As students are beginning to turn their attention to where they’ll live next year and listings for Castle Street flats are cropping up, the subject of flat initiations is once again on people’s minds. Personally, it’s been in the back of my mind since last year, when I witnessed a freshly initiated first-year tell us at Critic that he’d feared for his life.
You’ll probably be seeing a lot of anti-initiation campaigning sometime soon, mainly from the Uni. Each year, Dave Scott (the Proctor) goes door to door on Castle and Leith to remind them they could be putting their degrees at risk for hosting an initiation. Dave’s a great guy who cares about students’ safety, and was genuinely upset when I spoke to him during initiation season last year at the incidents he’d already had to deal with. I can’t begin to imagine how frustrating and disheartening it must be for him.
Here’s my two cents on flat initiations. Student culture is a bit like your summer hospo job; the turnover rate is so high that if one waitress decides to teach the new recruit that sneaking shots out the back mid-shift is the way things are done, the habit will stick. Successive staff are taught the same, until eventually the restaurant is so booze-soaked that if you wrung it like a towel, tequila would drip out.
Throngs of clout-chasing breathas have fallen prey to this same phenomenon. They’re convinced to endure gross and degrading flat initiations under the banner of “tradition” peddled by older students. If you dig into Critic’s archives, though, you’ll find that these so-called “traditions” are barely old enough to buy booze. And judging by the initiations I’ve seen, it’s debatable whether you lot should be able to, either.
At the end of last year, Critic broke the story of a Leith St flat initiation that included animal abuse – the capture and torture of a live eel that we saw video footage of. It was just one example of the frankly vile flat initiations we’d heard of. Last year’s Editor Fox Meyer pointed out that a lot of them were horrifyingly similar to CIA torture methods. I’m sure I don’t need to point out to you how fucked up that is.
While clearly illegal, there was no attempt to hide the eel initiation. The backyard of the flat could be seen in plain sight from Dundas St where anyone who happened to be walking past could see it. Which begs the question: why? “It’s tradition” is what one breatha after the next told Critic Te Ārohi. It was done to them, so they were doing it to the next poor lot – with a little something extra, snowballing from what probably started as a bit of harmless fun into the monster it’s become.
Critic last year had first-years simultaneously telling us it was probably the hardest thing they’d ever had to do and that they’d genuinely feared for their lives, whilst also insisting that “everyone enjoyed themselves”. But when you cut through the bullshit; when you take away the cheering (and jeering) crowd and slaps on your backs; when you walk through your hall wearing your shaven head like a badge of honour; ask yourselves: was it really “fun”?
The first-year who we interviewed, isolated from the environment that had encouraged him to view the initiation in a positive way, seemed to change his mind as we asked questions that confronted him with initiations’ reality. You could see the doubt trickling in. Was the self-described “humiliation” worth it? We asked him at the end if he would continue to initiate others like himself, and he said he might not. I hope he remembers that sentiment when initiation season rolls around this year, for freshers’ sakes.