When Hazing is Not Hazing: Getting Beyond Media Narratives of Tradition, Ritual, Acceptance, and Initiation

• In Event: Crime Policy and the Media

Abstract

This study is a Textual and Discourse analysis of high profile hazing news articles over the last 15 years. The analysis consists of 35 articles (textual) and their respective comment sections (discourse) to evaluate how the media shapes the publics interpretation of hazing events.

The typical media narrative model includes hazing as the result of tradition, ritual, acceptance, or initiation. This categorical media narrative removes the much of the content from these hazing events. Discourse analysis reveals that the public partially rejects those narratives and at times the media undercuts their own narrative. In particular, part of an “unrecognized media narrative” includes the nature and context of relationships between perpetrator and victim.

Textual and Discourse analysis indicate that many of the most extreme hazing events are embedded in strainful contexts or relationships. Findings suggestion that these hazing events are more accurately understood as violent crimes as opposed to the categorical media narratives presented to the public. The impact of this analysis suggests the ways in which we think and speak about hazing, as well as the subsequent “solutions”, are counterproductive and distort our understandings of the causes of “hazing”. Researchers present a relational framework that moves beyond the categorical model.

Authors

• Scott Alden Mathers, Eastern Washington University

• Jacqueline Suzanne Chavez, Troy University