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Another Penn State - MESS!
Fraternity Hazing and PTSD: Insiders Share Gory Details of Pledging Penn State’s Kappa Delta Rho
https://www.yahoo.com/health/fraternity-hazing-and-ptsd-insiders-share-gory-122286510207.html
From the outside, the Kappa Delta Rho fraternity house at Penn State University looks idyllic — a stone, Tudor-style mansion with a sprawling lot on a quiet off-campus street. But what goes on inside the house has been the subject of intense scrutiny since January, when a member, James Vivenzio, 21, informed police of an invitation-only Facebook page where KDR brothers regularly posted nude photos of intoxicated women, sometimes being sexually assaulted.
In May, Penn State rescinded the fraternity’s recognition on campus for three years, a reversal of the Interfraternity Council’s initial ruling, which said KDR could remain as long as members participated in sexual-assault-intervention training, among other measures to change the frat’s culture.
On June 4, the national headquarters of Kappa Delta Rho expelled from the fraternity 38 of the Penn State members involved in the Facebook scandal — and on June 9, a new chapter of the drama unfolded: Vivenzio filed suit against Penn State and Kappa Delta Rho, as well as the university’s Interfraternity Council and Panhellenic Association, claiming the fraternity’s intense hazing left him with posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD), for which he was hospitalized earlier this year. Other alleged outcomes of the hazing include failing his freshman year, despite having been a “successful high school student,” the court documents state, and a stint in rehab for alcohol abuse.
Vivenzio’s lawyers call the fraternity’s hazing “barbaric” and “life-threatening,” claiming pledges endured cigarette burns to the chest; forced consumption of copious amounts of hard alcohol and concoctions of hot sauce, liquor, cat food, and urine during “line-ups” in the frat house basement; and endless rounds of push-ups and wall-sits. At one point, pledges were forced to do push-ups on the basement floor, which was covered with garbage, broken glass, bleach, and cigarettes; one pledge, who was allergic to bleach, had to be given a shot of epinephrine.
Two pledges were reportedly branded on the buttocks with hot clothes hangers.
And reputedly, backing out was not an option: When Vivenzio missed a line-up, a 6-foot-5 brother allegedly punched him in the face and body repeatedly without warning.
You did not miss a line-up,” a Penn State KDR alumnus, who did not overlap with Vivenzio in the fraternity and wishes to remain anonymous, tells Yahoo Health. “If you missed a line-up, you were kicked out of the pledge class.”
Line-ups are one of the hallmarks of Penn State KDR hazing, becoming progressively more intense over the course of the pledging process, according to this KDR alumnus. “In the beginning of hazing, it would be primarily physical — push-ups, sit-ups, jumping jacks — with some verbal demeaning,” he explains. “They would just try to beat you down,” criticizing pledges’ intellect, appearance, and sexuality. “They would call you gay, say that you would never get laid,” the source says.
Another Penn State KDR brother — who was also in the chapter prior to Vivenzio’s tenure and also wishes to remain anonymous — confirms that the line-ups became increasingly severe. “At first, it would just be a little bit of yelling and push-ups,” he says. “It would be like a bad football practice.” But over a period of weeks, sometimes an entire semester, the hazing intensified, with the addition of “blue chairs” (the fraternity’s name for wall-sits), additional verbal abuse, excessive alcohol intake, and, eventually, forced consumption of concoctions of hot sauce, vinegar, milk, and, as one of the KDR alums later found out, urine. “The ultimate goal was to make you vomit,” he says, adding, “You had to drink milk and vinegar and then go on a three-mile run and do sprints up a hill.”
“Hazing is a process — it’s not like a bullying event that happens once,” Susan Lipkins, author of Preventing Hazing, tells Yahoo Health. “There is a beginning, which is often mild and looks like fun, and then it ends in what they call ‘hell week,’ which is extreme.”
As hell week — the final week of pledging — approached, “the days would get longer, so you were at the house almost 16 to 20 hours per day with very little sleep,” the first KDR source says, adding that paddling began during these final days. He was once kept awake for 30 straight hours, during which he cleaned the frat house, performed push-ups, and drank more vomit-inducing mixtures. “The last day before I got in [to the fraternity], you’re running on no sleep, getting screamed at, you’re delirious,” the other brother adds. “You’re up at 4 in the morning doing 50 push-ups. That was probably the worst [part] — the combination of all that.”
Sleep deprivation aside, this KDR member claims that hazing was mostly just “fun.” “I had to dress up as a meatball and wander around a party,” he recalls. “Some would say that’s degrading, walking around with spaghetti and sauce all over you. But the party was the meatball — you were the center of attention.”
The first KDR alum remembers the pledging process less fondly/ One weekend, after he made fun of a brother, “I had to eat a dozen Oreo cookies covered in syrup, flour, chili powder, and any other condiments and sauces they could find in the kitchen,” he recalls. Each time he vomited, he was forced to do a headstand in the trashcan where he’d puked. “That was right before my breaking point,” he says.
A few weeks before pledging ended, this KDR alum began to ask himself: “Is it worth it?” He went so far as to leave the house, but two of his fellow pledges chased after him. “They told me, ‘They’re just trying to break you, because they want the best of the best in the house,’ and to stick it out,” he says. So he did.
Similarly, Vivenzio “tried to flee numerous times,” according to court documents, but was always persuaded to return, after being promised that the hazing was almost over. When contacted for comment, counsel for the National Fraternity of Kappa Delta Rho declined, citing the active litigation.
This isn’t the first case claiming hazing has led to serious consequences. In 2009, a 21-year-old member of Sigma Alpha Mu fraternity at Tulane University in New Orleans filed a federal lawsuit, saying hazing compelled him to take “unwise actions.” The student had recently pleaded guilty to involuntary manslaughter, after a drinking-and-driving incident in which he struck and killed a pedestrian, leading to a five-year prison sentence.
Even so, one of the largest-ever studies of hazing suggests that emotional trauma is not, in fact, the norm. In a 2008 survey of more than 11,000 students at 53 college campuses, more than half of those involved in clubs, teams, and other campus organizations had experienced hazing; the practice was especially prevalent among the Greek community, with 73 percent of fraternity or sorority members citing incidences of hazing, often involving alcohol and sleep deprivation.
Interestingly, the students primarily reported positive outcomes, with nearly a third saying the rituals helped them feel a part of the group. According to Aldo Cimino, a researcher at UC Santa Barbara who has extensively studied hazing, a sense of bonding after hazing is common, at least anecdotally — and this may explain why so many people, especially men, are willing to endure such harsh treatment. “They want what’s at the other end of that dark tunnel: membership in a socially valued coalition,” he says. “You are accepted into an alliance of people that can help you advance your own interests, and that is to your ultimate betterment.”
Hazing may also serve a social purpose for its perpetrators, which may be the reason it has persisted for hundreds of years. (As early as the 1600s, hazing, then called “pennalism,” was used to groom underclassmen before they graduated from university.) “Hazing could effectively select out prospective members that are less committed to the group,” while establishing a power hierarchy for new members to follow, Cimino says. “Hazing can serve a social function and be wrong.”
Fraternity Hazing and PTSD: Insiders Share Gory Details of Pledging Penn State’s Kappa Delta Rho
https://www.yahoo.com/health/fraternity-hazing-and-ptsd-insiders-share-gory-122286510207.html
From the outside, the Kappa Delta Rho fraternity house at Penn State University looks idyllic — a stone, Tudor-style mansion with a sprawling lot on a quiet off-campus street. But what goes on inside the house has been the subject of intense scrutiny since January, when a member, James Vivenzio, 21, informed police of an invitation-only Facebook page where KDR brothers regularly posted nude photos of intoxicated women, sometimes being sexually assaulted.
In May, Penn State rescinded the fraternity’s recognition on campus for three years, a reversal of the Interfraternity Council’s initial ruling, which said KDR could remain as long as members participated in sexual-assault-intervention training, among other measures to change the frat’s culture.
On June 4, the national headquarters of Kappa Delta Rho expelled from the fraternity 38 of the Penn State members involved in the Facebook scandal — and on June 9, a new chapter of the drama unfolded: Vivenzio filed suit against Penn State and Kappa Delta Rho, as well as the university’s Interfraternity Council and Panhellenic Association, claiming the fraternity’s intense hazing left him with posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD), for which he was hospitalized earlier this year. Other alleged outcomes of the hazing include failing his freshman year, despite having been a “successful high school student,” the court documents state, and a stint in rehab for alcohol abuse.
Vivenzio’s lawyers call the fraternity’s hazing “barbaric” and “life-threatening,” claiming pledges endured cigarette burns to the chest; forced consumption of copious amounts of hard alcohol and concoctions of hot sauce, liquor, cat food, and urine during “line-ups” in the frat house basement; and endless rounds of push-ups and wall-sits. At one point, pledges were forced to do push-ups on the basement floor, which was covered with garbage, broken glass, bleach, and cigarettes; one pledge, who was allergic to bleach, had to be given a shot of epinephrine.
Two pledges were reportedly branded on the buttocks with hot clothes hangers.
And reputedly, backing out was not an option: When Vivenzio missed a line-up, a 6-foot-5 brother allegedly punched him in the face and body repeatedly without warning.
You did not miss a line-up,” a Penn State KDR alumnus, who did not overlap with Vivenzio in the fraternity and wishes to remain anonymous, tells Yahoo Health. “If you missed a line-up, you were kicked out of the pledge class.”
Line-ups are one of the hallmarks of Penn State KDR hazing, becoming progressively more intense over the course of the pledging process, according to this KDR alumnus. “In the beginning of hazing, it would be primarily physical — push-ups, sit-ups, jumping jacks — with some verbal demeaning,” he explains. “They would just try to beat you down,” criticizing pledges’ intellect, appearance, and sexuality. “They would call you gay, say that you would never get laid,” the source says.
Another Penn State KDR brother — who was also in the chapter prior to Vivenzio’s tenure and also wishes to remain anonymous — confirms that the line-ups became increasingly severe. “At first, it would just be a little bit of yelling and push-ups,” he says. “It would be like a bad football practice.” But over a period of weeks, sometimes an entire semester, the hazing intensified, with the addition of “blue chairs” (the fraternity’s name for wall-sits), additional verbal abuse, excessive alcohol intake, and, eventually, forced consumption of concoctions of hot sauce, vinegar, milk, and, as one of the KDR alums later found out, urine. “The ultimate goal was to make you vomit,” he says, adding, “You had to drink milk and vinegar and then go on a three-mile run and do sprints up a hill.”
“Hazing is a process — it’s not like a bullying event that happens once,” Susan Lipkins, author of Preventing Hazing, tells Yahoo Health. “There is a beginning, which is often mild and looks like fun, and then it ends in what they call ‘hell week,’ which is extreme.”
As hell week — the final week of pledging — approached, “the days would get longer, so you were at the house almost 16 to 20 hours per day with very little sleep,” the first KDR source says, adding that paddling began during these final days. He was once kept awake for 30 straight hours, during which he cleaned the frat house, performed push-ups, and drank more vomit-inducing mixtures. “The last day before I got in [to the fraternity], you’re running on no sleep, getting screamed at, you’re delirious,” the other brother adds. “You’re up at 4 in the morning doing 50 push-ups. That was probably the worst [part] — the combination of all that.”
Sleep deprivation aside, this KDR member claims that hazing was mostly just “fun.” “I had to dress up as a meatball and wander around a party,” he recalls. “Some would say that’s degrading, walking around with spaghetti and sauce all over you. But the party was the meatball — you were the center of attention.”
The first KDR alum remembers the pledging process less fondly/ One weekend, after he made fun of a brother, “I had to eat a dozen Oreo cookies covered in syrup, flour, chili powder, and any other condiments and sauces they could find in the kitchen,” he recalls. Each time he vomited, he was forced to do a headstand in the trashcan where he’d puked. “That was right before my breaking point,” he says.
A few weeks before pledging ended, this KDR alum began to ask himself: “Is it worth it?” He went so far as to leave the house, but two of his fellow pledges chased after him. “They told me, ‘They’re just trying to break you, because they want the best of the best in the house,’ and to stick it out,” he says. So he did.
Similarly, Vivenzio “tried to flee numerous times,” according to court documents, but was always persuaded to return, after being promised that the hazing was almost over. When contacted for comment, counsel for the National Fraternity of Kappa Delta Rho declined, citing the active litigation.
This isn’t the first case claiming hazing has led to serious consequences. In 2009, a 21-year-old member of Sigma Alpha Mu fraternity at Tulane University in New Orleans filed a federal lawsuit, saying hazing compelled him to take “unwise actions.” The student had recently pleaded guilty to involuntary manslaughter, after a drinking-and-driving incident in which he struck and killed a pedestrian, leading to a five-year prison sentence.
Even so, one of the largest-ever studies of hazing suggests that emotional trauma is not, in fact, the norm. In a 2008 survey of more than 11,000 students at 53 college campuses, more than half of those involved in clubs, teams, and other campus organizations had experienced hazing; the practice was especially prevalent among the Greek community, with 73 percent of fraternity or sorority members citing incidences of hazing, often involving alcohol and sleep deprivation.
Interestingly, the students primarily reported positive outcomes, with nearly a third saying the rituals helped them feel a part of the group. According to Aldo Cimino, a researcher at UC Santa Barbara who has extensively studied hazing, a sense of bonding after hazing is common, at least anecdotally — and this may explain why so many people, especially men, are willing to endure such harsh treatment. “They want what’s at the other end of that dark tunnel: membership in a socially valued coalition,” he says. “You are accepted into an alliance of people that can help you advance your own interests, and that is to your ultimate betterment.”
Hazing may also serve a social purpose for its perpetrators, which may be the reason it has persisted for hundreds of years. (As early as the 1600s, hazing, then called “pennalism,” was used to groom underclassmen before they graduated from university.) “Hazing could effectively select out prospective members that are less committed to the group,” while establishing a power hierarchy for new members to follow, Cimino says. “Hazing can serve a social function and be wrong.”
