Wednesday, 27 May 2009
Ragging in Bishop Cotton School (BCS) in Bangalore - 2 Students Leave School
New Delhi | May 22, 2009:
Two class IX students of Bishop Cotton School (BCS) in Bangalore have left the renowned education institute after complaining of ragging by seniors, prompting the state government to seek a report from the district administration on the incident.
The Two students, Akashdeep Turna and Avtar Singh, quit the school on Monday after their families lodged a complaint with the school authorities that their wards were bullied and physically assaulted by seniors, sources in the school said.
Kuldeep Turna, father of Akashdeep, who is an NRI settled in UK alleged that seniors used to send juniors to fetch food for them from hotels at night and did not allow juniors to use toilet after 11 after dark.
He further alleged that juniors were also beaten by rods and hockey sticks if they did not listen
When contacted, the school headmaster Christopher Robinson admitted receiving the complaint from the families of the two boys and said that the school's house master has given him a report on the alleged incident.
"The report has come and I am studying it," he said.
Annoyed over the incident, Chief Minister Prem Kumar Dhumal has sought a report from the Shimla district administration on the matter.
"Immediately after hearing of the incident, the CM ordered the Shimla district administration to submit a report," sources in the CM's office said.
They said though no no time frame has been specified, the district administration has been asked to submit the report immediately.
Deputy Commissioner Shimla Amar Singh Rathore confirmed that he has been asked for a report on the entire episode, which he would submit at the earliest.
The 150 year old school is not the first from the hill state where ragging incidents have been reported.
Educational institutes in Himachal were in news after the death of Aman Kachroo, the first year MBBS student of Dr Rajendra Prasad Government Medical College in March, due to ragging.
Subsequently complaints of ragging poured in from Indira Gandhi Medical College (IGMC), Shimla, Sanawar based Lawrence school and Homeopathic college at Solan.
Alarmed by death of Kachroo, the state government introduced a stringent anti-ragging ordinance.
Seeking to take to task anybody who indulges in the menace, the CM had yesterday ordered deployment of plain clothed police in higher education institutions
Showing posts with label hazing. Show all posts
Showing posts with label hazing. Show all posts
Thursday, June 4, 2009
Saturday, March 28, 2009
Hank Nuwer commentary on ragging: Sunday Times of India
from the Sunday Times of India
How US failed to deal with ragging
29 Mar 2009, 0252 hrs IST, Hank Nuwer
India’s national disgrace with ragging is more common in many industrial countries than even journalists realize.
Japan has vicious sumo wrestler initiations, one newcomer beaten to death by three older wrestlers not long ago. Beatings similar to ragging recently have resulted in killings in the Philippines, Indonesia and the United States.
In the latter three countries ragging is called hazing, the term apparently taken from the old American West for the practice of controlling stock animals. The word ‘hazing’ was later appropriated in the Wild West for the ridicule and rough jokes forced on newcomers called ‘greenhorns.’
Unfortunately, while awareness of hazing in the US media has never been higher, deaths from fraternity and, to a much lesser degree, sorority hazing have continued unabated for 30 years.
The first male fraternity man to die was the son of a former Civil War general at Cornell University in 1873. America has had at least one hazing death — and sometimes many deaths — every year from 1970 to 2009, according to my research.
These pledges or so-called ‘associate members’ die mainly from alcohol poisoning and beatings, but sometimes they die in bizarre ways, including burning to death, drowning, choking on forced substances and getting hit by drunk drivers.
Worse, with a few exceptions, educational programmes to address hazing in American secondary schools before college are mainly non-existent or hastily planned only after an incident occurs.
While high school students do not often die from beatings, they do endure pummelling, paddling, and worse, sexual abuse ending in rectal tearing from objects such as pens and brooms inserted by their gleeful, sadistic peers. Two football players from a small New Mexico town pleaded guilty in recent days to sodomizing a so-called ‘rookie’ teammate.
These high-school hazers take inspiration from American professional athletes who delight in tormenting, humiliating and savagely beating rookies — many of these incidents being treated as humorous and part of the game by US sportswriters.
Moreover, the hazing frenzy in North America is not limited to the US. Canada’s junior hockey programme has seen newcomers subject to sexual abuse, and one rookie quit McGill University’s football programme amid claims he was sexually hazed.
And beatings and sexual abuse during initiations in prestigious South African secondary academies have only recently sparked parents and concerned citizens to begin campaigns similar to India’s anti-ragging efforts to force school administrators to ban all such so-called ‘welcoming’ activities.
India’s attempts to impose a lifetime ban on those caught ragging is admirable (though likely to have educators mired in appeals and litigation), but if bans in the US are any indication, they are doomed to failure. Hazing used to be practiced out in the open in the US, but when perpetrators faced expulsion from school and fraternity, plus misdemeanor or felony hazing charges, they took the practice underground.
Beatings continued in secrecy, particularly in African-American and Latino groups that admire warrior ability to endure pain and sacrifice. Coerced alcohol initiations among international, national and local fraternities and sororities not only escalated but they evolved into creative games. This month a young sorority woman pleaded guilty to giving a fraternity pledge at Utah State University a fatal administering of booze during a games session. Supposedly it was a ‘reward’ for the pledge to be hazed by women instead of fraternity brothers for one night.
Is there anything that can be done about practices such as ragging and hazing other than throwing one’s hands up in disgust and outrage?
I think there is. Having written and studied about hazing since 1975, after a hazing death occurred at the Nevada University where I attended graduate school, i believe these are positive developments in the US:
National and international fraternities and sororities themselves have come down hard on hazers, expelling individual and individual chapters caught violating rules.
National organizations such as HazingPrevention.org and Stophazing.org provide educational programmes, as do risk management corporations such as the Human Equation which provides online anti-hazing educational courses.
Criminal laws gradually have been tightened state by state, mainly because the parents of dead victims have lobbied hard for felony hazing charges in states like Florida and California. Civil litigation (including awards of US$14 million) also serves as a deterrent — at least to the elders who are university administrators or fraternity officials.
But in the end, it is going to take a paradigm shift where young people themselves begin to universally condemn hazing before true reform can be expected to become the reality.
And even if a decrease in ragging/hazing does occur due to toughened national laws in India and the US and elsewhere, i have no doubt hazing will crop up again among students sometime in the future.
As i have written in my books, Wrongs of Passage and the Hazing Reader, hazing and ragging are indeed a weed in the Garden of Academe. Stamp it out in one quadrangle and it flares up again in the next. More than a weed, hazing and ragging are a true scourge, allowing us to see in our young people the kind of viciousness that erupted in the Americans holding pens for prisoners of war at Abu Ghraib.
Only when our young people gain a respect for human rights will these vicious human rites truly disappear. I pray they do disappear, but my research demonstrates that it will not disappear altogether in my lifetime, or in the lifetime of anyone reading this commentary.
And that is a sad commentary on human affairs indeed.
Hank Nuwer is a professor at Indiana University (retired from IUPUI: now with Franklin College) in the US and has written four books on hazing.
How US failed to deal with ragging
29 Mar 2009, 0252 hrs IST, Hank Nuwer
India’s national disgrace with ragging is more common in many industrial countries than even journalists realize.
Japan has vicious sumo wrestler initiations, one newcomer beaten to death by three older wrestlers not long ago. Beatings similar to ragging recently have resulted in killings in the Philippines, Indonesia and the United States.
In the latter three countries ragging is called hazing, the term apparently taken from the old American West for the practice of controlling stock animals. The word ‘hazing’ was later appropriated in the Wild West for the ridicule and rough jokes forced on newcomers called ‘greenhorns.’
Unfortunately, while awareness of hazing in the US media has never been higher, deaths from fraternity and, to a much lesser degree, sorority hazing have continued unabated for 30 years.
The first male fraternity man to die was the son of a former Civil War general at Cornell University in 1873. America has had at least one hazing death — and sometimes many deaths — every year from 1970 to 2009, according to my research.
These pledges or so-called ‘associate members’ die mainly from alcohol poisoning and beatings, but sometimes they die in bizarre ways, including burning to death, drowning, choking on forced substances and getting hit by drunk drivers.
Worse, with a few exceptions, educational programmes to address hazing in American secondary schools before college are mainly non-existent or hastily planned only after an incident occurs.
While high school students do not often die from beatings, they do endure pummelling, paddling, and worse, sexual abuse ending in rectal tearing from objects such as pens and brooms inserted by their gleeful, sadistic peers. Two football players from a small New Mexico town pleaded guilty in recent days to sodomizing a so-called ‘rookie’ teammate.
These high-school hazers take inspiration from American professional athletes who delight in tormenting, humiliating and savagely beating rookies — many of these incidents being treated as humorous and part of the game by US sportswriters.
Moreover, the hazing frenzy in North America is not limited to the US. Canada’s junior hockey programme has seen newcomers subject to sexual abuse, and one rookie quit McGill University’s football programme amid claims he was sexually hazed.
And beatings and sexual abuse during initiations in prestigious South African secondary academies have only recently sparked parents and concerned citizens to begin campaigns similar to India’s anti-ragging efforts to force school administrators to ban all such so-called ‘welcoming’ activities.
India’s attempts to impose a lifetime ban on those caught ragging is admirable (though likely to have educators mired in appeals and litigation), but if bans in the US are any indication, they are doomed to failure. Hazing used to be practiced out in the open in the US, but when perpetrators faced expulsion from school and fraternity, plus misdemeanor or felony hazing charges, they took the practice underground.
Beatings continued in secrecy, particularly in African-American and Latino groups that admire warrior ability to endure pain and sacrifice. Coerced alcohol initiations among international, national and local fraternities and sororities not only escalated but they evolved into creative games. This month a young sorority woman pleaded guilty to giving a fraternity pledge at Utah State University a fatal administering of booze during a games session. Supposedly it was a ‘reward’ for the pledge to be hazed by women instead of fraternity brothers for one night.
Is there anything that can be done about practices such as ragging and hazing other than throwing one’s hands up in disgust and outrage?
I think there is. Having written and studied about hazing since 1975, after a hazing death occurred at the Nevada University where I attended graduate school, i believe these are positive developments in the US:
National and international fraternities and sororities themselves have come down hard on hazers, expelling individual and individual chapters caught violating rules.
National organizations such as HazingPrevention.org and Stophazing.org provide educational programmes, as do risk management corporations such as the Human Equation which provides online anti-hazing educational courses.
Criminal laws gradually have been tightened state by state, mainly because the parents of dead victims have lobbied hard for felony hazing charges in states like Florida and California. Civil litigation (including awards of US$14 million) also serves as a deterrent — at least to the elders who are university administrators or fraternity officials.
But in the end, it is going to take a paradigm shift where young people themselves begin to universally condemn hazing before true reform can be expected to become the reality.
And even if a decrease in ragging/hazing does occur due to toughened national laws in India and the US and elsewhere, i have no doubt hazing will crop up again among students sometime in the future.
As i have written in my books, Wrongs of Passage and the Hazing Reader, hazing and ragging are indeed a weed in the Garden of Academe. Stamp it out in one quadrangle and it flares up again in the next. More than a weed, hazing and ragging are a true scourge, allowing us to see in our young people the kind of viciousness that erupted in the Americans holding pens for prisoners of war at Abu Ghraib.
Only when our young people gain a respect for human rights will these vicious human rites truly disappear. I pray they do disappear, but my research demonstrates that it will not disappear altogether in my lifetime, or in the lifetime of anyone reading this commentary.
And that is a sad commentary on human affairs indeed.
Hank Nuwer is a professor at Indiana University (retired from IUPUI: now with Franklin College) in the US and has written four books on hazing.
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