Hazing at universities in Brazil
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Hazing has been a widespread practice on Brazilian universities for decades. Victims are generally teenagers who have been approved on the Vestibular, and this is generally considered to be a rite of passage.
Hazing methods vary among universities, but include paddling, spanking, humiliating, throwing nauseating objects and liquids and, sometimes, even more violent actions such as attaching students to poles for hours, transporting them on truck loading platforms at noon, and forcing them to drink large amounts of alcoholic beverages.
In the 1990s, a lot of incidents began changing the indifference that public opinion had been manifesting about hazing for years. On February 23, 1999, Edison Tsung Chi Hsueh, a student that has just joined the Faculdade de Medicina da Universidade de São Paulo (FM-USP), the best known Brazilian university, who was unable to swim, was pulled into a deep pool several times at a welcoming party. According to official autopsy report of Instituto Médico Legal he finally died by "mechanic asphyxia caused by drowning". Investigations were inconclusive in finding those responsible for the homicide, as there was many people at the party, and there was no collaboration from other students on naming the guilty. No student was ever punished in a criminal or academic-administrative way.
The press gave large coverage on the issue, so new rules against hazing were established the following year, with tough punishments on students that promoted "unwanted hazing". Although, there was not a precise consensus on whether some hazing practices were consensual or not. In welcoming events, older students usually puts a lot of pressure on students that decide not to take part in hazing. Some colleges do not guarantee adequate information on the voluntary decision that newcomers are expected to make about being hazed or not. Anyway, the new rules make it easy for colleges to expel any student that they catch in nonconsensual hazing, so practices got soft, and were even banned in some universities. Fraternities and sororities, meanwhile, still promote widespread hazing.
There is a movement to replace even "innocent" hazing by volunteer actions such as painting a charity organization building, promote blood donation or production of food to be distributed to poor people. This actions are adopted by most of Universities and most of students since 2000. After the tragic incident with the Medicine student in 1999, most hazing policies have been changed to avoid other episodes like that. Most of hazing methods were changed, its uncommom having freshmen spanked or suffering other physical abuses, although it's still usual having them drinking alcoholic beverages (whose use is allowed for people over 18 in Brazil), getting into addapted children games with nauseating foods/liquids, having them painted all over the body to ask other people for money as well as question-answering games designed to make-fun of the new students.
Several careers are known for still having violent hazing, as engineering.
