Time to
initiate change
Mairisine Stanfield shines a light on the dark world of sports initiations taking place in our universities and colleges.
T
he young man was excited about leaving home for the first time. He couldn’t wait to go to the University of Aberdeen to begin the next stage of his life – to train to be a primary school teacher. He went as a young man who loved Jesus (he still does, more than ever) and a communicant member of the Presbyterian Church in Ireland. What he went through in his first month in Aberdeen could not only have affected all that – it could have killed him. Why? Because Jonathan was like many hundreds of young people each year at our British university sports clubs, who are forced to undergo some horrific and potentially devastating ‘initiations’ when they join up. According to the journalist Martin Samuel, writing in the magazine GQ: “University initiations are degrading, outdated and sometimes even deadly.” Yet these rituals are still very common in British universities, despite the National
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Herald September 2019
Union of Students’ belief that there’s been a shift in the culture surrounding initiations and several universities trying to ban them. Speaking to a graduate of a popular Scottish university, I was told that their university had a very strict policy on initiations – they are banned completely. In fact, if your team is found to conduct one of these initiations, the team is banned from competitions for the year. However, the student also said that they knew in some clubs, initiations still went on in secret. Indeed, the Rugby Football Union is so concerned with the decrease in the number of students participating
…what he was put through by his so-called team mates…should never happen to any young person.
in the game after secondary school, as a result of this culture, that it has set up an ‘educational working group’ to seek to address the issue. They estimate that 10,000 school leavers were lost to rugby in the recent past, many blaming the sport’s “penchant for humiliating initiations and stupid, laddish excess.” But that’s a naive view of what is happening. What is actually taking place is potentially life threatening. Jonathan was a student at Methodist College, Belfast and while there played rugby for the 1st XV. When he went to university he played in a freshers’ tournament, was awarded ‘Man of the Tournament’ and subsequently invited to play for the University 1st XV. He understood that there were practices that a first-time player was supposed to undertake, including a pub crawl around the city. He was not a drinker, which he explained to the club captain, so he didn’t go on the specific night. He was told that
