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[J. Vessely] In my role as the Dean of Students, I came across a few situations that would
be categorized as bullying, and my area of expertise is in the sport arena, so any number
of times, I’ve talked with school groups, athletic teams, coaches, athletes about hazing,
and what I’ve discovered is that there’s some very similar traits between bullying
and hazing. We need more education. We need to educate
people as much as we can to the pitfalls of not punishing bullying, of trying to reward
hazing because it’s a rite of passage, it’s a ritual. I like to think of hazing as bullying
with an excuse, or bullying with a license. Teasing is usually an incident or two of someone,
in effect, making fun of someone; either what they’re wearing, or how they look, or how
poorly they did on a test. When it becomes prolonged, then that’s one of the traits
of bullying. It’s a sense of someone trying to have power over someone else or a group
of people, and it’s a series of abusive kind of things, either emotional or physical.
The hazing, it’s done with the notion that we’re trying to include you in a group;
we want you to be part of the swim team; we want you to be part of a fraternity or a sorority,
and there’s a test, so hazing is this test of how loyal we can determine you’re going
to be. Well, I think, again, if we stereotype, there are the people, who we sometimes think
are a little nerdy, so they somehow, not of their own doing, but somehow lend themselves
to these sort of cowardly acts of bullying where someone says, boy, there’s somebody
who’s easy to pick on. It is very common. The person being bullied, or the person who
is being hazed are afraid to come forward because there are repercussions, and sometimes
the tempo picks up; well, you thought that was bad? Now that you’ve told on us, now
that you’ve pointed a figure toward us, here’s what it’s going to be from this
point forward. In the case of hazing, it’s often the coaches, and not to lump everybody
in the same group, but sometimes it’s a person who’s also in power who’s allowing
this to happen, so who are you going to tell? If you go tell the coach, the coach may have
already known it was taking place, and so there can be an issue there in terms of pointing
it out. If you think of the recent examples, in the
case of hazing, the young man who pointed out the hazing on the team bus in the recent
case; he’s changed schools now three times, so there was a fallout for him reporting this.
Stand up and not tolerate it. The sooner it’s reported, the less power the person who’s
doing the bullying or the hazing has cause you nip it right in the bud, so you want to
make sure you get it stopped as quickly as possible.