Is it Ragging or Stockholm Syndrome in our Campuses?
Ragging is
debated and discussed for ages now but we always stopped short of understanding
the hidden psychological mysteries behind it. It has been more than a decade
and a half since we started to recognize this problem and hunt for a solution
but we are still far way from our goal. At the outset the problem looks very
simple but as one enters into it and tries to understand, it becomes more
complicated
than unfolding the Bermuda triangle mystery.
In our attempt
to look for an early solution we perhaps focused too much on the law and order
aspect of ragging and ignored to probe on the psychological front. We didn’t
bother to unravel the mystery that how a victim who is tormented badly makes
his abuser his best pal in a short span of time and starts to follow the same
strategy on his junior. May be exploring answer to these questions and
awareness of these answers could have led to a better understanding of this
problem and have sorted it by now.
In August 1973,
two bank robbers in Stockholm
held 4 hostages, 3 women and one man, for a period of 6 days. In those six days
the hostages developed emotional bonds with their captors and exhibited
shocking attitude. They not only resisted the attempt made by the police to
rescue them but one of the woman hostages later got engaged to one of the
kidnappers and another arranged fund for the legal defense of the kidnappers.
This incident baffled many across the world. Psychologists later tried to study
the behavior shown by the Stockholm
hostages and termed this phenomenon as 'Stockholm
Syndrome'. They say that this is a common behavior seen in hostage situation.
Psychologists
believe that hazing, child abuse, pimp-prostitute relationship, battered
spouses’
relationship, etc work on the same psychology and call them 'Societal Stockholm
Syndrome'.
In evolutionary
psychology, psychologists explain that capture-bonding, or social reorientation
after capture, was an essential survival trait for millions of years. The
captives who reoriented would survive, and those who did not form social bonds
with captors would be killed. Psychologists believe that anyone can get
Stockholm Syndrome if the following conditions are met: (i) Perceived threat to
survival (ii) The captive's perception of small kindnesses from the captor
(iii) Isolation from perspectives other than those of the captor (iv) Perceived
inability to escape. Psychologists believe that it typically takes about three
or four days for this psychology to take hold of the victim mentally. A more in
depth information about the psychology that works in such situations and the
effect
it has on one's personality can be read in the book 'Psychology of torture'
by Dr. Sam Vaknin
Now, when I look
back to my ragging days in Medical College, I can easily understand why my
seniors, each time during ragging, used to first beat me recklessly for hours
without any provocation then show act of kindness towards me and offer me tea,
samosa, etc. and promise me of helping me later with notes. Perhaps they were
applying this same psychological technique of torture by playing the good guy
and bad guy at the same time, trying to break me psychologically- an art they
learnt from their seniors. Same pattern in ragging can be seen across the
country. Most of the victims just give in to this strong psychological tactics.
Fortunately this phenomenon did not work on me; however, I feel that if little
less torture had been applied, I would have easily become a victim of it.
Recently I saw a
similar situation in an award winning Polish film ‘Your name is Justyna’.
This film almost brought tears to my eyes and on several occasions even forced
me to change the channel. The film shows a pimp who uses similar strategy to
convince Justyna, the lead character in that film, into prostitution. His
strategy
was to psychologically break her down by simultaneously using torture and
kindness. The director of this Film, Franco De Penn, while doing research on
this subject found that using this psychological phenomenon, more than one
hundred and fifty thousand girls in Europe
were taken into prostitution. He says that this experience is so shocking that
it takes away the individual's whole personality. Psychologists who have worked
on this phenomenon believe that this is not only harmful to the individual who
goes through it but also to others around him/her.
This psychology
is so long lasting that we can find people around us who went through ragging
decades ago but are still under the influence of this psychology. Though
because of the Supreme Court guidelines and tragic cases of ragging reported in
the recent times they will hesitate to openly show their support. However on
talking to them, they would first segregate ragging into mild and severe and
then gradually start justifying its need for the initiation of a long lasting
camaraderie
among students and its need to prepare the students for the 'real world'.
Psychologists agree that this phenomenon helps in establishing emotional bond
but they call it 'traumatic bonding' and a manipulative behavior which has
harmful
effect on victim’s personality. We need to ask ourselves that for the sake of
bonding, is it justified to go this far and try destructive methods at the cost
of one's liberty, dignity and personality.
I am sure none of us would agree.
Students are so
blind folded by the virtues of ragging that they are not aware of the
destructive psychology behind it. Understanding and awareness of this
psychology can help in weakening the mass support that ragging enjoys and can
gradually
put a psychological taboo on it. I believe that asking the students and faculty
to do some Google search on such psychological phenomenon might prove more
useful than various methods of awareness that we are currently following. After
knowing that this is a psychological disorder, many would just hate to be
identified with it, many would be forced to rethink about the virtues of
ragging they believe in, many would be forced to rethink the justifications they
give to support ragging and this might eventually lead to its peaceful and
natural death by the simple method of thinking and application of logic.
