Dying to Belong
By Farah Syed
After taking this course, I was really interested at looking at the roles school plays in integrating new students. If not often, in many courses and readings, the message was told “school is a place where people learnt their role in society, where they were socialized”. I always wondered how this happens. This summer, my cousin from San Antonio, Texas visited me and somehow the discussion came to fraternities. So I asked her what they were as it was something that I would often hear about in the media. From what she had told me, it was interesting as it opened my eye as to what extent people can go to belong somewhere. University, for many first year students, may seem as a very intimidating place as not many of us know how the system works and we didn?t have that many friends. What happens in most of these campuses is that fraternities and sororities really shock me.
Students, in order to feel that they belong to a particular group, would join fraternities and sororities to become part of the “family.” However, to be part of the family, one needs to become a pledge and go through ridiculous initiation processes. These involve starting in isolated areas far from the fraternity home in extreme weather conditions and walk back while practicing extreme physical activities such as running, jogging, jumping, fighting and being intoxicated. In some cases, the brothers would engage in gang rape, binge drinking and violence. One fraternity my cousin had mentioned on campus was called the “deltas”. She said every fraternity member had to carve a “delta”symbol somewhere on their body so that after the wound would heal, the delta scar would remain proving their identity. Ironically, when I researched to write this blog, I found out that the delta fraternity had been kicked out from the campus for inhumane “hazing” practices. This is only one of thousands of fraternities that exist where many people get seriously injured or die from the initiation processes every year. It makes us wonder, how desperate are people for a sense of belonging?
