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Allegations
of Abuse in Institutions |
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For the outside world,
the humiliation and violent abuse allegedly dished out at the Army's Waiouru
cadet school seems bizarre and frightening. But, paradoxically,
psychologists say rites of passage that involve embarrassment - and even pain
- can make people more loyal to a group. Says Victoria
University psychology lecturer Ronald Fischer: "There have been quite a
few experiments showing if you humiliate people - if you make them do really
ridiculous things that embarrass them or if you give them electric shocks -
then afterwards they feel better about the group [than those who don't
experience such treatment] ... It's a pretty well-supported phenomenon."
Imagine, for example,
that you are accepted for a particular cadet school or university which you
want to attend. In the first week or months, you are forced to endure
unexpected humiliation and pain. "That creates some
dissonance, called cognitive dissonance ... You want to be part of that
school but at the same time you suffer. You have to reconcile these two
different experiences and the only way of doing that is justifying that
experience by saying: actually it's worth going through the suffering because
I really want to be part of that school, I really want to be part of that
group. "Once it's over
you're even happier, you're even more committed than before. And afterwards
you think it's the best thing you can do to these new people as well." But taken to excess,
and for some individuals, abuse defeats the purpose of the exercise. Rather
than making them loyal, you risk damaging them for life. This week's allegations
of abuse at the Army's Waiouru cadet school are particularly disturbing,
Fischer says. "The Army should be responsible and should protect
civilians. What are you going to do as a society when your Army is basically
neurotic psychopaths because they went through such a process? ... Now we
have to invest a lot of money for treatment, counselling and therapy." He dismisses the
argument of old soldiers that hazing toughens the new recruits and weeds out
those who won't be able to cope with the tasks ahead. "That's another
beautiful example of dissonance reduction and later justification because, to
admit that it is bad for you, you would completely reverse your whole history
and we as humans don't want to do that. So the only thing you can do is say:
yes, that was the best thing and it prepared us for potentially dangerous
situations and toughened us up ... Once you went through it, the only thing
you can do is justify it. That is a natural human response." The tendency to take
hazing to extremes, occurs most frequently when there is a dearth of morally
responsible leadership, Fischer says. Consider, for example,
the 1971 Stanford Prison Experiment in which a group of healthy, normal
college students were randomly assigned to be mock prisoners and mock-prison
guards. After just six days, the two-week experiment had to be aborted
because of the cruelty and abuse the "guards" were inflicting on
their peers. Among other things,
guards stripped the prisoners naked, placed bags over their heads and
encouraged them to perform sexual acts. Sound familiar? When similar images
of prisoner abuse came out of Abu Ghraib in Iraq this year, the leader of the
1971 study, Philip Zimbardo, told the New York Times he was unsurprised:
"I have exact parallel pictures of prisoners with bags over their
heads". Other examples of
hazing getting out of control include the much-debated 1991
"Tailhook" scandal in the US. During the annual naval aviators'
convention at the Las Vegas Hilton Hotel, 83 women and seven men were
assaulted, according to the Department of Defense. Women aviators
complained that they were raped and forced to run a gauntlet of male officers
who tore at their clothing and grabbed their bodies. Afterwards, a common
explanation from the thousands of witnesses interviewed was that this behaviour
was "expected" of junior officers. In Britain , suspicion
has fallen on the Deepcut Army Barracks in Surrey after four young recruits
were found dead with bullet wounds to the head - some with multiple wounds.
Though the Army has dismissed the deaths as suicide, the families of the dead
soldiers have repeatedly called for an inquiry. Allegations have since
surfaced of a climate of sexual harassment and bullying. "These kinds of
things can happen in any type of society," Fischer says. "Often it
happens in situations with very strong hierarchies, and not enough balances
and checks for people at lower levels. Similar things have happened in a lot
of war zones around the world." The best way to counter
it is with morally responsible leadership and ongoing supervision. "It
should not be acceptable in today's society that individuals within groups
can abuse people in a climate of general abuse and get away with it." Fischer regards the
airing of allegations of abuse at Waiouru as positive. For decades - even
centuries - such behaviour has been covered up. The climate has been one of
denial or implicit acceptance. "It's important for the victims that finally they get an acknowledgment of these abuses ... Also, it sets examples and starts people thinking about what is acceptable in society and hopefully this will give enough impetus to not repeat these kinds of things." |
