Hazing has been a tradition among friends for years, especially with guys, especially with sports teams. I’ve heard of stories of teammates hazing each other starting in high school and going all the way to the Major Leagues. But for years hazing your teammates was pretty harmless. The rookie or the freshmen, whoever the new guy is, would be told to carry someone’s bags or told to fetch food for the seniors at lunch. I was never on a team that did hazing but I remember my youth group did something of the sort back when I was in high school.
There were several years in a row when my youth group went to the same camp every year. The beds in each person’s room had a board in them that would hold the mattress up. But you could remove the board and put the mattress back and the mattress would still stay up so that it would seem the board was still there when it wasn’t. Whenever one of our friends came to the camp for the first time we would ask them to do something to distract them then while they were gone we’d remove the board in their bed. When they returned they would sit on their bed and fall through it. Like I said before it’s a harmless little hazing. The victim falls like a foot to the ground and lands on a soft mattress. But some of the hazing that goes on today has gotten increasingly dangerous and really stupid.
I heard one story in particular earlier today that made me think to write this article but I wanted to get more details on what happened so I searched Google news for stories on school hazing, what I found was about fifty stories on school hazing just in the last week alone. In all Google news gave me 26 pages of results with 10 results on each page which means I got 260 results. Those news items only went back to September 15th which means there has been 260 news items on school hazing in just the last month. Surely some of those articles were repeat articles and some might have just mentioned school hazing without having a big story about it, but you get the picture, there is a lot of school hazing going on. The thing is, none of the stories are about a senior making a freshmen carry their bags or throwing away their trash, none of those stories are severe enough to report. In all of these instances the hazing was severe enough that someone was either injured or punished.
The school hazing that caught my attention occurred earlier this week in Alberton, Montana. Alberton High School’s football team was on a trip in their school bus when they decided to perform some hazing on one of their players. They then proceeded to tape one student to the ceiling of the school bus! The bus driver and chaperones were on the bus when it took place and apparently didn’t think there was anything wrong with taping this boy to the ceiling because they let it happen. When they returned to the school nobody other than the people on the bus knew about the incident. None of the kids were going to go and tell anybody what they had done, the kid who got taped to the ceiling was too embarrassed to say anything and even the bus driver and chaperones didn’t think anybody needed to know what happened.
Fortunately, whenever there is hazing there has to be a camera to document the event. One girl took pictures of the boy that was taped to the ceiling and a week later her parents found the pictures. The parents took the pictures to the school and reported what had happened. All the players involved in the incident were sent to in-school suspension and the entire football season was cancelled. The Alberton school district’s attorney says she expects a criminal investigation as well.
In Pittsfield Maine five girls were found bound and gagged and had bruises and scrapes all over them after another hazing incident. In Madison, Wisconsin a hazing ritual required for the victim to shave his head while other members of the band dance nude around him, there is also alcohol involved, like that’s a big surprise. In Palm Desert, California a water polo team strapped one kid to the backboard of a stretcher than put a condom over his head and mocked him, all of this was done with a JV Coach watching.
I know that high school kids can have some…’creative” ideas, after all there was one point in high school where I had some pretty “creative” thoughts. Once I thought about inventing Pool Pool, a pool table that floats in a swimming pool. Another idea I had was to build an escalator that had recliners so your trip would be more comfortable. But who is the kid who says to his friend “hey man I’ve got a great idea, on our trip this week let’s tape someone to the ceiling of the bus!” I’m sure his friend replied with something like, “That’s a great idea! Way better than last week when we slipped arsenic into that guy’s Gatorade or the time we made that one kid wear a bee hive as his football helmet.” And who in the world are these adults who think its ok to tape people to the ceiling of the bus? Maybe the bus driver and two coaches are all vampires and they think it’s natural to hang from ceiling, I don’t know.
In a recent national study on hazing by New York’s Alfred University they defined hazing as “any humiliating or dangerous activity expected of you to join a group, regardless of your willingness to participate. Forty-eight percent of the students who belonged to an organized school group said that they had experienced some form of hazing. Forty-three percent said they were subjected to some embarrassing or humiliating action and thirty percent said they were forced to do an illegal action.
Kids do some stupid things, some cheat on tests, some choose their friends based on what kind of clothes they wear, some act up in class but I don’t think this kind of extreme behavior can be chalked up to “kids being kids. These kinds of hazings should have great punishments. Players should be suspended and football, water polo or band seasons should be cancelled. Maybe it’s not fair to the kids who weren’t involved in the hazing but at least they’ll learn it’s wrong and the hazers will just have to live with being known as the ones that cost them the season. Also any coach who sees such things happening and allows it should be fired on the spot. These extreme hazings have go be stopped. What ever happened to the good old fashioned wedgie?
