“It’s like being in hell,” said one university student, describing the feeling of taking part in one of Thailand’s notorious, and seemingly intractable, university hazing rituals. The practice of hazing in Thailand, which goes under the acronym SOTUS (Seniority: Order: Tradition: Unity: Spirit), or Rab Nong (welcoming the young), is thought to have originated in Kasetsart University in the late 1940s, modeled on hazing at Cornell University and other universities in the US. Cornell has now prohibited hazing; in Thailand it’s incorrigibly recurrent in many universities.
In Chiang Mai this month senior students at Chiang Mai University came under the spotlight after it was revealed that new students, freshies, had been beaten sometime between April 17-19. Pictures of their bruises, albeit not severe, appeared later on social media. The university avowed to investigate and punish seniors, likely reenacting their own freshman welcome, only if they did it, “without approval from the university,” according to a report in Khaosod. However, approved SOTUS, and its unapologetically fundamental criteria of often violently introducing new students to the university and its hierarchy, will no doubt remain intact, as it is a consequence of a wider culture that pervades the Thai ethos: that of entrenching young minds in a hierarchical order.
Students during hazing at worst might be stripped naked, beaten, sexually harassed, forced to crawl through dirty water, even killed (though you would think accidentally), and at the very least, in the negative, be shouted at and humiliated. At times hazing might look more like university sanctioned sadism than it does a warm welcome.
Phokhai Saengrojrat, a student at Pathumthani Technical College, died after reportedly being forced to consume an alcoholic drink and soon after having his face pushed into the sand at Sai Noi Beach in Prachuap Khiri Khan Province, after which, reports say, he suffocated. The boy’s parents later told the press that they wanted the loss of their child to be the last time such a thing happens due to hazing. There have been other deaths. In 2008 a student from Uthenthawai University died from injuries sustained during a hazing session. Photos and videos, students claimed at Chiang Mai University, are not allowed during these rituals, but since of the arrival of social media hazing has thankfully been scandalized to an almost effective degree.
A short film called ‘Vicious Cycle’ (below, with English translation), made by Thai students, demonstrates the brutality of the hazing ritual. Anti-SOTUS social media pages, which have gained thousands of followers, have been set up in an attempt to give the barbarity of SOTUS some public attention, and yet, in spite of such a prevailing negative backlash to this ordained university culture, it continues.