A YouTube video that captures university students dressed in bras and underwear who trudge on their hands and knees through icy sludge while being ridiculed and used as snowball targets has prompted controversy and concern.
Posted on March 21, the video depicts engineering students at the Canada-based Ryerson University undergoing what one student in the video called a “frosh leader initiation.”
In broad daylight and under a light snow, dozens of scantily clad students of both genders crawled on the muddy, icy ground as their more seasoned peers in the program act sort of like drill instructors and taunt them to move forward on their hands and knees, the YouTube video shows.
One male peer leader even slapped a female student on the butt as she crawled forward. Meanwhile, onlookers gawked and took photos of the spectacle, the video shows.
The camera man who posted the event titled the video “Ryerson University Students Subjected to Sexualized Hazing and Humiliation” and asks under the description of the post: “Students in Ryerson’s engineering department get put through unpleasant hazing-being forced to crawl naked on melted ice on a day with sub-zero temperatures. Is this okay? Looks like abuse to me-there’s at least one person in the group who wasn’t happy to be doing this.”
The camera man apparently was not the only person to find the incident problematic.
On Sunday, the Toronto Star reported that the event caught the ire of the university’s president, Sheldon Levy, who called the annual and voluntary tradition “completely unacceptable” and not representative of the “principles of civil society, and the positive and supportive culture of Ryerson.”
But the newspaper went on to report that students think Levy is overreacting, that the tradition simply aims to build team spirit and camaraderie.
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