Nuwer Blog letter

I am a student that currently attends Eckerd College in St. Petersburg, Florida. As both a college student and an athlete I have both witnessed and research the act of hazing. I have seen how it can humiliate not only a child, but an adult as well. I have visited your website and I believe it can change many communities. One of the main reasons why hazing exists today revolves around the fact that most people are not educated in the topic, and they do not realize the severity of it.

I am writing to you today in support for your cause. I have researched many hazing cases that have occurred not only in the collegiate level of school, but in high schools, athletic teams, gangs, and even in the military. The numbers that I located were unbelievable. Dr. Susan Lipkins found that somewhere around 250,000 college athletes have experience some sort of hazing when trying to join a team. In a survey conducted by Alfred University, they found that ten percent of their participants were hazed before the age of nine. It still remains obvious that the “word” is not being spread.

Eckerd College is a Division II liberal arts school. It does not have a Greek Life like most colleges, so we are very different. Naturally, I never thought that hazing would be a problem on our campus because there were no fraternities or sororities. I took it upon myself to investigate if there were any hazing acts that occurred on our campus. It turns out that hazing has been committed everywhere you look. My neighbor provided an interview for me, which was incorporated into my research paper, of her account of the night in which she was initiation onto a team. At the time, she thought it was all fun and games, but when she looks back at that night, she realized how humiliating it actually was. Because of her, I wanted to see what the community was doing to try and stop these events from occurring; this is when I found your website.

After doing this assignment for my school, I now realize how wide spread hazing is. When I came across your website I found it to be very useful and beneficial for informing the public and creating an awareness of the problem. Thank you for trying to get the information across to everyone. Thank you for encouraging the people to get involved and post their opinions on your blog, because in the words of Stophazing.org, “If you are not part of the solution, you are part of the problem”.