The Society of Honor by Joe America

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.