Hazing is an endemic in our colleges and high schools today that has taken the lives of countless students who only wanted to be like everyone else.
Whether it be a college fraternity or a high school water polo team, hazing can be detrimental to a student’s mental and physical health and can bring on extreme humiliation.
Gary DeVercelly Jr., son of former Long Beach Poly teacher Julie DeVercelly, died in 2007 during Rider University’s Phi Kappa Taus’s “initiation ritual,” a yearly induction into the fraternity through forced alcohol consumption. His parents have since then undertook a project with the Clery Center, a group that works toward safer campuses, to put together a just-finished documentary called We Don’t Haze.
We Don’t Haze includes interviews with the DeVercelly family and the parents of Robert Champion Jr. and George B. Desdunes, innocent victims of an unjustifiable tradition—a tradition that should be eradicated in every school in the United States.
Fifty-five percent of college students involved in some school activity have experienced hazing in their lifetime, and that is a statistic that has to change.
Despite efforts by colleges and high schools to eliminate hazing, there is still a lot of progress to be made. Teachers and students should attend mandatory hazing-awareness meetings and assemblies, and all sports teams, clubs, and musical groups should be informed of the consequences of hazing. Only this way can we keep our studentry safe.
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