Excerpt from High School Hazing
by Hank Nuwer

Initiations used to consist of putting on silly clothing, wearing garish makeup, sporting handmade signs, or doing errands. For example, new members of the Future Farmers of America (FFA), a national organization in many schools where students have a farming background, sometimes have to wear a drawing of a green hand around the neck to show new-convert status. (The national FFA prohibits hazing).

In another example, a rookie football player in New York state was taped head to foot. Increasingly, however, these stories of non-criminal hazing have been replaced by acts most observers would regard as cruel and dangerous.

At this time, unlike the most severe college hazing incidents, high school hazing is rarely deadly. However, a number of close calls lately have made educators afraid that high school initiations could evolve into deadlier forms. This has led to increased efforts to make junior high and high school students aware of potential dangers.

Hazing at the high school level sometimes involves dangerous alcohol consumption, paddlings, or savage beatings—which could easily cause permanent injury or death. Forty-one states with antihazing laws now ban these activities as criminal hazing, though some states such as Virginia require proof of physical injury before police officers can make an arrest. In 2000, Vermont is taking testimony to decide whether to join the other forty-one states and pass antihazing legislation.

THE NEED TO BE ACCEPTED

What is the purpose of hazing? Remember that all groups need to induct new members or risk dying out. Hazing reassures senior members that the new people value membership in the group. Members willing to gain acceptance through hazing may be logically a little less likely to change the old organization the senior members know and love.

In fact, a new group member who refuses to accept hazing is usually (although unfairly) considered a deviant, according to researchers in group behavior. And through the socialization process students go through in the elementary grades, they grow increasingly less likely to intervene to help someone else in a crisis situation—particularly if group members are picking on a single individual. Studies have also shown this to be the case when police officers in a group can’t seem to stop beating someone.

Furthermore, new people who refuse to be initiated—even if they find the activity repulsive—often feel uncomfortable, seeing themselves as abnormal. It may be hard for a high school administrator or parent to understand why this is so, but people have a need to be accepted and valued by their peers. "All of us are very hungry for that sort of thing," said group psychologist Irving L. Janis in an interview with the author before Janis’s death.

People outside a group—having no need to belong—may find it hard to understand why newcomers to a group crave acceptance from insiders to such a degree. The urge to belong is powerful. In high schools where popularity is particularly valued, there should be little surprise that nonmembers might envy the status members possess. "If I can only join this group," the newcomer things, "then others will envy me."

A CLIMATE WHERE HAZING FLOURISHES

Why does hazing flourish in so many high schools? It may have something to do with the fundamental drawbacks of the U.S. educational system, which is charged with serving the needs of a great many young people.

Some social critics see inevitable clashes in high schools, where the values of thoughtful individuals—students and teachers—collide with the values, or lack of them, in a mass-market culture.

Edgar Friedenberg, author of Coming of Age in America, writes that adolescence is a rich time full of opportunity, when teenagers should celebrate their uniqueness. Instead, many high schools act as an extension of the larger "manipulative mass culture," which can blot out originality in young people.

From High School Hazing by Hank Nuwer (Watts, March 2000). All rights reserved