5 No-cost and Low-cost Ways to Jumpstart Campus Hazing Prevention
Bogged down by budget lines? Feeling under-resourced? Here are 5 no-cost and low-cost ways to jumpstart your campus hazing prevention.
Under the newly passed Stop Campus Hazing Act (2024), colleges and universities are required to include a policy statement outlining their research-informed, campus-wide hazing prevention programs for students, staff, and faculty. Yet, designing educational initiatives and large-scale prevention efforts can feel overwhelming, especially when working with limited resources. Hazing is often framed solely as a fraternity and sorority life issue, leaving the responsibility for campus-wide prevention on the shoulders of one staff member or functional unit. However, in alignment with the Hazing Prevention Framework (HPF) and with the goal of creating a campus climate that is inhospitable to hazing, it is essential to build broad-based commitment and capacity for recognition and intervention across all stakeholder groups, whether they be students, faculty, staff, or parents. So, where- and how- can campus professionals begin to gather support for hazing prevention efforts? And how can they begin to develop tailored, research-informed strategies without a dedicated budget? To address these challenges, StopHazing staff members have compiled 5 low-to-no-cost approaches to jumpstart hazing prevention efforts on your campus and strengthen your institution’s commitment and capacity.
No-cost and Low-cost Strategy #1: Assessments
The first approach to jumpstarting your campus’s hazing prevention efforts is to gather and then present data about the nature and extent of hazing on your campus to senior leaders and decision-makers. Some relevant data points include campus reporting statistics and findings from previous hazing investigations. There are also opportunities to collect data by embedding questions about student hazing experiences, behaviors, and attitudes and perceptions into existing campus surveys.
StopHazing also offers resources to support data-gathering. For example, in the Campus Commitment to Hazing Prevention: Action Guide, there is a dedicated information-gathering tool, which provides a useful roadmap for considering your campus’s current resource allocation (i.e., funding and staff), efforts in progress (e.g., communications campaigns, trainings), and infrastructure (e.g., policies, incident response) for hazing prevention. This resource also includes a worksheet to help plan and prioritize next steps for your institution. Your campus could also engage in a risk and protective factor analysis, considering the elements of your campus culture that make hazing more or less likely to occur. The Hazing Prevention Toolkit provides a brief overview of risk and protective factors, and this can be a valuable resource to aid in the strategic planning of future programs and educational initiatives.
No-cost and Low-cost Strategy #2: Hazing Prevention Coalitions
Another approach that your campus can use to strengthen existing hazing prevention efforts or build a foundation for prevention work is by developing a campus-wide coalition focused on hazing and its prevention. Coalition-building provides opportunities to increase the overall capacity for hazing prevention work, connect a range of campus stakeholders to provide perspective on future initiatives, and develop working groups to share the workload. Building a coalition can also create opportunities for ongoing strategic partnerships across athletics, student affairs, faculty, and institutional advancement. The Hazing Prevention Toolkit highlights the importance of coalitions in increasing the overall capacity for hazing prevention on your campus, and Missouri Partners in Prevention developed a Coalition Building Toolkit with step-by-step instructions for making the ask of campus partners, establishing a guiding vision and mission, and sustaining the work for a long-term cultural shift.
No-cost and Low-cost Strategy #3: Hazing Prevention Education & Training
Campus-wide education is a promising strategy for hazing prevention. StopHazing has developed the largest collection of free hazing prevention resources to educate a range of campus stakeholders and jumpstart these efforts. We offer research-informed workshops guides such as Making Space for Leaders to Lead Change and Practicing Values-Based Leadership & Decision Making. Our 10 Signs of Healthy & Unhealthy Groups workshop comes complete with pre-made slides, facilitation guide, list of tabling activities, and one-pagers that define all 20 healthy and unhealthy signs. We also offer facilitation and programming guides for films like We Don’t Haze– a 16-minute award-winning documentary made in collaboration with the Clery Center–, HAZING –a 90-minute first-person documentary by Byron Hurt, and Intervene– a 20-minute bystander intervention training video from Cornell University. We Don’t Haze and Intervene have both been tested for efficacy and published in peer-reviewed journals, making these resources research-based. If capacity for education poses a barrier to implementing these strategies, hazing prevention education can also be embedded into existing educational programs such as the campus’ bystander intervention training and student wellness campaigns. Education, overall, presents an opportunity to build knowledge and skills for recognizing hazing within your campus community.
No-cost and Low-cost Strategy #4: Outreach & Communication
Communication campaigns are another way to jumpstart hazing prevention on your campus, and they present opportunities to gather commitment from students, senior leadership, institutional advancement partners, parent and family programs , and your marketing and communications staff.
Leadership Statements
Leadership statements present opportunities for senior leaders and student leaders to endorse campus hazing prevention initiatives, take an explicitly anti-hazing stance, and advocate for ethical leadership in a visible way. Cornell University highlights their leadership statements on their hazing website, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), similarly, showcases an institutional ethical leadership statement that guides all community members.
Websites
Visible commitment to hazing prevention can also come in the form of website development, specifically, having a dedicated page about hazing and its prevention on your campus. Institutions such as the University of California at Santa Barbara, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and the University of Texas at Austin have websites that include educational information (e.g., definitions of hazing, statistics), information on existing hazing prevention efforts, and reporting options.
Communications
Low-to-no-cost hazing prevention efforts can also include a prevention and programming update in newsletters shared with students, families, and alumni. Senior leaders can send regular (semesterly or yearly) email reminders to students about campus hazing policies and prevention efforts. In the Campus Commitment to Hazing Prevention: Action Guide there are also resources geared towards engaging families and students in hazing prevention work. Hazing prevention communications can include passive, campus-wide poster campaigns that highlight institutional definitions of hazing, reporting information, and available prevention resources, or it could be a social norms campaign developed using student survey data. Social media is also an effective way to widely disseminate information about campus hazing prevention and policies, and StopHazing developed multiple infographics and a social media toolkit to support these efforts.
No-cost and Low-cost Strategy #5: Policy & Law Compliance
Finally, an approach for initiating conversations about hazing prevention on your campus is policy compliance. Under the newly passed Stop Campus Hazing Act (2024), campuses will be required to include hazing statistics in their Annual Security Reports, develop policy statements to document their comprehensive, research-informed hazing prevention education and programming, and publicly disclose violations of the institution’s hazing policy through hazing incident transparency reports. To ensure that your campus is in compliance with federal law and your state’s anti-hazing law, evaluate and refresh your current campus hazing policy, and be sure that these policies are easily accessible (both to view and understand) for students, family, staff, and faculty. To support the development of your transparency reports, StopHazing developed a transparency report flowchart, and hazinginfo.org is a free hazing database where you can search and find examples of policies, websites, and transparency reports.
While compliance with state and federal law is a key piece of campus-wide hazing prevention, it is important to remember that compliance – boxchecking – is a first step and not the only step. As you evaluate the policies and procedures you currently have in place to address hazing, consider the ways in which additional prevention efforts (wide-scale education, targeted trainings, cyclical data collection) can support culture shifts.
Conclusion
There is no one-size-fits-all approach to campus hazing prevention, and it’s important to meet the needs of your campus where they are at. While implementing campus-wide prevention efforts can feel overwhelming, these strategies offer a starting point to build commitment and capacity without spending additional funds. Ready to take the next step in creating a safer, more inclusive campus culture? Explore more resources and services available through Stophazing and start building your prevention plan today- click here to learn more.
Authors:
Lauren Griffin, M.Ed. – Program & Prevention Coordinator at StopHazing
Devin Franklin, M.Ed. – Doctoral Research Fellow at StopHazing