about it. Therefore your popularity goes up. You become more widely known. You’re the girl that’s in the fight with the other girl. It’s like the attention, whether it’s positive or negative. It’s a constant competition or race for attention.

What strikes me about Bahtya’s analysis is how closely entwined media messages and school behavior are for her—how she moves from one to the other without missing a beat. Yet she also doesn’t quite believe the hype; she has “commonsense in [her] head.” Of course socialization is not that simple; “as the imposition of fictional identities…(it) does not work” (Walkerdine, 1990, p. 198). Girls meet these messages with a range of questions, responses, and experiences. But there’s no doubt that the increase in images of girlfighting on TV and in movies contributes to the normalizing of both relational and physical aggression of girls toward other girls. Rarely is there a contemporary TV show or movie for kids of any age with a girl, token or not, who doesn’t physically fight or isn’t verbally tough—that is, if she has any respect or power on the show. The problem is, that while these girls fight over a lot of things, they almost never fight for girls’ rights or against the unfairnesses and injustice or cruelty lobbed at other girls. There is no prevailing counter story of girls’ friendship or loyalty to other girls.

But fighting itself is not the real issue. One can make a strong case for teaching girls how to box or do karate, not only to protect themselves, but so they can experience a full sense of power, physical and mental. Indeed, Simone De Beauvoir, writing fifty years ago, espoused the benefits to fighting that transcended competitive sports which, she argued, “does not provide information on the world and the self as intimately as does a free fight" (1952, p. 330).

...for a man to feel in his fists his will to self-affirmation is enough to reassure him of his sovereignty. Against any insult, any attempt to reduce him to the status of object, the male has recourse to his fists, exposure of himself to blows: he does not let himself be transcended by others, he is himself at the heart of his subjectivity.. . anger or revolt that does not get into the muscles remains a figment of the imagination.... This lack of physical power [in girls] leads to a more general timidity: she has no faith in a force she has not experienced in her body"(De Beauvoir, 1952, p. 331).ⁱⁱ

It’s this sense of power, this refusal to be reduced to the status of object, this desire to be at the heart of her subjectivity, that so often lies behind both girls’ growing participation in sports and an increase in physical and relational fighting. Indeed, Natalie Adams argues that girlfighting is about being somebody (1999) and finds that both cheerleaders and girls who get in trouble at school for fighting use similar discourse to explain their choices. They want to feel powerful, to be visible and to be respected (Adams, 2001). Girls seek that feeling of power within the contexts and possibilities offered to them.

The problem is that the girlfighting girls see in the media is so often about containing other girls, reproducing misogyny, and policing and punishing feminine ideals rather than experiencing subjectivity and freedom of expression. On TV “girly girls” are now the stand-in for conventional femininity. Weak, vapid, and stupid—from the evil head cheerleader in Disney’s Kim Possible and Lizzie McGuire, to The Man Show’s Juggy Squad, to The Thong Song wannabes on MTV, they make good targets and are roundly ridiculed and rejected. Girls who take out other girls for being “too girly” or for being “sluts” “divas” or “bitches,” can prove they are different, worth taking seriously, a force to contend with--no wimps, wusses, or victims here. But of course this is short-lived protection because selling out other girls in this way just continues the same old binaries—good and bad, Madonna and whore, nice and mean—and encourages girls to do the work of policing the borders. This repetition thus serves a particular performative (cultural) purpose (Butler, 1991).

Girls’ anger has a long history of being dismissed (she’s just a bitch, has PMS) and trivialized (“You’re beautiful when you’re angry”), and girlfighting has long been a spectacle, enjoyed for its eroticism as much as its entertainment value. As concerned as I was with the hazing we all watched up-close and personal, I’m just as concerned about who was watching the events unfold on the field, why it was caught on videotape, passed on to cable television, and why it went international. Girlfighting as spectator sport—again. Why, when boys are the perpetrators of 80% of serious violence in the U.S., is this the story that captivates and defines us?ⁱⁱⁱ

I think in the “shock and awe” of it all—and I use this metaphor deliberately, to signify a pyrotechnic spectacle that distracts us, perhaps intentionally, from an underlying moral bankruptcy--we’ve not listened very closely or very well. The principal of the Glenbrook School, for example, would have us think this is just “kids” with “old scores” to settle” (just as those pondering Columbine had us wonder about why “kids” are shooting up schools). That doesn’t tell us enough and worse, it effaces the real issues. This was girls fighting over boyfriends and popularity and the seniors used words like “bitches,” “wimps,” and “sluts” to shame the juniors into staying on the field. It should concern us that girls are fighting other girls in front of video-taping boys, that girls used sexist and misogynistic language to control other girls during and after the event, and that their fights were primarily for boys’ attention and favor.

The real issue is not anger or aggression, but the disconnection of anger from its real source. And this disconnection, at its base, is about power (Brown, 1998; Jack, 1999). As Gregory Maguire, in his novel Wicked reminds us, the so-called Wicked Witches of the world have their own story to tell and it’s by no means a simple tale. Fundamentally, it’s a political story about battling the colonization of girls’ bodies, minds and spirits; a story that varies with social context, with race, class, and sexual orientation. It’s a story about containment and effacement and dismissal that gets acted out horizontally on other girls because this is the safest and easiest outlet for girls’ outrage and frustration. It’s a story about who gets taken seriously and listened to; a story about rage at the machine channeled through ordinary interactions and performed in the everyday spaces girls occupy. And it’s a story about justified anger at a world that devalues girls and encourages them to decontaminate themselves from all things feminine.

The problem, then, is not girls; it’s a culture that denigrates, commodifies, and demoralizes women and gets a kick out of the divide and conquer consequences. I suspect, as does Sharon Lamb (2002), that if we give girls legitimate avenues to power, value their minds as much as their bodies, see their rage as more than “little bits of garbage” (Hey, 1997, p. 51), they’d be less likely to go down those nasty underhanded or openly hostile roads, less likely to take their legitimate rage out on other girls. Let’s stop blocking their paths with the usual sexist, racist and homophobic trash and join them in creating counter-public realities (Fraser, 1993; Weis & Carbonell-Medina, 2000) that open pathways to power and possibility.

References

Adams, N. (1999). Fighting to be somebody: Resisting erasure and the discursive practices of female adolescent fighting. Educational Studies, 30 (2): 115-139.

Adams, N. (2001). Girl power: The discursive practices of female fighters and female cheerleaders. Paper presented at the American Educational Research Association annual conference. Seattle, Washington.

Brown, L.M. (1998). Raising their voices: The politics of girls’ anger. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Brown, L. M. (2003). Girlfighting: Betrayal and rejection among girls. New York: New York University Press.

Brown, L.M. & C. Gilligan. (1992). Meeting at the crossroads: Women’s psychology and girls’ development. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Butler, J. (1991). Imitation and gender insubordination. In D. Fuss (ed.), Inside/Out: Lesbian theories, gay theories. New York: Routledge.

Diamond, L. (2000). Passionate friendships among adolescent sexual minority women. Journal of Research on Adolescence, 10 (2): 191-210.

Dines, G. & Humez, J.M. (Eds.). (1995). Gender, race, and class in media: A text-reader. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.

De Beauvoir, S. (1952). The second sex. New York: Vintage.

Fine, M. and P. Macpherson. (1992). Over dinner: Feminism and adolescent female bodies. In M. Fine (ed.), Disruptive Voices. Albany, NY: SUNY Press.

Fordham, S. (1993). "Those loud black girls": (Black) women, silences, and gender "passing" in the academy. Anthropology and Education Quarterly, 24: 3-32.

Fraser, N. (1993). Rethinking the public sphere. In B. Robbins, ed., The phantom public sphere. Minneapolis: The University of Minnesota Press.

Freire, P. (1970/1992). Pedagogy of the oppressed. New York: The Continuum Publishing
Company.

Hey, V. (1997). The company she keeps: An ethnography of girls’ friendship. Philadelphia: Open University Press.

Jack, D. (1999). Behind the mask: Destruction and creativity in women’s aggression. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Lamb, S. (Ed.). (1999). New versions of victims: Feminist struggles with the concept. New York: New York University Press.

Lamb, S. (2002). The secret lives of girls. New York: The Free Press.

Leadbeater, B. & N. Way (eds.), Urban girls: Resisting stereotypes, creating identities. New York: New York University Press.

Maguire, G. (1995). Wicked: The life and times of the wicked witch of the west. New York: HarperCollins.

McRobbie, A. (1991). Feminism and youth culture: From Jackie to just seventeen. Boston: Unwin Hyman.

Meadows, S, & Johnson, D, (May 19, 2003). Girl Fight: Savagery in the Chicago suburbs. Newsweek, p. 37.

Phillips, L. (2000). Flirting with danger: Young women’s reflections on sexuality and domination. New York: New York University Press.

Simmons, R. (2002). Odd girl out. New York: Harcourt.

Talbot, M. (February 24, 2002). Mean girls and the new movement to tame them. New York Times Magazine: 24-29, 40, 58, 64-65.

Thorne, B. (1993). Gender play: Girls and boys in school. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press.

Tolman, D.L. (2002). Dilemmas of desire. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Walkerdine, V. (1990). Schoolgirl fictions. London: Verso.

Walkerdine, V. (1997). Daddy’s girl. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Ward, J. (1996). Raising resisters: The role of truth-telling in the psychological development of African-American girls. In B. Leadbeater and N. Way (eds.), Urban girls: Resisting stereotypes, creating identites. New York: New York University Press.

Way, N. (1995). “Can’t you see the courage, the strength that I have?” Listening to urban adolescent girls speak about their relationships. Psychology of Women Quqrterly, 19: 107-128.

Weis, L. and D. Carbonell-Medina. (2000). Learning to speak out in an abstinence based sex education group: Gender and race work in an urban magnet school. Teachers College Record, 120 (3): 620-250.

Wiseman, R. (2002). Queen bees and wannabees. New York: Crown.

ⁱⁱThanks to Natalie Adams for referring me to this passage.

ⁱⁱⁱThanks to Meda Cheney Linn for an earlier conversation about this issue.

Hazing and the Making of Men
Elizabeth J. Allan, Ph.D.
University of Maine
Orono, Maine

“Hazing” refers to any activity expected of someone joining a group (or to maintain full status in a group) that humiliates, degrades or risks emotional and/or physical harm, regardless of the person’s willingness to participate.  In years past, hazing practices were typically considered harmless pranks or comical antics associated with young men in college fraternities.  Today we know that hazing extends far beyond college fraternities and is experienced by boys/men and girls/women in school groups, university organizations, athletic teams, military, and other social and professional organizations, causing emotional and physical harm and even death.  Hazing practices are shaped by power dynamics operating in a group and/or organization within a particular cultural context.  As such, hazing also reflects societal norms and expectations around gender, and masculinity, in particular.

Historical Overview

Behavior that would meet today’s definition of hazing has been documented among male educational and military groups for centuries.  The term “hazing” however was not commonly used in the United States until the Civil War period when it emerged as a descriptor of initiation jokes played on newcomers to the ranks of the military.  After the Civil War, the term “hazing” was used to describe practices of initiating new students to the university and maintaining order within the established hierarchy between classes of students (i.e. upperclassmen vs. freshmen).  Such activities typically included expectations of personal servitude and other displays of subordination to students in the upper ranks.  Occasionally however, hazing involved what was termed “disorderly conduct” and sometimes escalated into physical brawls causing serious injuries and even fatalities (Nuwer 1999).

Hazing practices today continue to reflect the masculine historical roots of military units and universities.  However, documentation of hazing in high schools, organized athletics, as well as professional groups like police academies and firefighting units has grown considerably.  Over the last century, and especially the last three decades, awareness and concern about the dangers of hazing has increased, marked for example by its inclusion in many school and university codes of student conduct.  Since the 1970s there has been at least one student fatality each year involving hazing (Nuwer 1999, 237).  Such tragedies often led to increased public scrutiny and sometimes resulted in the passage of statutory legislation rendering hazing a criminal act.  Today in the United States, forty-four states have enacted anti-hazing laws that vary widely in scope and consequence but are typically restricted to behavior occurring in educational arenas.

Hazing activities are generally considered to be:  physically abusive, hazardous, and/or sexually violating.  The specific behaviors or activities within these categories vary widely among participants, groups and settings.  Alcohol use is common in nearly all types of hazing. Other examples of typical hazing practices include: personal servitude; sleep deprivation and restrictions on personal hygiene; yelling, swearing and insulting new members/rookies; being forced to wear embarrassing or humiliating attire in public; consumption of vile substances or smearing of such on one’s skin; brandings; physical beatings; binge drinking and drinking games; sexual simulation and sexual assault.

Research on Hazing

Empirical research on hazing is scarce, and to date, there has been no systematic investigation examining the role of gender in hazing.   The most recent and extensive studies have focused on hazing for male and female high school students and intercollegiate athletes. Results of these studies indicated that 48 percent of high school student group members reported being subjected to hazing (Alfred 2000) and 79 percent of NCAA athlete respondents reported experiencing one or more typical hazing behaviors as part of team initiations (Alfred 1999).  National news accounts of hazing and anecdotal evidence point toward gender differences in hazing activities.  In general, a common conclusion drawn is that hazing among men is more likely to be violent in nature and hazing among women is more likely to be psychological/emotional in nature.  Such perspectives align with and also reinforce predominant understandings of differences between the genders.  The results of the Alfred/NCAA study, revealed differences between types of hazing experienced by male and female athletes.  Notably, women were less likely than men to be subjected to unacceptable acts including:  destroying or stealing property, beatings, being tied up or taped, confined to small places, paddled, kidnapped or transported and abandoned (Alfred University 1999).  This finding supports the assertion that sex/gender differences in hazing experiences do exist.  For some, this distinction is simply attributed to innate biological differences between the sexes.  Others however draw on a social constructionist perspective to argue that these differences are largely the result of learning to perform gender roles differently (Allan forthcoming).

Several ethnographic and journalistic accounts of fraternity life (Nuwer 1990, 1999) and athletics (Robinson 1998) provide some insights about hazing practices.  A number of these examinations rely substantially on theories of gender, sexism and homophobia to explain aspects of all-male groups that increase the probability of violence against women who come in contact with these groups (Martin 1989, Rhoads 1995).  While hazing practices may take many forms largely influenced by the participants, group and setting; some common characteristics can be identified and understood in relation to predominant masculinity as practiced in contemporary European and North American society.  For instance, when hazing occurs among men, regardless of the type of group, it is often framed as a test of “strength,” “courage,” and “determination.”

Masculinity: “Weeding Out the Unworthy”

How men and women are taught to live in the world affects patterns of violence, abuse and other behaviors involved in hazing practices.  Regardless of race and socio-economic status, accounts of hazing incidents among boys and men often include tests of physical endurance, forced/coerced alcohol consumption, paddling and other forms of physical assaults/beatings.  A common rationale in support of hazing is that it is a “tradition” necessary to “weed out” those unworthy of membership.

Research on fraternity cultures and male athletic teams reveals an emphasis on hypermasculinity:  physical and mental toughness, endurance of pain and humiliation, obedience to superiors and the use of physical force and coercion to obtain compliance (Martin 1989, Messner and Sabo 1994).  Gender theory provides a framework for understanding the ways in which hazing is both shaped by and contributes to shaping notions of masculinity and manhood.  Some men who have been hazed are firm believers in the abuses endured through the process of hazing and insist they “enjoyed the challenge.”  Such arguments are embedded in predominant cultural performances of masculinity and what boys are taught to expect of themselves and others as “real men.” Likewise, social anxieties around masculinity also sustain hazing practices.  The more boys/men are fearful of being labeled as weak—the more likely they are to participate in hazing activities that are dangerous and even life-threatening.  A chronology of hazing fatalities reveals that men are far more likely to die from hazing activities than are women.  Of more than sixty documented hazing deaths, only three have been women (Nuwer 1999, 237). 

Gendered practices of hazing are supported by the role homophobia plays in reinforcing rigid and confining expectations of masculine and feminine behavior.  This dynamic is evidenced when for instance high school students to think about what happens if a man is a little bit too nurturing or a bit too emotional and they are quick to respond, “he’s a sissy,” “he’s a fag.”  Women who cross the line of normative expectations for femininity face similar social consequences of being called “butch” or “dyke.”  These terms are unlikely to serve as deterrents unless they are perceived negatively, and homophobia ensures this.  Thus, the predominant social construction of masculinity, and homophobia, work in tandem to create a climate in which violent and demeaning hazing practices are more likely to be tolerated and even considered beneficial for young men (Allan forthcoming)

Understanding masculinity as a dynamic process of “doing” gender helps to illuminate why the eradication of hazing practices can be difficult.  Since hazing can serve as an opportunity for men to prove their masculinity (and heterosexuality), the elimination of hazing traditions can be threatening on multiple fronts.  Exit costs for leaving a hazing organization increase because young men may lose a major part of their identity by severing ties with the organization. Further, when hazing is so closely tied to the performance of masculinity, those who identify with predominant cultural constructions of masculinity, are likely to fear their manhood will be called into question if they resist an opportunity to prove their masculinity via hazing practices.  This also explains, at least in part, why some pledges, rookies and new members of organizations will ask to be hazed even if the group is attempting to eradicate such traditions.  Newcomers know they are likely to be subject to scrutiny by members who have proven their manhood through hazing.  Such scrutiny is not entirely external—but also self-imposed—as many boys/men have been taught to think of manhood in terms of physical prowess/strength, toughness and conquest. 

Increasingly, reports of hazing among boys/men include acts of sexual victimization.  While reports of hazing have increased over the past decade, the humiliation and degradation, along with the threat of group retaliation, continue to make it exceedingly difficult for many to report such abuses.  To date, efforts to curtail harmful hazing have emphasized legal and policy remedies.  Educational and programmatic efforts are mounting, however, such efforts are rarely grounded in perspectives linking the performance of gender to the development and maintenance of abusive hazing practices.  Making masculinity visible is crucial to further understanding hazing and developing effective prevention strategies. 

References and further reading

Portions of this essay are provided in: Allan, E. J. (2003). Hazing in High School and College & Allan, E. J. (2003). Athletic Team Hazing. In Kimmel, M. & Aronson, A. (Eds.). Men and Masculinities: A Social, Cultural and Historical Encyclopedia. Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO.

Alfred University. 1999.  “Initiation Rites and Athletics for NCAA Sports Teams:  A National Survey.” http://www.alfred.edu/news/html/hazing.

______.  2000.  Initiation Rites in American High Schools:  A National Survey.”  http://www.alfred.edu/news/html/hazing_study.html.

Allan, Elizabeth J. forthcoming.  “Hazing and Gender: Analyzing the Obvious.”  in Examining Hazing.  Edited by Hank Nuwer.  Indiana University Press.

Martin, Patricia Y. 1989.  “Fraternities and rape on campus.”  Gender and Society.  3, no. 4:  457-473. 

Messner, Michael A. and Donald F. Sabo.  1989. Sex, Violence and Power in Sports.  Freedom, CA:  The Crossing Press.

Nuwer, Hank.  1990.  Broken Pledges:  The Deadly Rite of Hazing.  Atlanta, GA:  Longstreet Press.

_____. 1999.  Wrongs of Passage:  Fraternities, Sororities, Hazing and Binge Drinking:  Indiana University Press.

_____.  2000.  High school hazing:  When Rites Become Wrongs.  New York:  Grolier Publishing.

Rhoads, Robert A. 1995.  “Whales Tales, Dog Piles, and Beer Goggles:  An Ethnographic Study of Fraternity Life.”  Anthropology and Education Quarterly.  26, no. 3:  306-323.

Robinson, Laura.  1998.  Crossing the Line:  Violence and Sexual Assault in Canada’s National Sport.  Toronto, Canada:  McClelland and Stewart.

StopHazing.org.  http://www.stophazing.org.