Hazing victims also to blame

Hazing victims were willing victims. I said it 11 years ago in this space. I said it again in 2019, when a Philippine Military Academy cadet died from hazing and three others were hospitalized. I say it again now to mean that nothing has really changed. Things even got worse.

While in the past, the victims were rushed by their brods, aka torturers, to the hospital, as in the case of University of Santo Tomas (UST) law student Horacio Castillo III, the badly beaten body of Adamson University chemistry major, John Matthew Salilig, was hastily buried by his torturers somewhere in Cavite.

Hazing victims as partly, if not wholly, to blame for their own deaths or that they had it coming, is an unpopular, even tactless, thing to say while a family is grieving the loss of a member. It is not nice to blame the dead. But things need to be said.

I have yet to hear bereaved families and friends of hazing victims say that their dear departed were willing, if not somewhat hesitant, victims who walked to their slaughter. What one hears are cries for justice and retribution. The blame is heaped on the hazers who are alive and walking, they who wield paddles, whips, and baseball bats, in the name of brotherhood and loyalty. They who had once been brutalized themselves and survived, and who are “paying it forward” with the same physical cruelty. As they say, there are no sadists where there are no masochists.

Among those who had survived by the skin of their teeth, had anyone come forward to say it was all wrong and then severed ties with the so-called brotherhood? Ex-cultists who survived with soupy brains have done better.

The grieving should go beyond lamenting their dearly departed’s dreams that were laid to waste. Yes, we commiserate and sympathize. Not you, not I, who have not experienced this kind of loss, can ever fathom their pain, my way of saying that this kind of loss should not happen to anyone.

Grieving families should do more than just blame the fratmen who inflicted the death blows. They should go out there and tell the bright but gullible young—in the strongest, uncoolest words—that it is stupid, katangahan, and kabobohan to allow one’s body to be beaten to a pulp. In effect, that is saying that their dear departed belong to that category. But how to explain law students getting misled to think that a true brother inflicts physical pain, and even sends brothers to the morgue, if not to the intensive care unit, there to languish like pinikpikan? And, recently, to a hastily dug grave in the grasslands.

Go erect a billboard.

Doctors have tried explaining why a hazing victim succumbed—multiple organ failure, internal hemorrhage, heart attack. Psychologists keep explaining the whys—the need to belong, false sense of brotherhood, etc. The police tell the media the where, what, when, who, how. The media even show quick flashes of the victims’ “kulay talong (eggplant color)” physical state.

The anti-hazing law is there, but it has not served as a deterrent, as evidenced by the deaths. The law is, at best, merely punitive. Life imprisonment for the guilty, thank you. Parents who lost sons numbly walk out of the courtroom, murmuring the sad refrain: “Nothing will bring them back to life.”

Some frats with Greek letter names are known for their supposed brotherhood that goes beyond university and into their legal and political careers, even allegedly influencing their decisions—right or wrong. Years ago, the revered late Sen. Jovito Salonga, a University of the Philippines law graduate, publicly announced his resignation from the Sigma Rho fraternity, after a neophyte died because of hazing.

Some law school frats carry Latin names or are named after their school symbols—predators like the eagle, the lion. There is Aquila Legis of Ateneo de Manila, Lex Leonum Fraternitas of San Beda College, Aegis Juris of UST. These are frats in Catholic schools figuring in hazing deaths. The fratmen from Adamson (also a Catholic university) who carried Salilig to his grave belong to Tau Gamma Phi fraternity which, as statistics show, has the most kills.

How stupid of fratmen to equate their cruelty with the power, fierceness, and mystery of their Greek and Latin names and animal symbols. Speaking of eagles and lions, these amazing creatures of the wild are true to their essence, they consume only what they need, they are not cruel and greedy. Humans have a lot to learn from their swiftness, strength, and precision. A wrong move on your part, you get devoured.

Mike de Leon’s much-acclaimed movie, “Batch ’81,” is not far from the truth. It should be shown and watched again to everyone’s horror.

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