In the search for the origin of this barbaric behaviour called ‘ragging’, one will find that it exists not only in our universities, but also in our schools, work places and most other organisations. It may perhaps, exist in different forms and in different degrees, where seniors try to maintain the tribal culture over newcomers who have to make the transition from their old way of life to the new one dictated by the ‘self-appointed tribal leaders’ of this tribe known as the ‘seniors’.
It is important to pay attention to the fact that the ‘raggers’ are a group of ‘self-appointed tribal leaders ‘who try to show the newcomers that it is not easy to become a member of this tribe, if one is not prepared to go through all the rituals and traditions of this induction process which have been handed down to them by their ancestors.
If and when the rest of the tribe is silent while the newcomers are being humiliated, tortured and in some cases even killed by these ‘self-appointed tribal leaders’, then each and every member of the tribe is automatically going to be ‘an accessory to the crime’, not only by the legal definition of the phrase, but also due to the absence of any formal action of denouncing the leadership of those ‘self-appointed leaders’.
In order to make it clear to the reader why we have to look into all these different aspects in our search for the root causes of this virus, I should also mention a few other interesting phenomena, which have existed perhaps over the last ten years or so, that can be observed in the Sri Lankan state universities.
a) A majority of the newcomers themselves, irrespective of whether they have been victimised directly by the raggers or have been just passive observers, choose to be silent even if they are questioned during an inquiry related to a specific ragging incident.
b) At inquiries, some newcomers even say they got voluntarily ragged by the seniors since they enjoyed it, even when the marshals or the student counselors have video evidence of torture and blatant violations of human rights.
c) Almost all the newcomers say they wear a uniform (black pants and white shirts for males and white or light coloured skirts and blouses for females with the skirts covering their knees) because they like to be ‘formal’ when they come to the university and nobody has forced them to do so. It is easily seen that this urge, to be ‘formal’ when coming to the university, disappears and the majority of the newcomers can be seen in jeans and T-shirts in all kinds of colours, after the ragging season.
Usually, when an experienced investigator observes such behaviour by a potential witness in a criminal inquiry, as being reluctantly silent, or giving evasive answers, or even fearful admissions of his/her enjoyment of being tortured and therefore not wanting to press charges against anyone, then they categorise such a witness, either as a hostile witness and/or accomplice or as an innocent victim/witness who is afraid of the intimidation and threats which have been delivered to him/her by the thugs who are being accused of the crime.
In this digital age, ragging and witness intimidation are done through social media even before the newcomers set foot in their respective universities.
These types of activities may be categorised as ‘cyber bullying / ‘cyber crimes’ and the country’s Criminal (or Penal) Code should be strong enough to cover all such violations. One other very interesting phenomenon I have observed in recent years is, some of the newcomers themselves working as agents of the raggers from the very first day itself. These agents work as informants and sleeper cells that can be activated to herd or coerce their own batch-mates to a place prearranged by the raggers.
In appreciation of their support, these agents will then enjoy certain benefits that their other batch-mates do not have access to and of course will be exempted from ragging too. It is fair to assume in this situation that these agents may have had some kind of communication, willingly or not, with the’ raggers’, most probably through social media, even before they showed up at the university on the first day.
What that means is that there are some freshmen who are willing to sacrifice or betray their own batch-mates, irrespective of the intensity of the physical and mental agonies those sacrificial lambs have to go through, in order to protect themselves from being ragged and also to be in the good books of the thugs who had promised them some other benefits as well.
The irony of this phenomenon is that the raggers say that one of the main cultural values they want to teach the freshmen is ‘keeping the unity within the batch’, which they introduce as ‘Batch-Fit’.
Believe it or not, these are the people who have scored the highest in their GCE A/L examination and have been rewarded with an opportunity to obtain a Bachelor’s degree free of charge since they are believed to be the most intelligent group of youth in the country. But, they can’t even see the contradiction in trying to teach ‘how to achieve the unity in a batch’ by getting a part of that batch to betray the rest. It is clear that characteristics such as manipulating part of a group to betray the rest of their own group, as ‘raggers’, and also agreeing to betray their own batch-mates for their personal gains, as ‘raggees’, are both extremely destructive, immoral behavioural patterns these youths have inculcated within them over twenty some years of living in our society.
Is it because of the training they have gone through to be extremely selfish and back-stabbing, to steal books from their friends and libraries, not to share any notes, information or knowledge with their peers and even to misguide others in order to reduce the competition, to cheat during the exam among other things, in the process of getting them ready from their Grade 5 Scholarship all the way to the GCE A/L examinations, that they have become such selfish ‘raggers’ and ‘raggees? If and when one tries to answer such questions by looking at the origin of the ragging virus, one will have to look into all possible factors that could have influenced these young adults to develop such immoral and inhumane thinking/behavioural patterns while living in our homes within our society under the supervision (at least until the age of eighteen)of parents and extended family, teachers/lecturers/counselors/coaches/mentors, administrators of all educational institutions starting from the kindergarten all the way to universities, healthcare providers, spiritual leaders of all the religions, law enforcers and law makers and more or less, all members of the adult society.
That is why, at the end of Part I of this series, I reminded the reader about one of the old African proverbs which says that “It takes a village to raise a child”.
Multinational studies done over the years, using as many as twenty to fifty countries at times, have shown that similar behavioural patterns are found in other countries as well, perhaps identified by other names as ‘bullying’, ‘hazing’ or even ’initiation/Induction’ rituals.
While the commonality of it across the globe does not justify, in any way, shape or form, the behaviour as something normal, it would certainly be helpful to look at the remedies and protective methods other countries use to fight this virus around the world. An important observation one can make, in the way most of the other countries around the world are attacking this virus, is their approach to it as a Public Health Crisis.
(The writer has served in the higher education sector as an academic for over twenty years in the USA and thirteen years in Sri Lanka and can be contacted at [email protected])