Healthy Community Doesn’t Harm.
Your experience at UW-Madison is a chance to find community that encourages, uplifts, and grows you toward your social, academic, and professional pursuits.
Hazing, in many groups, is a tradition that claims to be a necessary way to create community, organizational pride, and help you grow. But hazing is way more harmful than it is good.
There are much better ways to create community. True community can encourage, uplift, and grow you in ways that don’t put you in the way of harm. Learn more about why it’s important to avoid hazing by clicking each box.
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Your Mental Health
Hazing can be harmful to your mental health and wellbeing. Hazing often involves coercion, humiliation, or abuse, which can lead to anxiety, depression and PTSD. Hazing can also create trauma for the individuals being hazed and the individuals participating in the hazing that lasts long after the hazing experience.
Your Safety
Hazing can jeopardize your safety, exposing you to physical harm, substance abuse, and psychological distress. Hazing often forces individuals into dangerous activities and extreme conditions. The nature of hazing can inhibit your ability to opt out freely, isolating you from support and placing you in vulnerable situations.
Your Academics
Hazing can be harmful to your academic success. Hazing often involves time-consuming, stressful, or degrading activities that interfere with studying, attending class, and completing assignments. You may experience exhaustion, distraction, or emotional distress that makes it difficult to focus or stay motivated.
Hazing is known to lead to academic disengagement and withdrawal, especially when students feel unsafe or unsupported in their learning environment. These disruptions can have lasting effects on academic performance and persistence throughout your time in college.
Your Reputation
Hazing can be harmful to your reputation.. Hazing often involves abusive, illegal, or unethical behavior that can damage how others perceive you—both personally and professionally. Students who participate in hazing may face disciplinary action, legal consequences, or public exposure that affects their credibility and trustworthiness.
Your Social Life
Hazing can be harmful to your social life and sense of belonging. Hazing often involves exclusion, manipulation, or abusive group dynamics that damage trust and connection. Instead of building genuine friendships, hazing can create fear, resentment, or isolation among you and your peers.
Students may feel pressured to conform or stay silent, even when uncomfortable, which can erode healthy relationships. Hazing can also fracture group cohesion and leave lasting emotional scars that affect how individuals relate to others during and after college. These impacts undermine the very community hazing claims to strengthen
"For a community to be whole and healthy, it must be based on people's love and concern for each other."
Millard Fuller
So, What?
1. Don’t Participate.
Make the choice today that you won’t allow yourself to take part in hazing. Understand that you have options and lean into the communities that make you feel safe, secure, and comfortable.
2. Educate Yourself.
Learn more about hazing, its history, and alternatives to hazing practices. Stay informed about groups that might have a reputation for hazing and ask questions about group practices before joining.
3. Encourage Your Community.
Talk to your friends and community members about hazing. Talk about its harm and alternatives. Help them make a commitment to disengage from hazing activities and advocate for prevention practices.
Were you or someone you know involved in a hazing incident?
Want To Learn More?
Hazing Intervention
Learn intervention strategies to help others who might be engaged in hazing activity directly and indirectly.
Policy & Violations
Learn more about UW-Madison's hazing policy and stay informed on the organizations who have violated hazing policy at the university.
For Community Members
Learn how hazing impacts the entire community and how family, friends, UW-Madison staff/faculty, and other community members should respond.