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[title]How easily could you be persuaded to shave off an eyebrow, or take a shot for every stair you climbed? Perhaps you’d feel more compelled if you were half a bottle of ‘Chicken Wine’ deep, 18, and surrounded by new friends that you were trying to impress?
If you attended university in the UK you might have an uncomfortable feeling of deja-vu, perhaps being whisked back to the time you were ‘hazed’ as a first year student. If you didn’t, you’ve likely heard the rumours about former prime ministers getting it on with pigs, or rugby teams shoving carrots in places vegetables should never go.
Hazing, or ‘initiation’ as it more commonly goes by this side of the Atlantic, is a practice which usually consists of ritualistically embarrassing rookie members of a given group in order for them to prove themselves. It’s also nothing new. There’s evidence of rowdy schoolboys dating as far back as 420 BCE when Plato recounted ‘practical jokes played by unruly young men’ which left both spectators and haze-ees injured. Somehow, this bizarre custom has survived the rise and fall of the Roman Empire, the birth of Jesus Christ, several international plagues and found a home for itself in the modern age on university campuses.
But for the past decade or so, hazing’s millenia-long reign has been threatened by a generation who supposedly care more about their physical and mental health than they do about banter and ritual humiliation. Today, hazing has met its match: Generation Z. So what do these sadistic rituals look like in 2024?
Take a shot, kiss a fish
At one point in the recent past, hazing was pretty bad. Over the last 15 years student newspapers have reported on rugby lads wrestling in vomit (2017), hockey players downing shots mixed with dog food (2010), and runners kissing a dead eel (2014). And these are just the things people are willing to admit.
Although snogging a fish is unpleasant and a bit odd, it is harmless for all people involved (except, perhaps, the eel). But there’s a much darker side to initiations, which is why most unis have now adopted a ‘zero tolerance policy’. In 2019, during a particularly intense end-of-season initiation ceremony for rugby players at the University of Gloucestershire, team member Sam Potter drank what would end up being a fatal amount of alcohol. He was found the morning after the session by his friends, and was pronounced dead by the time paramedics arrived. He was only 19 at the time.
Anything that leads to someone having a bad time just isn’t fun anymore.
Tragically, Potter wasn’t the only one. Twenty-year-old Ed Farmer passed away after a similarly heavy society initiation bar crawl on December 13, 2016, in Newcastle, also due to drinking an excess amount of alcohol. During an inquest into his death, a fellow student admitted that although no one was ‘forced’ to drink anything, ‘there would have been encouragement from the second and third year students… As a first year I felt pressure to drink, but I would not say I was forced.’
The aftermath
Following these tragedies, universities started cracking down on hazing. Initiations are now banned at the University of Newcastle, while the University of Edinburgh says they are ‘not permitted by any SU club.’ Most unions will impose harsh punishments on any group found to be in breach of this rule, ranging from fines, to society bans, to kicking students off courses in the most serious cases – the National Union of Students has been encouraging their members to impose sanctions on those hosting initiations for some time now.
‘The university cracked down on it a lot and were very much trying to stop it from happening for obvious reasons,’ says Sophie*, a final year undergraduate student involved in sports at the University of Bristol. ‘Things feel a lot more friendly now than when I joined [three years ago].’ Now, she tells us, the wildest thing she’d expect to see at an ‘initiation’ ceremony would be a drinking game, ‘like, trying a slightly weird drink – nothing that out there.’
Ben, who is on both the rowing team and an intramural rugby team at the University of Southampton, echoes her thoughts. ‘I know rugby has a bad reputation, but I’ve never had [a negative] experience,’ he says. ‘No one wants to make anyone uncomfortable; we’d never cross that line between fun and bullying.’ According to him, these days, the craziest thing his society does are games around a table with rules which, for the most part, seemed unrelated to drinking: ‘for instance, if you say the word ‘‘drink’’, you put your head to the table until the next person says it, or if you say ‘‘my’’ you have to do a press up. They aren’t targeted towards first years – we all join in.’ In other words? Not so rowdy stuff.
Sam*, an undergraduate who plays football at Imperial College London, says initiations nowadays are equally tame at the central London uni. ‘Someone drank beer through a sock once,’ they admit. ‘That’s as dramatic as it ever really gets.’
Be nice, or else
So what changed? Sure, the students’ unions have all officially banned hazing, but that hasn’t historically acted as much of a deterrent. Is the threat of formal punishment enough to cause the shift, or is there something else at play?
A far cry from bygone days when humiliating your mates was comedy gold, in 2024, students have altered their priorities in a way which might be unrecognisable to anyone who studied in the noughties or early 2010s. Putting your friends into situations they aren’t comfortable with has become a real faux-pas in the past few years. Social media has not only spread awareness of how to better take care of your health – #sobercurious has been used nearly 100,000 times on TikTok – it’s also put an entire generation in the spotlight. Mistakes you make at 19 can, and often will, be used against you later in life, and no one wants footage of them encouraging a teenager to drink themself to near death to be the first thing that comes up when you Google their name.
I don’t have that same determination to make others feel the pain that some people seem to.
‘Accountability culture has really changed people’s mindsets,’ Sam says. ‘Everyone is really respectful of each other’s boundaries now.’ Southampton student Ben agrees, describing a time when his society trialled a ‘quasi-initiation’ a few years ago, where first years were encouraged to take part in low-stakes drinking challenges like racing to finish a pint: ‘as soon as we could tell they might not be enjoying it we called it off and turned it into a normal [pub social].’ He says: ‘We haven’t done anything like that ever since… It’s hard being a fresher. Why make it worse?’
The end of a (very long) era
Not everyone is so empathetic. ‘I don’t have that same determination to make others feel the pain that some people seem to,’ Sophie says. She’s seen people who have ‘a chip on their shoulder about the fact that they had to [do drinking challenges] in their first year. They feel like they have a right to make others do the same’.
Peer pressure, she says, is still present, but on its way out. ‘There’s definitely less of that attitude now, but when you’re coming in as a fresher you definitely still feel a lot of pressure to join in and be a good sport,’ she says, even if it isn’t spelled out explicitly. So will she be continuing the tradition this year? Yes – but ‘in a fun way’. ‘Anything that leads to someone having a bad time just isn’t fun anymore,’ Sophie says. Shots, three legged races, and drinking games like King’s Cup are all in, but miscellaneous bodily fluids and revenge-by-proxy are firmly out.
It won’t be a huge surprise if this is the generation who end up killing off initiations completely. They’ve already been reported to be less interested in drinking and clubbing, and more interested in wholesome activities like knitting and reading, and there’s nothing wholesome about forcing down fourteen shots of vodka when you’d rather be in bed. Within a couple of years, the wildest tales will be relegated to the pantheon of student horror stories, passed down through word of mouth and the power of Snapchat. They will continue to be twisted, recounted earnestly by boys who swear they ‘know a guy’ until they become nothing more than cautionary tales from a bygone era. And that can only be a good thing.
*Names have been changed