It seems like hazing just won’t die.
From homophobic slurs to racial epithets to physical torment, one could even get the impression that hazing culture is just getting worse. Student-athletes are particularly at risk of hazing incidents in high school and college. The latest alleged incident resulted in Boston College suspending its men’s and women’s swimming and diving teams.
Despite continued efforts to put an end to what some brush off as “locker room culture” or “kids being kids,” the issue persists. Nicolette Aduama, Senior Associate Director of Northeastern’s Center for the Study of Sport and Society, joined All Things Considered host Arun Rath to give insight into why hazing culture seems stronger than ever. The following transcript has been lightly edited for clarity.
Arun Rath: So first, can I get your take on this most recent reported incident at Boston College? What was your initial reaction?
Nicolette Aduama: Any time we see a headline, it makes us sad, of course. There's an initial reaction. We're sorry that that happened. Curiosity; we want to find out a little bit more. And then, ultimately, how can we help? How can we be of assistance as a resource to the commonwealth and others as the incident unfolds and more information comes out about what's happening? How can we be a resource to those impacted by whatever happened?
Rath: As I mentioned, there are many efforts to put an end to hazing: then-Attorney General Maura Healey's Addressing Hate in School Sports Initiative, the Anti-Hazing Collaborative, and of course, as you just mentioned, the work your colleagues are doing. What is working, and what's going wrong in terms of these incidents still persisting?
Aduama: Yes. So having come off of almost a dozen regional trainings on behalf of various organizations, you realize that it's more complicated of an issue than people think.
A lot of responses that we hear from participants in our training and the sessions that we do is, "Wow, I didn't realize that," or, "I don't know as much as I thought I knew about these issues. I'm actually uncomfortable trying to figure out how to disrupt behavior or figuring out when behavior is problematic." So I think the issue is more complicated and deep-rooted than a lot of people realize.
This curriculum, which we've been doing now for some months, is our latest curriculum addressing hate in school sports. You dig a little deeper than some of our other curricula at why certain problematic behaviors persist.
What we're trying to help participants—whether they are students or administrators or coaches—understand and realize is that these are deep-rooted thoughts and feelings and systems that are in place. To understand them and dismantle them takes time. It's not something that we're going to solve tomorrow, unfortunately. We say that at the center all the time. We would love to be out of a job and not have to do this work, even though it's amazing work and necessary work.
It can be very challenging at times to hear people's stories, so I think that's part of why we're still seeing this, because it's not as simple as "don't do this, don't do that." At the center, we don't legislate behavior. We're having conversations and allowing people in a safe space to explore. "How are you socialized? What were you told as a child or as an adult, and then how does that play out?" You'll hear coaches say, "Oh, the way I was coached, it was effective, but I actually don't want to coach that way now with my athletes." That takes time.
And also, I think another challenge is that social media spreads things like wildfire now, and so we're hearing more about it, but I don't know if necessarily that indicates that the problem is worse, right? We're just having more exposure to information that would have taken a lot longer to come out, or we may not have heard about in the past.
Rath: That was going to be my next question. It's hard to get a sense now because, again, whether these are actually happening more often or if they're just more likely to not be swept under the rug now.
Aduama: Yes. And I also think, to go back to your previous question about what's going well, the willingness of people to come together in a room—sometimes with colleagues, other times with people they don't know as well—to actually dig deep and do the work and try to improve themselves, but also their communities, is very uplifting and very promising.
It's wonderful when I'm engaging with a superintendent, a principal and an athletic director, and they're all here to say, "We love our school, we love our school community, our students are amazing. We want to be proactive in this work. We want to make sure that our staff has what they need, but also that our students have what they need to be kinder, more compassionate change agents in our school community and in the larger context of their lives in the world."
Rath: In college sports, in particular, is there a financial aspect to why officials might be more likely to turn their heads?
Aduama: I will say there's a lot going on when there is a game. When we've talked to referees or coaches or administrators, depending on the resources that a school has, whether it's high school or college, there's not always an opportunity to stop a game, to stop a match, to stop a meet and say we heard something problematic, we heard a racial slur or a player-versus-player situation is happening, right? So there's not always the resources available to intervene in that moment because there's a lot going on.
So you think about these games—like, let's take a basketball game. There may be hundreds of people there, right? Or at a football game, there may be thousands of people in the stands, depending on the school. So to stop and, if you're going to leave a match or a game, what does that look like? Are people going to be safe as they're exiting? So there's a lot more involved when it comes to disrupting something that's going on in real time than I think people realize.
And that's another thing that came out from the regional training that we were able to do in the spring—that there's a lot that senior administrators are thinking about in the moment. So, the current situation that's happening right now, what does that mean for the athletes? Right? What does that mean for their time in the water? What does that mean for what's next for them, whether it's their professional career or their collegiate career, to have time away from the sport?
