Over the years, I’ve received countless phone calls from concerned parents. Each one echoes a similar worry: their child has shared just enough to raise red flags, but not enough to prompt immediate action. The stories are vague by design: “Something happened.” “It’s just part of the process.” “They said it’ll be over soon.”
When I ask for more information, anything we can use to intervene, I’m often met with hesitation. Parents fear that if they speak up, their child will be targeted or ostracized. One told me, “If I say too much, they’ll know it came from him.” That fear of retaliation is real. And it keeps far too many students and their families silent.
Reading the State of Hazing blog series by HazingInfo org, which currently include entries from Georgia, Louisiana, Ohio, and Washington, pushed me to reflect more deeply on the systemic barriers that make meaningful prevention so difficult. While each state's context is unique, a clear theme emerges: institutions struggle with compliance.
The Georgia feature, titled “Only 19 of Georgia’s 55 higher education institutions are publicly reporting hazing incidents despite state law — with nearly half of those reports out of date,” underscores the gap between legal mandates and actual practice.
Why Transparency Isn’t Enough
Many hazing laws, particularly those requiring disclosure, are built on a single assumption: public shame will drive change. If institutions know their reports will be public, they’ll work harder to prevent hazing.
But here’s the reality: you can’t report what you can’t track. And most institutions lack the infrastructure, training, or cross-campus buy-in to do either well.
Take the Stop Campus Hazing Act. On paper, it’s a promising step toward federal oversight. But ask any Student Affairs professional how much time, staffing, or support they’ve received to prepare for compliance, and you’ll hear a familiar refrain: “We’re being asked to continue to do more with less.”
That’s the central tension we don’t talk about enough.
What’s Getting in the Way
After two decades in this field, I’ve seen the same challenges play out across campuses:
Shrinking resources across higher education. Student Affairs professionals are stretched thin, managing more responsibilities with fewer people and reduced budgets.
Understaffed Fraternity and Sorority Life offices. Prevention is layered on top of advising, crisis response, programming, and compliance, often all managed by a single professional fresh out of graduate school.
A narrow lens on hazing. Hazing is too often seen solely as a “Greek Life issue,” ignoring its presence in athletic teams, honor societies, marching bands, and cultural organizations.
Institutional silence until a headline breaks. Senior leadership often doesn’t prioritize hazing prevention until public scrutiny forces it. Even then, there's confusion about what the law requires, and too few partnerships with legal counsel or compliance experts.
Limited faculty/staff training. Without clear guidance, faculty and staff may overlook, minimize, or misidentify hazing behaviors in the student groups they advise.
Parents are caught in a difficult position. They’re essential allies, but often afraid to speak up. They want accountability without exposing their child, and in a culture of silence, that’s a tough ask.
Add to this the lack of coordination across departments, siloed operations, and inconsistent ownership of prevention efforts, and you get a system that makes hazing prevention feel like an individual’s responsibility, not an institutional one.
It’s hard, but it’s not impossible. We can do better. We have to.
Prevention Is a Community Responsibility
It’s easy to blame an outdated form or a conduct case with no finding. It’s much harder to build a culture of prevention when the systems behind that culture are exhausted, under-resourced, and unsure where to begin. But let me be clear: these are our students. Every student deserves to belong without harm, to be initiated without humiliation, and to lead without perpetuating abuse masked as “tradition.”
Transparency laws are a start, but real prevention begins in the everyday work of educators, advisors, parents, and peers.
Join the Conversation
If you’ve read this far, thank you. I invite you to reflect:
What does hazing prevention look like on your campus?
Do your institution’s actions reflect its policies?
What barriers stand in the way of full compliance or transparency?
I’d love to hear your thoughts and share more stories from the field.