THE EDITOR, Sir:
IT IS the beginning of another academic year when senior students get the grand opportunity of orienting, acculturating, initiating, guiding and other euphemistic terms for grubbing, ragging, humiliating, abusing, harassing, tormenting and in extreme cases torturing and traumatising new students.
This practice finds varying degrees of acceptance in educational institutions. Administrators tend to turn a blind eye unless someone is seriously hurt physically. Nobody pays attention to the emotional damage done to students who are the victims of the actions of senior students.
Some students carry feelings of anger, hate and resentment for years. Some quietly bide their time until they become senior students and make sure that new students suffer the same fate as they did when they were new.
Students who take no pleasure in making other people uncomfortable do not participate in ragging. In my view, the kind of person who takes pleasure in making other people uncomfortable by ragging them is no different from the kind of person who kicks down people's doors, forces them to their knees, and orders them to beg for mercy and then shoots them. It is only that one person takes the actions to the extreme.
Flouring, or dousing a student with water on his or her birthday is just as offensive as ragging and should not be tolerated in our educational institutions.
The problem of ragging is at its worst in institutions at the tertiary level. The bandwagon fallacy is spouted as justification for doing most things in Jamaica; therefore, I expect the response to my protestation to be, 'Oh, they do the same thing in institutions abroad, so nothing is wrong with it.' Obviously, I do not concur.
Ragging is disrespectful regardless of the euphemistic terms that are used to veil this reprehensible action. This is clearly not a demonstration of true respect for all.
I am, etc.,
WINNIE ANDERSON-BROWN
winab@cwjamaica.com
Bagatelle District
Ashley P.A., Clarendon
