School: Minister Destiny Testimony Schools Track: Adult Class: Topic Library — Year 1 (Foundations) Founded and presented by: Muslim Ordained Minister Destiny Marie Morgan
This lesson is educational information, Massachusetts-first, and is not legal advice. Laws vary by state and by case. If you are in danger right now, call 911. If you have a real case, talk to a lawyer — legal aid organizations help many people for free.
Before you start
- This school never asks your name. Your progress is saved only in your own browser on this device — the school collects and keeps nothing. If you pass this unit's quiz (80% or higher, retakes allowed), you earn a downloadable certificate with a blank line — you write your own name on it after you save it. Quiz answers are not shown.
- Hazing hides behind friendly words — tradition, bonding, earning your place. This unit strips those words away and teaches the plain definition, the Massachusetts law (including its duty to report), the federal campus frame, and what bystanders, victims, and families can do.
The lesson
Part 1. What hazing is — humiliation or endangerment as the price of belonging
Hazing is any activity expected of someone joining — or staying in — a group that humiliates, degrades, abuses, or endangers them, regardless of whether they say they are willing. The core transaction is the tell: belonging is made conditional on suffering. The suffering can be physical (forced exertion, forced consumption, exposure, blows), mental (sleep deprivation, isolation, screaming), or social (public humiliation, servitude, demeaning tasks). It does not need to leave a mark; endangering mental health counts, in the Massachusetts definition and in honest speech.
Hazing appears wherever groups control access to belonging: sports teams, fraternities and sororities, marching bands and clubs, workplaces, and military units in general discussion — and in smaller rooms: a team chat, a rookie night at a job. Two distinctions matter. Legitimate training is hard for a reason connected to the activity itself — conditioning for a sport, drills for a skill — and it stops when safety requires. Hazing is hard for a different reason: to test submission.
Part 2. Why "tradition" and "consent" do not make it safe or lawful
The two defenses you will hear are tradition and consent, and both fail — one morally, one legally, and both practically. Tradition proves only that a practice has been repeated; it says nothing about whether it is right, and every harmful custom in history was once defended exactly this way. Notice, too, what tradition-talk conceals: each year's victims become next year's organizers, because enduring the ritual is reframed as the credential that entitles a person to run it. The cycle, not any educational purpose, is what tradition protects.
Consent fails on the facts before it fails in court. A new member's "willingness" is produced under pressure no honest person would call free: refuse, and you lose the team, the house, the brotherhood, the job — the very belonging you came for. Massachusetts law has absorbed that reality completely: the anti-hazing statute states that consent is not available as a defense to a hazing prosecution. A group cannot vote itself an exemption. When someone tells you "they all volunteered," the correct reading is that the pressure worked as designed.
Part 3. The Massachusetts anti-hazing law — sections 17, 18, and 19
Massachusetts carries one of the country's older, most complete anti-hazing statutes, at Mass. Gen. Laws ch. 269, §§ 17–19. Section 17 makes it a crime to be a principal organizer or participant in hazing, and defines hazing as conduct or a method of initiation into a student organization — on public or private property — that willfully or recklessly endangers the physical or mental health of a student or other person, including extreme mental stress such as extended deprivation of sleep or rest or extended isolation. Section 17 also carries Part 2's rule: consent is not a defense.
Section 18 is the section every bystander in Massachusetts should know: a person who knows another person is the victim of hazing and is at the scene must report it to law enforcement as soon as reasonably practicable, to the extent they can do so without danger to themselves or others. Failing to report is itself punishable — silence at the scene is not a neutral option in Massachusetts. Section 19 works on institutions: schools must issue the text of the law to student groups and full-time students, collect acknowledgments, adopt a disciplinary policy on hazing, and file an annual compliance report. The design is deliberate — criminal liability for participants, a reporting duty for witnesses, and paperwork duties that make it impossible for an institution to claim it never told anyone.
Part 4. School policies and the federal campus-reporting frame
Alongside the criminal statute sits an institutional layer. Schools and colleges prohibit hazing in their own codes of conduct and can discipline students and dissolve organizations without waiting for any criminal case — and they are usually faster. A group that loses its charter, its recognition, or its season has been punished in the currency it actually cares about, which is why institutional reporting matters even where a prosecutor never files charges.
At the federal level, the campus frame is the Clery Act — 20 U.S.C. § 1092(f) — which requires colleges receiving federal student aid to disclose campus crime statistics and safety policies in an annual security report. In December 2024, the Stop Campus Hazing Act amended that framework to add hazing: covered institutions must now collect hazing statistics, include them in annual security reporting, publish a Campus Hazing Transparency Report, and publish their anti-hazing policies and prevention programs. The practical meaning: hazing on a campus is no longer only a discipline matter whispered about in a dean's office — it is data the institution must gather and publish, and published data lets families compare schools and journalists ask hard questions.
Part 5. Bystander duties — what to do at the scene and after it
Most hazing has an audience, and the audience is where prevention lives. At the scene, your duties in Massachusetts are legal (Part 3's section 18) and practical. Get the person out of danger if you safely can — interrupt, object out loud, pull the targeted person into another errand, another room; numbers help, so recruit the other uncomfortable people beside you, because there almost always are some. Report as soon as reasonably practicable to law enforcement, and use the institution's channels too — coach, dean, resident life, the organization's national office. If someone is injured, unresponsive, or in danger right now, call 911 first and paperwork second.
Afterward: write down what you saw, when, and who else was present, while it is fresh, and keep your own copy. Expect the group's first move to be a loyalty appeal — "we handle this inside." Part 2 already answered it: the law removed the inside option. A report may be the document that protects the next class, because institutions act on records, not rumors.
Part 6. Refusing, reporting, and what victims and families can do
If you are the person being hazed: you may refuse, and refusal gets easier with a plan made before the moment — a rehearsed reason to leave, a friend outside the group who knows where you are, and the knowledge that no membership is worth an injury and that the law, not the group, defines the line. Report through the institution; in Massachusetts, participants and silent witnesses alike face the statute. Keep evidence — messages, schedules, photos — and give copies to someone outside the group.
Families have their own levers: report to the institution in writing; ask, in writing, what its hazing policy and investigative process are; read its published reports — including, now, its hazing transparency reporting; and consult a lawyer about civil claims, because organizers, organizations, and in some circumstances institutions can bear legal responsibility for hazing injuries — the Delaware case studied below is the landmark example. None of this requires a family to be wealthy or connected. It requires paper, persistence, and the refusal to accept "tradition" as an answer.
Words to know — Hazing and Prevention
- Hazing — activity expected of someone joining or staying in a group that humiliates, degrades, abuses, or endangers them, whatever they say about willingness.
- Initiation — the process by which a person becomes a member of a group; the stage at which hazing most commonly occurs.
- Bystander — a person present at an event who is not its target or organizer; in Massachusetts, a witness at a hazing scene carries a duty to report.
- Consent (as a defense) — the claim that a person's agreement excuses the conduct; under Massachusetts law, consent is not available as a defense.
- Duty to report — the obligation § 18 places on a person at the scene who knows hazing is occurring, to report it to law enforcement as soon as reasonably practicable, where they can do so safely.
- Campus Hazing Transparency Report — the public report on hazing findings that the Stop Campus Hazing Act requires covered colleges to publish.
- Assumption of risk — the defense claim that a person who voluntarily took part accepted the danger; raised by the university in Furek and not accepted as a bar to its duty.
- Duty of care — a legal obligation to use reasonable care to protect another person from foreseeable harm within one's control.
Myths vs facts — Hazing and Prevention
- Myth: Hazing builds unity and respect. Fact: What it builds is a cycle — this year's targets become next year's organizers. Real unity comes from shared work, not shared suffering.
- Myth: If everyone agreed to it, it is not hazing and not illegal. Fact: Willingness produced by the price of belonging is the core of hazing — and under Massachusetts law, consent is not a defense at all.
- Myth: It is only hazing if someone ends up in the hospital. Fact: The Massachusetts definition reaches conduct that endangers mental health — extreme stress, sleep deprivation, isolation. No injury is required.
- Myth: Staying silent at the scene keeps you out of it. Fact: In Massachusetts, a person at the scene who knows hazing is occurring and does not report it commits an offense under § 18.
- Myth: Hazing is a college Greek-life problem only. Fact: It appears on teams, in bands and clubs, in workplaces, and in military settings — anywhere belonging is priced in endurance.
Think it through — Hazing and Prevention
The situation: Your daughter, a first-year student at a Massachusetts college, calls you shaken. Her club team's "welcome week" has escalated: new members are kept up most of the night running errands, screamed at for small mistakes, and warned that "quitters get frozen out." She begs you not to make it worse. What is happening, and what can you do?
Walk it through: (1) Name it against Part 1: membership conditioned on sleep deprivation, degradation, and a threat of exclusion is hazing — the definition reaches extreme mental stress and extended deprivation of sleep expressly; no physical injury is needed. (2) The defenses are pre-answered — Part 2: "everyone went through it" is tradition, and her teammates' willingness is consent under pressure; under § 17, consent is not a defense. (3) Duties are already running — Part 3: every teammate in that room who knows carries § 18's duty to report, and the college carries § 19 duties to have told them so. (4) Your levers — Parts 4 and 6: report in writing and ask in writing for its policy and process; the college must also publish hazing information under the federal frame. Your daughter's fear of social cost is real and deserves respect in how you proceed — but Part 6's rule stands: no membership is worth her health, and a report protects the class behind her too.
Cases & codes to study — Hazing and Prevention
Furek v. University of Delaware, 594 A.2d 506 (Supreme Court of Delaware, 1991)
- The facts: A student at the University of Delaware was seriously injured during a fraternity initiation night. He sued, arguing the university had failed to protect students even though it had an anti-hazing policy, and evidence showed hazing on its campus had continued for years despite warnings.
- The question: Did the university owe its students a duty to protect them from the foreseeable dangers of hazing it knew was occurring — even though the student took part willingly?
- The ruling and the outcome: The Delaware Supreme Court held that a legal basis for the university's duty did exist where the hazing danger was foreseeable and subject to the university's control. It reversed the trial court's ruling that had wiped out the jury's verdict against the university, which had assigned the university the great majority of responsibility.
- Why it matters to you: Furek's lesson: an institution's duty is measured by what it knew and could control — not by whether it printed a policy, and not by whether the student "agreed."
- 📄 Court document: https://law.justia.com/cases/delaware/supreme-court/1991/594-a-2d-506-5.html (the full opinion of the Supreme Court of Delaware, via Justia)
The law itself — read the real words
- Mass. Gen. Laws ch. 269, § 17 — defines hazing and makes organizing or participating a crime. Read it: https://malegislature.gov/laws/generallaws/partiv/titlei/chapter269/section17
- Mass. Gen. Laws ch. 269, § 18 — the duty to report: a person at the scene who knows hazing is occurring must report it to law enforcement as soon as reasonably practicable, where they can do so safely. Read it: https://malegislature.gov/Laws/GeneralLaws/PartIV/TitleI/Chapter269/Section18
- Mass. Gen. Laws ch. 269, § 19 — institutions must issue the law, adopt a disciplinary policy, and file an annual compliance report. Read it: https://malegislature.gov/Laws/GeneralLaws/PartIV/TitleI/Chapter269/Section19
- 20 U.S.C. § 1092(f) — the Clery Act provision requiring covered colleges to disclose campus safety information; amended by the Stop Campus Hazing Act (2024) to add hazing reporting. Read the Act's summary from Wichita State University: https://www.wichita.edu/about/student_conduct/Stop_Campus_Hazing_Act.php
Where to read the real thing, free: Massachusetts Legislature (malegislature.gov) — https://malegislature.gov/laws/generallaws/partiv/titlei/chapter269/section17 — the official anti-hazing text; Justia (law.justia.com) — https://law.justia.com/cases/delaware/supreme-court/1991/594-a-2d-506-5.html — the Furek opinion.
Try this — Hazing and Prevention
- ☐ Read §§ 17–19 at malegislature.gov and write, in your own words, the statute's three duties (participant, witness, institution).
- ☐ Find the hazing policy and annual security report of a college you know, and check whether its hazing information is published as Part 4 describes.
- ☐ Rehearse your scene interruption: the sentence you would say, the person you would recruit, the number you would call.
- ☐ If you belong to a group with an intake process, mark which welcome activities condition belonging on endurance — then design the replacement.
- ☐ Save the reporting channels now: campus safety or police non-emergency routes, and 911 for danger.
Resources to keep — Hazing and Prevention
- 911 — if someone is injured or in danger.
- mass.gov — official Massachusetts information and agencies.
- Massachusetts Legislature — malegislature.gov — official text of §§ 17–19.
- 988 (call or text) — if hazing has become a personal crisis.
What you earned / what's next — Hazing and Prevention
✅ Hazing and Prevention complete (quiz score 80% or higher): You can define hazing by its core transaction, answer the tradition and consent defenses, state the duties in §§ 17–19, describe the institutional and federal reporting frame, act as a bystander, and explain what victims and families can do — including the duty Furek established.
Your certificate
Minister Destiny Testimony Schools Certificate of Completion — Hazing and Prevention
This certificate is presented by Muslim Ordained Minister Destiny Marie Morgan
Awarded to: ______________________________ (write your name here after you download — your name is never collected or stored by this school)
Date completed: ______________
Congratulations. You know that belonging earned through harm is not belonging at all — and you know the law and the phone call that protect the next person in line. — Minister Destiny Marie Morgan
This is a certificate of educational completion from Minister Destiny Testimony Schools. It is not a state license, a government certification, or legal training for representing anyone.
What's next: Return to the Topic Library for your next Year 1 Foundations unit.
Sources
- Furek v. University of Delaware, 594 A.2d 506 (Supreme Court of Delaware 1991) — a university that knows hazing is occurring can owe students a duty of protection; the jury's verdict against the university was reinstated.
- Chapter 269 § 17 (Mass. Gen. Laws) — defines hazing, makes it a crime, and provides that consent is not a defense.
- Chapter 269 § 18 (Mass. Gen. Laws) — the duty of a person at the scene who knows hazing is occurring to report it to law enforcement.
- Chapter 269 § 19 (Mass. Gen. Laws) — institutions must issue the law, adopt a disciplinary policy, and report compliance annually.
- Title 20 § 1092(f) (U.S. Code) — the Clery Act disclosure provision, amended by the Stop Campus Hazing Act (2024) to add hazing statistics and transparency reporting.
- Stop Campus Hazing Act — Wichita State University (wichita.edu) (https://www.wichita.edu/about/student_conduct/Stop_Campus_Hazing_Act.php) — plain summary of the 2024 Act, used in Part 4.
Your Progress — On Your Device Only — Hazing and Prevention
- Learning outcomes: On completing this unit, the student can:
- define hazing by its core transaction — belonging conditioned on harm — and distinguish it from legitimate training;
- explain why tradition and consent do not make hazing safe or lawful;
- state the three duties in §§ 17–19 for participants, witnesses, and institutions;
- describe the institutional discipline layer and the federal Clery frame as amended by the Stop Campus Hazing Act;
- carry out bystander steps at a scene and afterward, and list the levers available to victims and families;
- explain the holding and outcome of Furek v. University of Delaware.
- Study time: Approximately 1 hour — an estimate covering reading, activities, and the test. Students move at their own pace.
- Assessment: A 10-question test drawn only from this unit's lesson. 80% or higher passes and earns the unit certificate. Answers are not shown; your score is saved only in your own browser on this device, and retakes are allowed.
- Level: Topic Library — Year 1 (Foundations) · Adult school · working rank on completion path: Freshman → Sophomore.
- Version: Version 1.0 — October 2026.
Minister Destiny Testimony Schools — Adult. Educational information only, not legal advice. Help lines: 911 for emergencies · 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline (call/text 988).