WHEN HAZING CANNOT BE STOPPED BY LAW ALONE
How to make a deadly tradition unnecessary, difficult to hide and impossible to romanticize
By Karl M. Garcia
Every time a young Filipino dies or is seriously injured because of hazing, the country goes through a familiar cycle.
There is outrage.
There are investigations.
Schools suspend organizations. Police investigate. Officials promise tougher enforcement. Calls are made for stricter laws.
Then, eventually, the attention fades.
Until the next victim.
The uncomfortable lesson is that hazing is not simply a legal problem. It is a cultural and institutional problem.
That matters because if hazing were merely a matter of insufficient penalties, decades of prohibition should have solved it.
They have not.
The Philippines already has a strong legal framework against hazing, strengthened after earlier tragedies. Yet laws cannot physically prevent a group of people from deciding to conduct a secret initiation somewhere beyond immediate institutional supervision.
Nor can a law by itself eliminate the psychology behind hazing:
We suffered through it, so you should too.
That is the chain that has to be broken.
Hazing is older than the Philippines
Hazing is not uniquely Filipino.
Forms of dangerous initiation have appeared in fraternities, universities, military organizations, sports teams and other hierarchical groups in different countries and periods.
The underlying attraction is remarkably consistent.
Groups want to create solidarity.
Older members want to test newcomers.
New members want to prove commitment.
The organization develops rituals that distinguish insiders from outsiders.
There is nothing inherently wrong with initiation.
The problem begins when belonging is measured by how much humiliation or pain a newcomer can endure.
A difficult task can build competence.
A demanding exercise can build teamwork.
A shared service project can build solidarity.
Hazing is different.
It is fundamentally about power.
The senior member has the power to impose suffering. The junior member is expected to accept it as the price of admission.
Once that becomes tradition, each generation can reproduce the behavior without asking whether the tradition itself makes sense.
The Filipino version is reinforced by silence
The Philippine setting adds another complication.
Fraternities, school organizations, professional networks and alumni associations can create lifelong bonds.
These networks can be good things.
They provide friendship, mentoring, professional connections and a sense of community.
But strong networks can also make accountability difficult.
A student may hesitate to report an older member.
A witness may fear being ostracized.
A junior officer may fear retaliation.
An administrator may worry about damaging the school’s reputation.
An alumnus may instinctively defend the organization he joined decades earlier.
And a victim may be told, explicitly or implicitly, that reporting the abuse means betraying his brothers.
This creates the environment hazing needs most:
secrecy.
The people involved know what happened. The people outside the organization do not.
Until somebody ends up in a hospital—or a morgue.
The wrong question is: How do we make hazing impossible?
We probably cannot.
There will always be individuals willing to break rules.
The more realistic objective is therefore:
How do we make hazing unnecessary, difficult to conceal, costly to organize and socially unacceptable?
That requires changing the system around it.
First, institutions must distinguish between initiation and hazing.
An organization should be allowed to create meaningful traditions.
But initiation should demonstrate competence, commitment and teamwork—not obedience to abuse.
A fraternity can require new members to complete community service.
A student organization can conduct a demanding team project.
A military or police organization can impose rigorous but professionally designed physical and mental training.
A professional association can require examinations, skills demonstrations or public-service activities.
The message should change from:
“Prove that you can suffer.”
to:
“Prove that you can contribute.”
Make legitimate initiation visible
Secret initiation creates an accountability gap.
Schools and other institutions should therefore know when recognized organizations are conducting initiation activities.
They should know the organizers, location, schedule, participants and responsible senior members.
This does not require turning every student organization into a bureaucratic operation.
It simply creates an institutional footprint.
If an activity is legitimate, there should be little reason to conceal its existence.
And if an organization insists that its initiation must remain completely secret, that secrecy should itself be treated as a warning sign.
The objective is not to monitor every student.
It is to prevent organizations from disappearing from institutional responsibility precisely when the greatest risks arise.
Protect the person who says no
This may be the most important reform of all.
A student must be able to refuse an activity without losing his place in the organization.
A recruit must be able to leave without being threatened.
A witness must be able to report without becoming the next target.
There should be confidential and independent reporting mechanisms—not merely a senior member’s telephone number.
There should also be a clear way to remove someone from a dangerous situation immediately.
Because the true test of an anti-hazing system is not what happens after someone dies.
It is whether a frightened eighteen-year-old can say:
“I don’t want to do this.”
—and know that somebody will protect him.
Senior members cannot hide behind junior members
Another weakness in hazing cases is plausible deniability.
The actual assault may be committed by several junior members while older leaders claim they did not know.
Sometimes they genuinely did not know.
But where leaders knew, encouraged, facilitated or deliberately ignored hazing, responsibility should follow the hierarchy.
Leadership cannot mean authority when things go well and helplessness when things go wrong.
Organizations should establish clear responsibility for initiation activities.
Senior members should have a duty to prevent prohibited conduct.
And institutions should examine organizational history rather than treating every incident as an isolated act by a few bad individuals.
If the same organization repeatedly produces hazing incidents, something more than individual misconduct is happening.
There is a system problem.
Punish the behavior—but don’t stop there
Punishment remains necessary.
Serious injury and death must have serious consequences.
Organizations that repeatedly tolerate hazing should also risk losing recognition, access to facilities, recruitment privileges or institutional support.
But punishment alone has limits.
If all we do is increase penalties, we may simply encourage better concealment.
The smarter approach is to alter the incentives.
Make safe organizations easier to operate.
Make dangerous organizations harder to sustain.
Make reporting safer.
Make concealment riskier.
Make responsible leaders accountable.
And give organizations legitimate alternatives to hazing.
The military and police deserve special attention
This distinction is particularly important in organizations built around hierarchy and discipline.
Military and police institutions require discipline.
They require physical courage.
They require the ability to function under stress.
But hazing is not discipline.
Discipline serves a mission.
Hazing serves a hierarchy.
A recruit can be physically exhausted through legitimate training without being humiliated.
A cadet can be tested without being abused.
A new police officer can be taught resilience without being subjected to illegal punishment.
Indeed, professional organizations should be especially resistant to hazing because they are supposed to teach controlled behavior under pressure.
The lesson should be:
strength means control, not the ability to inflict pain.
Alumni can break the cycle
Perhaps the most underused force against hazing is the alumni community.
Many organizations have generations of former members who possess enormous influence over current members.
They can either preserve the tradition or terminate it.
An alumnus who says, “We went through it, so you must go through it,” perpetuates the cycle.
An alumnus who says, “We went through it, and we were wrong to pass it on,” can help end it.
That second message needs to become respectable.
There should be no embarrassment in admitting that an old tradition was wrong.
Traditions are not sacred simply because they are old.
Some traditions deserve preservation.
Others deserve retirement.
Hazing belongs in the second category.
The deeper cultural change
Ultimately, the problem is not merely the act of physical abuse.
It is the idea that suffering creates legitimacy.
A member who has endured humiliation may feel that the experience gave his membership greater value.
But that creates a dangerous psychological trap.
If suffering becomes the proof of belonging, those who suffered yesterday may feel entitled to make others suffer tomorrow.
The cycle becomes self-justifying.
The alternative is to create organizations where members earn respect through contribution.
Let the new member build something.
Serve the community.
Learn a difficult skill.
Complete a demanding project.
Help another member.
Pass a professional standard.
Respond to an emergency.
Lead a team.
Then the organization can say:
You belong because you have demonstrated what you can do—not because you survived what we did to you.
That is a much healthier basis for brotherhood.
Can hazing actually be stopped?
Perhaps not completely.
No society eliminates every form of abuse simply by passing a law.
But that is the wrong standard.
We have not eliminated every drunk driver, but we have made drunk driving less socially acceptable and more difficult.
We have not eliminated corruption, but we build systems designed to detect and punish it.
We have not eliminated violence, but we do not conclude that prevention is therefore pointless.
Hazing should be treated the same way.
The goal is not to promise a magical zero.
The goal is to make the practice rare, risky, unnecessary and shameful rather than prestigious.
That requires more than another law.
It requires institutions that know what their organizations are doing.
It requires students who know they can walk away.
It requires leaders who cannot escape responsibility.
It requires alumni willing to end traditions they once accepted.
And it requires a cultural redefinition of what initiation means.
The strongest fraternity is not the one whose members can inflict the most pain.
The strongest organization is the one capable of building loyalty without violence.
If we can make that the new standard, hazing may never disappear completely.
But it can lose the thing that has allowed it to survive for generations:
the belief that it is necessary.
In university I pledged for a prominent Greek fraternity. My time as a pledge ended when I beat up a few senior brothers when they tried to separate me from and rape my female friends (who they had asked me to bring). Never again.
One must understand that records of hazing go all the way back to Ancient Greece. But the behavior of in-group dominance and imposition of hierarchy is a human tendency that exists long before, probably to the days our primitive relatives roaming the African savannas started to form tribal structures.
The primary reason for hazing is not as an “initiation ritual” as romanticized, but as a tool of control. Coercive asymmetry establishes a clear power imbalance that forces submission to senior members. Allegiance is built by cognitive dissonance in which every coercive action overvalues the group’s importance, leading to justification of the suffering “needed” to join the group. Individual identities are broken down by shared trauma over the abuse, creating collective bonds with peers to endure the threat. Once pledges become full associates, they demand that the next cohort of pledges face the same abuse they survived.
Not sure if such structures whose only purpose is control over the individual can ever be reformed.
Thanks for sharing. Sorry for trigerrong bad memories.
I think it also needs to be said that Greek fraternities started off as literary or scholarly societies in American universities. Initiation was by invite only, not by general recruitment. The primary focus was intellectualism and debate, like academic honor societies today.
The influx of war veterans from 4 specific periods, who often suffered from war-related PTSD and used their military training to enforce the hierarchy they were used to, shaping the modern Greek fraternity including hazing rituals:
1. US Civil War
2. World War I
3. World War II
4. Vietnam War
For example, Civil War veterans introduced the “Hell Week” of hazing pledges through physical discipline, beatings, mock kidnapping. WWI and WWII veterans began structuring Hell Week into a sort of boot camp; stripping pledges naked, sleep deprivation, forced physical activity, and exposure to extreme elements seemed to them trivial compared to the trauma of war. Vietnam veterans who often had PTSD-related alcohol and drug abuse as a coping mechanism introduced the modern drinking as a hazing ritual and abusing underclassmen as a form of entertainment for associates and senior members.
Interestingly, while mild hazing had existed in the US military (and the history of other Western militaries), the US military recognized that abuse by seniors of their juniors degraded combat readiness, eroded unit morale, and most importantly, destroyed trust within units. Therefore the US Military starting in 1950 under the Uniform Code of Military Justice (UCMJ) banned hazing and introduced reforms that had severe repercussions for senior members who abused the juniors entrusted to them, while building group cohesion through mission-linked shared challenges rather than arbitrary abuse. An important US Military reform was also to teach sergeants and officers to be mentor-leaders to be respected rather than feared, with punishments only being meted out under clear rules.
Fraternities, having been modeled after Freemasonry, are collections of decentralized chapters so they only selectively absorbed from the military (the abuse part) while keeping the in-group aspects of their socially elite origin intact. After all, fraternities are fundamentally organizations of social and in-group status. Which is why alumni of such groups form networks after graduating and help each other despite being from different chapters.
initiation in the army can be just as brutal, phil military academy in bagyo boasts some of the most unforgettable ones.
it can be very lonely for a newbie in the academia with no friends, no buddy, no one to share jokes with, and the library can only offer cold shoulders. newbies longed to be accepted, to be liked, their belonging needs trump all others that logic takes a hike. in highschool and being seniors they were top of the food chain, but their world suddenly turned upside down when they enter the academia, finding themselves ill prepared and helpless at the bottom of the pecking order.
the brave ones dared and joined frats, entered into initiation rites, not hazing but bonding exercise that look like hazing, feel like hazing, profiles like hazing, but is bonding, nevertheless.
medical students once played a bonding scenario as part of their studies. and knew there is a way round to bonding and how best to survive one. some suggested to pre-medicate the initiate with anti inflam similar to what is given to post operative patients that suppresses the body’s responses to blunt force trauma, mainly the swelling of traumatize tissue to nearly twice to thrice their normal size. the swelling apparently mimic transient ischemic attack, compressing or squeezing blood vessel that cause impediment to blood circulation. thus starving the tissue and ultimately the brain of much needed oxygen. and death could well follow.
if the body is given premed like prednisolone, it can enter the system within an hour at most, and stays in the system for roughly four hrs, then it degrades and leaves the body. the initiate can then ward off much of the effects of swelling and maybe bruises kept to the minimum too. contraindication is if the initiate is allergic to anti inflam, if not, well and good.
and where is the ethics there? medical students demurred and said they were saving lives. anyhow, that is what they do to people apparently badly injured in motor vehicular accidents, give them anti inflam immediately to ward off the unwanted side effects of swelling and thus save them from dying on the spot.
Maybe it’s just my attitude towards rigid hierarchy, but I find the euphemisms of “cherished traditions” and “reception rites” to just be excuses for abuse. Early on my first Cebuano friends described me as “supakero” — if there is willful injustice, it must be opposed. Organizations built on trust and mentorship are far stronger than ones built on fear and blind obedience. One can look at the vast difference between the Ukrainian and Russian militaries as to how both had common origins but the former reformed while the latter did not, and what effects that had on organizational effectiveness. I am astounded every time I visit Ukraine about how much their military and society progressed even under the threat of war.
thanks po. the hierarchy I know protect and supports its member sometimes to the extend of foregoing accountability. members are believed, nurtured and given assistance. when in trouble and when members are convicted, they are not forgotten and still cherished up to a point. look at our stupid senator bato, gone awol and hiding and still very much protected by the heirarchies of the undesirables and the underbellies. our ombudsman remulla urged bato to surrender to authorities, or there will be blood shed, like bato cares!
I love our tradition like wearing bridal whites on wedding, even though money is hard to come by. marriage is once in a lifetime rite of passage and we make as memorable as possible. some of our traditions are questionable, like the lenten tradition of being crucified on the cross. I am so tempted that maybe one day, I should try being crucified too, haha.
about ukraine, some questionable money from ukraine have apparently ended up laundered? in sara duterte’s hubby’s business calle88. calle88 has over billions in assets and only has two employees!
Correct me in my observations. The Saudis are showing even just for show an improved attitude towards women.
Second.
PC and woke have their contributions to check old behaviors
MBS’ Saudi reforms are mostly about preparing for the day Saudi Arabia won’t be able to depend on oil to support what is basically a giant welfare state. The introduction of Saudi women into the workforce is part of that reform to get Saudis to have actual jobs rather than no-show jobs by a Saudi man where the actual job was done by a foreign expert (like me on a few stints in the Middle East). To get women to participate, MBS had to liberalize society towards *Saudi* women (but not female foreign workers). Saudi women are entering the workforce with gusto, and amusingly appear to be more competent at their jobs than Saudi men in an equivalent role.
I lament the death of PC and woke, which I supported in the past during my transition from the political right to the political left. Basically, PC was about respecting that other people may have differences and one should be cognizant of if not sensitive to those differences, because differences are a strength. While Woke was originally a concept in African American intellectualism with origins in the 1930s when African Americans began to “awake” to the fact of and organize against systemic racism *in the US* which eventually led to the Civil Rights Movement. In both cases, young, affluent, middle class *White* Americans started using both terms (as with other terms like CRT, DEI, post-colonialism, oppressor-oppressed binary) as a form of virtue signaling, stripping and reducing the original meaning, in order to build moral status within their own affluent, middle class, *White* in-group. A lot of this appropriation gets mixed into the far-left milieu of Marxist-Leninism, Maoism, Anarchism as well. Eventually with the rise of social media this cultural and moral appropriation got exported all around the world. See what happened with BLM before, and what’s happening in France right now. Or how young affluent people like Greta Thunberg don’t give a crap about the “climate change” she shouted “SHAME!” about a few years ago and moved onto Palestine. Moral reductionism transforms appropriated causes into an “Omnicause.” Or how affluent, middle class, White Americans are traveling to the Philippines to learn from Filipino far-left groups about how to become even more radical. This appropriation of marginalized voices by the privileged don’t check old behaviors; it simply becomes another tool to enforce the in-group preferences of the priviledged.
Many many thanks.
something NOT realized by many Filipinos I guess, it is pretty mainstream to mock those who have more modern approaches towards stuff like teaching and leadership as “woke” over there. The weird admiration many Pinoys in the 1970s and 1980s had with the WW2 Wehrmacht (a military that LOST the war) is something I experienced directly and didn’t like at all.
it is common knowledge at least in Europe how the Russian military is built on what they call “grandfather rights” – meaning the right of officers to brutally haze their soldiers.
Of course I don’t expect “self-respecting Filipinos” like benignzero and the DDS etc. to listen to the perspective of “Euro weaklings” who to them are like the Romans when they got too comfortable (actually something my father once said, and maybe it is a bit true of Western Europe) and they might yet need Ukraine winning to be convinced if ever.
I had a discussion about this once with a GenX pinoy. IMHO the answer as to why the attraction to the Wehrmacht (and shockingly, SS) has to do with uniforms and ostentatious-looking displays of power. Tbf American combat and dress (formal) uniforms have always been kind of boring and simplistic looking compared to European ones. If those pinoys were present during the Japanese invasion of Manila, they’d probably cheer for the Imperial Japanese troops as well in their grand uniforms. Douglas MacArthur adopting a flashy and performative persona was him understanding how Filipinos view and interpret what is and what isn’t power.
I understand why, but am still shocked by, how those types of Filipinos crap on people or countries who are clearly higher than them and the Philippines. It’s a bit amusing actually when not totally toxic. I joke that it’s the Filipino form of “negging” (deliberate backhanded compliments) where one hopes one will win just by constantly insulting the other. From my reading of how pre-Spanish datus sometimes became datus, apparently that was a tactic attributed to datus who won leadership by cleverness rather than war prowess.
it is a way of saying to one’s followers “they ain’t all that” about the obviously more advantaged or whatever competitors, real or perceived.
DDS calling VP Leni “boba” (Prof. Van Ybiernas often repeated that allegation as if it was a fact) were employing a similar tactic in 2022.
such bluffs were I guess called more quickly in the olden days than now, so people can persist in delusions for far longer today.
reality in terms of reduced prosperity or losing to another datu quickly showed those up who couldn’t make it after faking it.
Nowadays DDS still “bilib” (are impressed) in “maisug” Baste Duterte even after he didn’t show up to box with General Torre haha.
ahem, methink, the dabaw maisugs have struck again! a veteran journo 72yrs old philip lustre who wrote about extra judicial killings was very recently apprehended in quezon city and detained for cyber libel. the accuser is apparently from dabaw who seemingly followed the juke process instead of due process. I cannot believe qc cops carried the order and arrested lustre with arrest warrant filed by dabaw accuser whose name is left blank as in hello! empty space, is anyone home! and could well be mickey mouse!
this is worse than hazing! there really should be a rule that if the accuser cannot spell his name or put a thump print to identify self, said accuser should at lest have photo ID of self as proof of life, na hindi siya alien, animal or beast. legal papers like arrest warrant should not be left blank, but diligently filed up leaving no blank spaces that can later be usurped and left to speculation.
there is something inherently wrong with dabaw.
ah, bear with me Irineo, I am just celebrating the call of the wildest wild!
another dabaw maisug, if he is indeed maisug, as in hiding because he is too maisug to show his face that can launch a thousand bloodbath! has 50million bounty on his head: the great and illusive bato, told by malakanyang to surrender or there will indeed be blood bath! bato’s lawyers are scrambling to the rescue.
This is probably a good example of how the cultural operating system itself, which may work perfectly well at a localized level, does not work as well when scaled without adaptations that make scaling work. In a “National Village,” someone who is ma-hambog (boast)can’t get called out and laughed to his face by his neighbors and someone who becomes ma-maoy (run amok) can’t get smacked on the head by a stick (which I’ve personally found to be super effective). Or those Pinoy keyboard warriors who so easily makainis (troll) online, thinking themselves expert in atake-atras (attack and retreat), but person are meek weaklings. DDS just took these behaviors which got disciplined through hiya (shame) by the community at the barangay level in the past to the next level, without the accountability mechanism. Even barangays nowadays are not that close-knit as I found them to be back in the late 1990s, except maybe in poor places of Mindanao where everyone knows everyone else’s business.
To us Baste might seem like a clown (because he is), but the Dutertes are very much still very “datu” in the areas their network of political allies control. The main reasons why Class D/E support any particular politician usually has to do with a combination of remembered utang na loob (e.g. I was helped that time; He paid for the wake; etc.). It’s almost like entering another world, an older world, which is why I often refer to the “Two Philippines” concept.
and the old codes will still apply to those one has utang na loob to, not to criticize them even if one knows their weaknesses – and also that utang na loob extends towards the children of the one who helped.
It might be a bit like Thais will not speak ill of their present King even if most probably most respected Bhumibol a lot more, and a bit like I will not criticize Raissa Robles EVER because her late law professor father helped me get out of Pasay City jail in November 1981 after one night there, even if I may at times heavily disagree deep within.
Irineo, there’s a law in thailand that said speaking ill of the king and the regent carries penalty. as for utang na luob, not me, isang beses ko lang yan babayaran ang utang ko. though others will continue one like what senator bato’s wife is now urging those whom bato have helped in the past to return the favor and help bato now that bato is facing the devil and the deep blue sea, bato needs help not prosecution, the wife said, though the wife would make a poor judge, she is too emotionally involved and too close to the subject, her judgement is be clouded.
as for raissa’s dad, he is gone and dont expect anymore payment, right? would raissa? nah, she’ll understand if people turn away from her.
utang na luob once paid, ay babayaran uli in the hope that the beneficiary will remember at magpapautang uli. a good turn deserves another, and another and another; back and forth yan, endless cycle. of co-dependency, the giver and the taker.
as for me, namimigay ako, no strings attached, I dont expect to be paid. thank you is enough.
Many thanks
Ty for this insight I am now thinking if something similar happened to the local military and the local societies/fraternities. Stories from older generation showed there were people with multiple fraternities during the pre Marcos era. Wonder if the diary project of MLQ3 would shed light on how it was pre war post war pre martial law and post martial law?
Prof. Alfred McCoy (the same one who wrote “An Anarchy of Families”) wrote “Closer than Brothers” about the PMA and IIRC explicitly compared the Third Republic PMA culture with the one of Marcos days.
I finally got to watch the Quezon movie and even as it overdid a lot of things, Jericho Rosales did manage to convey how MLQ was a continuation of the ilustrado imitation of Western role models especially in terms of masculinity – the present day remnants of that being the two Senators with bigote..
AFAIK Greek organizations in the Philippines were American imports; after all UP was modeled after American public land grant universities (like University of California).
While PMA was modeled off of another American import, West Point.
In both cases there is a local tendency among the Philippine elite for secret societies, going back to the Katipunan being modeled after Freemasonry adapted to local customs. Then there are the cultural operating system dynamics like datu-ism, kapwa, loob, the relational economy, protecting the in-group, and so on which provide a further filter to what was imported. I think I choose the word “filter” here carefully, rather than “adaptation.”
Alpha Phi Omega is an example of a US frat the Philippines adopted which operates in a very Filipino way.
A lot of APO members voted for their “brod” Jejomar Binay in 2016 and APO is known to be pretty large over there.
Upsilon Sigma Phi is a fraternity with a lot of elite members – including Marcos Sr., Ninoy Aquino, Sen. Kiko Pangilinan – and TSOH author Will Villanueva:
APO is a service fraternity, which like honor societies (previously called literary/scholarly fraternities) are quite mild. Being co-educational helps too. Social fraternities, which are the ones which descended from secret societies for elite young men, are the usual culprits in excessive hazing. The fraternity I was a part of for a while, Pi Alpha Phi (Pineapples), was the oldest Asian-American origin fraternity and founded at Berkeley. PAPhi dissolved after nearly 100 years in 2023 after a spate of sexual scandals, hazing deaths, and so on. Our rival were the Lambda Phi Epsilon (Lambdas), a much younger Asian-American fraternity formed in the 1980s at UCLA. Pineapples were known as the elite, preppy, usually street racing scions of rich families while the Lambdas had a lot of SEA refugee members and were known for former gangsters with high-performance motorcycles (liter-bikes). We had inter-fraternity brawls quite often, while getting top grades, lol. So sort of like Upsilon Sigma Phi.
I don’t know of Upsilon Sigma Phi getting into brawls, but what I definitely recall from growing up on campus at UP Diliman was the news of yet another frat member dying at the UP Infirmary (just across from the UP (Catholic) Church and the UP Protestant Church, but probably not intentional for the dead to have a short way across) from ice pick wounds, as ice picks were the weapon of choice in many UP frat brawls before. Ateneo did not allow frats, meaning that if Will Villanueva had stayed at Ateneo where he finished high school, he would not have become Upsilon Sigma Phi.
German frats used to play a huge role in connection with the pre-WW2 military, what one often sees in movies like the 1970s “Cross of Iron” that German officers have scarred faces was due to fencing being a major part of their hazings, though one could make the case that a “Fux” (pledge) could at least fight back but to what extent did they. They often still played a role in post-WW2 German industry, with the “Altherren” in major positions. They were completely banned in Berlin though due to the Allied prerogative until 1990. They are not as mainstream anymore as before. In Heidelberg, Rizal apparently had some nights out with German liberal fraternities. At that time they had been a major player in German unification, and the coordinates liberal and conservative meant something very different from today. I doubt that Rizal hung out with the so-called “nicht-schlagende Verbindungen” meaning the religious “Burschenschaften” (fraternities) that did not “hit” aka fence. And I don’t remember how I once was invited to a fencing fraternity night in Cologne when I was a student in Bonn. It was a lot of drinking..
I recall reading that London often had issues with criminal gangs each time a war of the British Empire ended, so there is something about war changing people. In the working class, IIRC the Hells Angels were formed by WW2 veterans and the Bandidos were formed by Vietnam War veterans. The now banned (very violent) Satudara Maluku MC in the Netherlands was originally formed by Moluccans, IIRC they also fled a civil war, interesting thing is that “satudara” in Bahasa means the same thing as “sandugo” in Tagalog, so “blood brotherhood”..
..re the US military, I always had the impression that one of Karl’s favorite movies is “A Few Good Men”, and I would say that how the “Code Red” is dealt with by military justice in the movie probably reflects how the ethical imperative you described was made reality, because codes are only “pan-display” like so often in the Philippines if not actually lived.
A lot of my batchmates volunteered for the service as 9/11 happened during the end of our time in high school. Many of them never fully re-integrated back into society after their service. Militaries, including the US Military, are really good at forging effective soldiers and military hierarchies, but are less good at civilian re-integration. Without the clear rules and hierarchies they were used to, a lot of my friends became lost men after their time in service.
Btw, it is the clear rules and hierarchy of the US Military that made the US Military so effective at racial integration after WWII, then later integration of women. Units might be comprised of multiple races, state and country origins, all working effectively as a single unit. So when the directive came down to cut out the (informal) hazing that was affecting soldier effectiveness, it was done. Sergeants, lieutenants, and captains who tried to carry on hazing clandestinely were made an example of and pushed out. That’s all possible because of the clear rules and hierarchy. Unfortunately in the civilian world clear rules and hierarchies are not always present. It is a bit more chaotic. But I do think there are a lot good ideas from militaries that can be applied to civilian organizations. Why not anyway, since most of the modern hazing practices were originally bad behaviors in the military that were reformed from the military.
good for you. I imagine this happening in the Philippines and woe to the women involved as senior members almost always include legacy members the sons of prominent political families.
I can’t relate to the attitude that causing others trauma somehow builds loyalty and teamwork. I don’t like pranks because they, to me, are “hazing light”. So I think the rule should be stop being juvenile and stupid. Be kind.
In this cruel world, it is very uplifting to hear about kindness.
kindness, compassion and apparently being considerate to others could apparently put you in good graces of lady luck! have you noticed that major winners of lotto, they win bigger to biggest prizes! are kind, compassionate and considerate to others? they give and share and think less of themselves and more of others, and in return, they are given much.
even those that habitually clean their houses and kept their surroundings clutter free, also win prizes. apparently lady luck is lover of order, and doesnt like chaos.
be nice, be kind. even if that does not make you lotto winner. your time will come.
Saw in the news that the Dept of labor will consider forcog employees to sing snd dance in a Christmas performance will be dinged as bullying. For now I guess there will be a few complaints unless they would know where to go after being fired then another labor case of wrongful termination.
When I worked at Samsung in Korea we had site visits to Samsung Electronics Philippines Corporation (SEPCO) which was then headquartered in Makati, warehouse in Pasig, and manufacturing in Laguna. SEPCO has since re-located to Taguig.
On a number of site visits I confronted the (male) Filipino managers and supervisors about their bullying of male workers they didn’t like and sexual harassment of female workers they fancied. Shockingly, the bullying and sexual harassment occurred openly in Messenger group chats I was invited to. A lot of Filipino bullying and harassment of course is done in innuendo with plausible deniability. They didn’t know I knew enough Tagalog to figure out what was going on, and were confident the Korean site managers didn’t have a clue. When I raised the issue, I was made out to be a villain and killjoy (their words). A few weeks ago in a gc with some younger friends, one posted a screenshot of her manager requesting “kuha ka ng bata na Chix” (“get/hire young-looking sexy girls”) to the HR guy in the company gc that has the Korean site managers on it too. Her college friend and coworker resigned due to the sexual harassment and had to move when the boss kept showing up to her boarding house with “gifts.” Apparently that Filipino manager is middle aged and already has a family, and all the female workers warn each other about getting too close with normal friendly Filipino behaviors like sharing food. So I guess it’s still going on. Act innocent in front of the foreign boss and act with impunity to Filipino underlings, up to even sexual harassment.
This also commonly happens in BPOs. Like a lot. Those who are disfavored or male workers who might be love rivals bullied until they quit, female coworkers romantically pursued even if it’s unwanted, all while acting innocent to the foreign boss who is reliant on the Filipino manager.
Agaon, thanks for sharing.
many bosses have been called off for sexual harassment and lose their jobs. these days, anyone can hide their identities and air grievances in the internet. people being people, put one and one together and hit jackpot and bosses are taken to court. there are bosses that settled out of court, with the proviso that their dastardly behavior ceased and desist.
we have laws now that not only protect the vulnerable like women and children, the law also send perpetrators to jail. we have big names languishing in jail for rapes and sexual assault.
in the workplace, human resources hear grievances, complaints and disputes first hand, if not settled, law court is the next point of call.
as well, recently our supreme court changed the term victim of sexual assault to victim survivor of sexual assault.
Well here’s a problem: HR are there to protect the company, not the worker, even though protecting the company sometimes means “protecting the worker.”
As for workplace sexual harassment, there is a culture of silence and the Filipino bad habit of exploiting power disparity. In a Western company usually such problems would be nipped in the bud from the top, but most foreign subsidiaries in the Philippines send site managers who are not familiar with the culture or understand the language thus are susceptible to sipsip from the Filipino manager (who is usually a man). Female workers are also often afraid to report issues since Filipinas are breadwinners for many families nowadays. Then there is the disarming “Filipino joke” response to bad behavior of “joke lang,” “why can’t you take a joke?” that makes those who disagree out to be a villain. Btw this is villainizing also affects foreigners who become closer to Filipino culture, like myself, because now they’re part of the in-group and are expected to conform. How a foreigner is treated usually is greatly affected by the power distance and whether the foreigner chooses to become “more Filipino.” Foreigners who maintain distance are treated with more deference than those who become closer, unless he asserts his position of course, at which point like any other Filipino he risks being ganged up upon. I keep my friends circles very close in the Philippines and learned to treat Filipino subordinates (when I was working at Samsung) at an arm’s distance.
I think it’s good that there are laws now to protect women in the workplace and against workplace bullying, but laws in the Philippines are often just suggestions, especially if no one reports due to a culture of silence within the in-group. Those who report, usually it is a career ender. I know multiple female friends who did and couldn’t get hired at their education and skill level in their field again — they left and went abroad.
The problem may eventually solve itself as in the last 10 years Filipino women have been graduating college at an astounding rate compared to Filipino men — something like a 2:1 female to male ratio. I find Filipinas to be vastly more competent than the average Filipino guy, even Filipinas who never graduated past high school. Filipinas will save the nation, perhaps.
we learned to set borders, what we can accept and what we cannot.
yeah, pres duterte was famously the father of many bad jokes and look where he is now!
my father did say something similar in the 1980s in relation to the Pinoy migrant community in Germany, to the effect that Filipinas tend to be more responsible.
Filipino culture does encourage yabang and laziness among men, often even mocking serious men like PNoy, while glorifying the likes of Robin Padilla who after all was the Senator with the most votes in 2022. I was surprised that Bam Aquino (almost an incel by kalye standards, cmon a man with a wife but no mistress haha) got into the Senate again in 2025 BTW, really..
I wonder if another way to think about this is:
Filipinas carry on the spiritual responsibilities of a babaylan, such as nurturing and leading harvests. Today those responsibilities might be becoming the family’s breadwinner, advisor, and if needed, leader. It’s not uncommon for me to have met a woman 10 years ago when she was young and had a kid with a useless guy, stuck in life looking quite pitiful, then in the intervening time straightened everything out, raising her kid, booting the guy out if need be.
Whereas a lot of Filipino men of lower economic classes are treated as little princes since childhood. I guess to prepare them to “become datu” following some ancient template. Yet it isn’t really possible for a boy to “become datu” nowadays, so a lot of them just languish using drugs, drinking, having irregular work, to fund their bisyo, dying young. Then there’s “role models” for boys like Robin Padilla that “proves” that one can “become datu” despite being uncouth and “poor.” Joke’s on them though, since Robin was born to a well-to-do showbiz family and is only LARPing as an everyman.
gender equality, in philippines we dont have enough men with more girls being born than boys. and boys are prized for their ability to pass on the family name, become the apple of their mother’s eyes and are spoiled rotten.
girls were supposed to be only good for the kitchen and housework, hence no need for them to be educated as they will get supported by a husband anyway. that was the olden days mantra.
we know now that husbands dont live forever, and quite a number of them die earlier than their wives, some are deserters, and the poor wife is left to pick up the pieces, fend for herself and her children and without a breadwinner, a life of poverty and misery waits them. else they got picked on by strange men and become easy victims.
today, girls are going to school, might as well learn to fend for themselves early on and not wait until they become widows, get a job, save money and buy a house. and with job comes status and security.
maybe not, filipinos loved nothing better than to sing and dance especially if helped along with a little alcohol! better than hiring strippers and you know what, haha. boys and girls gotta amuse themselves, though office christmas parties can be minefield of copious remorse later, with apologies uttered and accepted. c’mon baby do the chicken, chicken walk! what happens in the office party, stays in the office, the waiver. so, no incriminating pics allowed to be downloaded later in the internet?
sa undas, there will be many attending gruesome parties, and as always, I will come dressed like lucky eddie, from hagar the horrible comics, my signature attire, outdated maybe, but wait until you see my papermache axe!
Incredible.
I hated this and only participated once.
I think we call this trauma bonding. I can say that I agree that trauma builds loyalty and teamwork. I have seen this during difficult projects. I am still in contact with my teams from these difficult projects. The fake thing is trying to manufacture this trauma bonding through hazing. I think it works but only for weak people.
yes, I also have my network from 30+ years in SAP built out of shared struggle – a bit like the kind of struggle somewhat cheesy Alpine mountaineer movies of old show just not physical.
I knew someone with mountaineering background who earned a lot of money in team building for corporations via rafting or mountaineering trips. That I think doesn’t work that well either compared to long-term shared struggles.
Right, but that is voluntary trauma, not imposed trauma. I suppose one could argue fraternity hazing is voluntary trauma, too. But working through a crisis is psychologically strong, submitting to the will of others is psychologically needy.
are participants really aware they are to be hazed as to give consent? maybe they give consent by their mere presence like lambs to the slaughter, silent and humble and didnt know what they were submitting themselves to.
to this day, it was not hazing but apparently bonding exercise that caused two top athletes to breathe their last. coach lost his job over it, and an institution went into overdrive to protect itself and salvage reputation. now, several months later, all is well in the western front.
A lot of hopeful lambs sticking with the sheep on the way to the slaughtering chute.