Hazing Claiming Younger Victims

Oct. 17, 2003 -- Eileen Stevens didn't know any of the boys allegedly victimized in a high school football hazing incident this summer, but she still took it personally.

Stevens, of Sayville, N.Y., has spent most of the 25 years since her son, Chuck Stenzel, died in a sports fraternity hazing fighting to bring an end to the practice.

Though she has retired from the activist role she took on after Chuck's death, she couldn't help following the case this summer, in which three athletes from Mepham High School in Bellmore, N.Y., who were attending a summer football camp in Preston Park, Pa., allegedly used broom handles, pine cones and other objects to sodomize younger team members.

"It's disheartening and I'm discouraged," Stevens said of the alleged incident.

One frigid, snowy night in February 1978, her son, a student at Alfred University in upstate New York who was joining an athletic fraternity, died after he was dragged from his bed, locked in the trunk of a car and told to consume a pint of whisky, a six-pack of beer and a bottle of wine before he would be let out, then forced to consume more alcohol at a fraternity party.

When he finally passed out, he was dumped on a bed in the frat house and left. While the party went on, Chuck stopped breathing.

She knew she couldn't bring Chuck back, but she wanted something good to come out of his death so she devoted the next 22 years to what began as virtually a one-woman campaign to end hazing. Her activism helped to get laws passed in 38 states and to convince countless schools, fraternities and sororities to adopt anti-hazing programs.

But the practice of using physical abuse as an initiation goes on, too often with damaging or tragic results.

In the case this summer, three boys, ages 15, 16 and 17 at the time of the incident, face a long list of juvenile court charges, including involuntary deviate sexual intercourse, kidnapping, aggravated assault, unlawful restraint and false imprisonment. Prosecutors have asked that they be allowed to file adult charges against the youths.

Though there are few hard statistics, researchers say there seems to have been an increase in hazing at the high school level, even as — at least in part thanks to Stevens' efforts — the practice has become less common in college fraternities and sororities.

Hank Nuwer, who has written four books on hazing, tracks hazing cases around the country and he has recorded an increase in reported cases involving high school students over the last several years. Though the Pennsylvania case is horrific, if the allegations are true, there are other cases Nuwer has recorded that are similar.

And boys or young men are not the only ones involved.

Last spring in a Chicago suburb, high school junior girls were beaten and pelted with rotten food and other filth by senior girls. Five girls wound up in the hospital as a result of the abuse.

"We are finding an increase in hazing events among girls and women, and a lot of the tactics are becoming increasingly brutal," said Richard Sigal, a professor of sociology at County College of Morris, in Randolph, N.J., who has studied hazing since Chuck Stenzel's death.

One thing that seems not to have changed since 1978, though, is the reluctance of people to talk about hazing incidents.

Stevens said she was shocked when she went to Alfred to find out about her son's death, because almost no one — not even two other boys who were injured in the incident or their families — wanted to talk about what had happened.

In the case involving the Long Island high school athletes, prosecutors criticized the school's adminstrators and coaches, saying they were not doing enough to assist in the investigation. Instead of anger at the school administrators or the coaches, community members at a school meeting last week praised how the incident has been handled.

Stevens called it a code of silence, and scholars who have spent their lives studying hazing say some of that is due to the psychology of groups and some of it, when the hazing involves boys or young men, is because of attitudes about what it means to be a man.

"There is a lot of pressure on males to be tough, stiff upper lip — a lot of people still believe that," Sigal said. "They want boys to take the pain and shut up about it. The attitude is what happens on the bus stays on the bus. You don't tell anybody outside the organization."

Hazing is an extreme form of initiation, which is expected to create a stronger bond between members. Many of the practices include tests of trust, such as having initiates blindfolded and having them walk or run on the orders of other members of the team or group.

Perhaps surprisingly, even the more brutal practices can create a closer bond, particularly among the new members who go through the experience together.

Jared Howe told ABCNEWS that he went through hazing when he joined a fraternity at DePauw University, but once he became an "active," he and others decided to put an end to things such as "line-ups," in which pledges were verbally abused and demeaned, he said the spirit in the fraternity declined.

"Hazing, having to endure trials and tribulations thrown to us by the active members, showed us that we had to work hard to become a member of the house," he said.

(To read Jared Howe's story, click here.)

Nuwer said his research indicates that the bonding that is achieved through physical or mental abuse can be achieved without putting people at risk.

"All the psychologists I've talked to — even all the anti-hazing people I've talked to — assert that there is bonding, but they say there can be rituals carried out in positive ways that create the same kind of bonding without victimizing the initiates," he said.

In many cases, the abuse has the effect of driving people out of the group altogether. "Charles," a man who attended a Midwestern university and asked that his real name not be used, said that after he underwent a hazing that included having the fraternity's letters burned into his chest, he immediately quit the fraternity.

(To read "Charles'" story, click here.)

A man who went to a Midwestern engineering school who asked that ABCNEWS identify him only as "J." said that when he tried to change the hazing practices at the fraternity where he had gone through an initiation that included sleep deprivation, verbal abuse and beatings, he was kicked out and the national organization paid no attention to his allegations.

(To read J.'s story, click here.)

For some, the bond created by the abuse may be not as strong as the desire to make sure that someone else goes through the same thing that you went through.

"For a while it did seem to cause a deep bond of friendship to form between my linebrothers, but it did not truly last," Dominique Hill said of his hazing experience. "The only true result of the hazing was that we wanted to haze someone else and make them feel as we did while we were hazed. It really has nothing to do with brotherhood/sisterhood, but making sure someone else is humiliated as you were."

Schools need to demonstrate that they will not tolerate abusive initiation rites, and encourage positive rituals that psychologists say will promote the same kind of bonding as the violence and abuse, experts say.

But the programs need to start early.

"I think maybe by high school it's too late," Nuwer said.