Paul Thomas: Schoolboy cruelty cycle rolls on

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I have a confession to make: I was a teenage hazer.

As a boarder at King's College sometime last century, I hazed. But before I was a hazer, I was a hazee. And there was a period when I was both.

Only we didn't call it hazing, we called it "seniority", and this is how it worked.

The boarding house was a rigid hierarchy in which age conferred status and the right to make life miserable for those below you. Thus it was open season on first years (Year 9s) while fourth years (Year 12s) were top of the food chain, masters of all they surveyed.

The house prefects, Year 13s, were nominally responsible for discipline. In practice this meant getting people out of bed and into a cold shower of a morning and whacking them on the arse with a sandshoe at regular intervals for obscure, inconsequential, often trumped-up offences.

Like talking after lights out. Everyone did it every night but it was against the rules, so if a house prefect was bored or in a bad mood or felt like some physical activity, he'd burst into a junior boys' dormitory and "call out" all those talking.

Amazingly, given these exercises were usually fishing expeditions, there was always a good turnout: the chatterboxes would plod out to the locker room and take their punishment. Unless the prefect or teacher concerned was particularly skilled and/or sadistic, corporal punishment soon lost its sting so a shoeing was preferable to getting mocked by your peers for weaseling out.

These rituals aside, the prefects out-sourced the administration of house discipline to the fourth years. The dreaded summons to their common room meant that you'd shown up on the radar of their disapproval - in my case for not rolling my shirtsleeves up far enough - and now you were going to pay for it.

It wasn't entirely gratuitous. The fourth years took their role seriously. Just as Chairman Mao believed political power came out of the barrel of a gun, the fourth years believed a strong house spirit and the achievements which flowed from that didn't happen by accident: everyone did their bit because they were acutely aware of the consequences of being seen to be recalcitrant, faint-hearted or full of yourself.

I remember one generation of fourth years - a notably tough mob with a strong farming influence - getting fired up over the shambolic rehearsals for the inter-house music competition, which involved individual and group performances topped by the whole house mangling some well-known song.

The fourth years felt the house song lacked gusto so each year group was hauled into their common room and raucously threatened. The message was clear: this isn't our thing but we're going to give it a crack; we mightn't win but, by Christ, we'll be the loudest. Or else.

The problem with seniority, as with all authoritarian systems, was that it was so open to abuse that abuse was inevitable. You do it because you can.

I narrowly avoided a generation who were a byword for elaborate cruelty. A favourite torment was to blindfold a victim, stand him up on a ping pong table, put a noose around his neck, throw the rope over a rafter and pull it tight. Then very quietly and carefully so that the victim didn't realise he was no longer almost two metres off the ground, they'd lift the table off the trestles and lower it to within centimetres of the floor. Then they'd order the poor bugger to jump.

Bear in mind that nothing in their previous behaviour or demeanour would have encouraged the victim to think they gave two hoots about his welfare or indeed existence.

The most reprehensible aspect of seniority was that those best-equipped to withstand it - robust, sporty, popular boys - tended to get off lightly, while those most vulnerable - the physically and emotionally fragile, the different - tended to get singled out.

The most insidious aspect of seniority was that it was self-perpetuating. When you were on the receiving end, you consoled yourself with the thought that one day it would be your turn. To forgo your turn when it eventually came around required a saintliness one doesn't associate with the teenage male.

I'd suggest there's one key difference between seniority as I experienced it and the hazing that was reported this week. Back then New Zealand was a patriarchal society: many boys were sent to King's because their fathers wanted the school to make a man of them. By and large, King's took the fathers at their word.

We now live in a world in which mothers insist on leaving it to nature to make men of their little boys.