In 2019, 19-year-old University of Gloucestershire student Sam Potter died from alcohol poisoning following a rugby initiation ceremony that involved excessive quantities of Guinness, lager and rum.
The teenager from Surrey had taken part in a four-hour drinking game as part of an end-of-season celebration among rugby team-mates. They took turns downing “concoctions” of alcohol in a shed, with a sheet of tarpaulin laid on the floor to catch any vomit.
Potter’s friends were unable to wake him the next morning. Toxicology reports showed the student had a blood alcohol level more than four times the legal drink-drive limit, and a coroner recorded that he died an “alcohol-related death”.
Later that same year, the Universities UK (UUK) lobby group published guidance warning British students about the dangers of initiation ceremonies. It said the impact of each incident was “significant, with far-reaching effects on families, friends and the wider university community”.
It was hoped the horrendous incident would serve as a wake-up call that hazing rituals could no longer be shrugged off as the type of harmless fun associated with fraternities at American colleges.
But more than five years later, hazing rituals are still happening in sports clubs across UK campuses, with men’s rugby clubs widely regarded as the most dangerous culprit.
Telegraph Sport has learnt that initiations include forcing students to drink bodily fluids from a dead sheep’s head, eat dog excrement and carry dead animals in pockets throughout ceremonies, with extreme bullying and a culture of fear widespread.
Cycle of abuse gets worse
Telegraph Sport has spoken to numerous current and former university students who have been subjected to extreme activities as part of rugby initiation ceremonies in recent years.
Similar types of behaviour are also commonplace at weekly socials, which tend to take place on Wednesday nights, but the initiation of first-year students has escalated to a different level.
All of the students requested anonymity, telling Telegraph Sport of their fears that they would be shunned by their peers for exposing details of the covert events, including those who have already graduated.
Many described being forced to drink dangerous levels of alcohol and a “cycle of abuse” passed down through year groups, mostly from older male students to their younger male peers who are determined to make initiations more extreme year on year.
Although colloquially used to describe a set of activities required to gain entry to university societies, UUK defines hazing as any university event where students are forced to participate in dangerous behaviour by their peers.
Initiation ceremonies have typically centred around excessive alcohol consumption, but substance misuse, bullying and harassment – including subjecting younger students to risky behaviour designed to humiliate them – are now par for the course.
The Telegraph revealed last summer that students were sexually and physically abused during rugby club initiations at Harper Adams, an agricultural university in Shropshire.
Documents from an internal investigation carried out by the university included claims that students were lashed with belts, forced to drink bodily waste and were sexually assaulted with wine bottles during the incidents.
Harper Adams admitted that some of its students had suffered abuse in recent years after they were subjected to “extreme activities” during social events, but insisted it had put measures in place to turn the tide.
At a separate university in the Midlands, a student told Telegraph Sport that rugby squad members were forced to drink alcohol out of a sheep’s head during hazing rituals.
Senior members of the squad brought the animal’s head to an initiation ceremony and made first-year students consume fluids directly from its mouth as if performing CPR. A mixture of alcohol, urine and spit had been poured through the cavity of the sheep’s severed neck for the rugby players to drink.
Students at two separate universities also told Telegraph Sport that their rugby clubs had their own versions of a “crucifixion cross”, to which team members were tied for as long as five hours as forms of “punishments”.
Others described grim antics on university rugby tours to Salou, in Spain’s Costa Dorada. One said he witnessed a friend “picking up dog poo from the street and putting it in his mouth”. Another ex-student said he was made to “eat” parts of his own passport, leaving him unable to fly home until he sourced a replacement.
Despite studies showing drinking is on the wane among Gen Z, initiation ceremonies appear to remain alive and kicking, potentially driven underground as campus culture becomes more polarised. Some have suggested social media may also have exacerbated initiation culture by egging pupils into more extreme forms of public humiliation.
Despite studies showing drinking is on the wane among Gen Z, initiation ceremonies appear to remain alive and kicking. Image / Herald graphic
Private messages reveal extent of behaviour
Telegraph Sport has been shown the private social media channels of one university’s first XV men’s rugby team, whose name has been anonymised to protect students’ identities.
They provided a window into the sort of horseplay often associated with a heavy drinking culture in a typical university sports club – photographs of students’ shaved heads and eyebrows, and nudity in public places.
But they also revealed a more extreme side to initiation ceremonies. One photograph shared on the rugby team’s Facebook group chat showed a pair of dead animals stuffed inside a student’s jacket pockets. Another showed two first XV rugby players engaged in a game of tug of war using university ties knotted to one another’s testicles.
Private messages exchanged between the students also displayed examples of older team-mates ordering freshers to obey their demands. In one message, a final-year student commanded first-year students to each show up to a rugby club social bearing a fortnight’s worth of alcohol, painkillers, three pairs of knickers and a blindfold.
Player X:
“Hello chicken f***ers, 1st years you are required to Rendezvous at precisely 7pm. May you dress how you see fit. All required to bring 8 cans, 750ml of wine, 6 pictures of s***, 5 very hot chillies, 4 cigarettes, 3 woman’s underwear, 2 paracetamol, 1 item to use as a blindfold.”
In another series of messages sent before a rugby match, students were instructed to each bring £5 as “hush money” to encourage the sports club’s coach driver to turn a blind eye to their antics.
Player X:
“Oi boys the football have had bar bans from being weird. everyone bring a £5 for the driver as hush money."
On another occasion, the rugby captain demanded each player to provide a £20 “cash bribe” to discourage a local restaurant owner from informing the university about a chaotic food fight nights earlier. At the social, one player was whipped “in the face with a buckle”.
Player X:
After last night’s meetings and with more to follow today the curry house situation slowly sees some light. Regarding the University, they will do whatever they can to try f*** with us as they always do but we can keep chats to a minimum and be as vague as possible because we won’t give names and if the Indian is happy they will be a bit more relaxed. To make the Indian happy and inform the uni, we have until Tuesday to provide a cash bribe. This is going to be £20 from each and every attendee with responsibility of collecting cash. Please can the moneys be given to myself in cash and as soon as possible. It is a lot of money but I was given a tour yesterday and the place was an absolute state with walls, chairs, ceiling and floor plus cutlery and glasses missing. By doing this we stop any further involvement with police and prevent the Indian staff heading to uni to identify individuals.
The messages were spliced with photographs of a player with his front tooth knocked out, of a teammate with a lattice of lash marks on his naked buttocks, and another student with no clothes on doing a handstand on a coach to a rugby match.
The former student who shared the social media channels with Telegraph Sport, who has since left university, said he wanted to expose the toxic culture that often hides in plain sight at university sports clubs.
“People know about this stuff going on, a lot of them are too scared to say anything,” he said.
The exact scale of dangerous behaviour in hazing ceremonies and sports club socials in the UK is hard to gauge. There is no central body that collects statistics on the subject, and freedom of information requests to universities tend to yield little since many of the incidents either go unreported or take place off campus in local pubs and venues.
Between 2016 and 2019, 20 universities launched investigations into initiations or hazing events, according to data from information requests to 155 universities.
Guidance issued by UUK said the prevalence of initiation ceremonies was “difficult to assess, in part because they break university disciplinary codes and so remain covert”.
Several students said they also felt their complaints had slipped through the cracks as they witnessed the buck being passed between student unions, senior university officials and external organisations.
British Universities and Colleges Sport (BUCS), the national governing body of university sport in the UK, said in its latest annual report that it received 63 official complaints “alleging misconduct” relating to matches last year.
Many of these involved spectators getting drunk on the sidelines of sports events, according to a log of its misconduct cases. BUCS insisted that none of these were related specifically to hazing rituals.
The university sporting body, which organises competitions across UK campuses, launched an anonymous reporting tool in 2020 encouraging students to blow the whistle over dangerous initiation events.
The number of reports raising concerns about hazing ceremonies has more than doubled this year, BUCS told Telegraph Sport. The organisation has received 11 reports from students about dangerous initiations this year to date, up from five in the entire last academic year. BUCS would not disclose the figures for the three previous academic years that its reporting tool was live.
It is a far cry from the United States, which last month signed into law the Stop Campus Hazing Act in one of Joe Biden’s final acts in the White House. The former US President introduced a legal requirement for universities to disclose all hazing incidents reported to campus authorities in their annual security reports.
The change came after a spate of college campus deaths from acute alcohol poisoning among students subjected to dangerous initiation rituals.
Death threats for speaking out
In the UK, there are fears that failure to instigate a culture change could damage the uptake of some university sports altogether. The Rugby Football Union has already been warned that it faces an existential crisis because of tanking participation at school level.
An independent review commissioned by the RFU said last October that the sport was sinking in popularity among school pupils because of “changing attitudes” and an “image problem with some who may see it as a game for… ‘posh white boys’”.
It has prompted the national sporting body to play whack-a-mole and suspend any university rugby teams accused of allowing dangerous behaviour, including Harper Adams, which was issued with an interim suspension order last September. The Shropshire university has since been allowed to return to competitions.
Last month, a legal case lent weight to suggestions that hazing culture at university rugby clubs may itself be traced to top British schools. Methodist College, one of Northern Ireland’s leading grammar schools, agreed to pay out more than £50,000 to a former schoolboy after he was allegedly coerced into stripping naked and having his head shaved as part of an initiation ceremony.
Gabriel McConkey claimed to have witnessed other boys perform acts on a sex toy while on a rugby trip to the Algarve for warm-weather training. His family sued the school’s board of governors for alleged negligence and failure to properly supervise the senior rugby squad on the trip.
The problem is also not limited to rugby, although students suggested the sport was linked to the most extreme out of any university initiation rituals.
Telegraph Sport also spoke to the father of another student who claimed his son was abused at his university’s shooting club socials.
“I don’t want to sound as if I don’t want them to have fun. They’re adults, they can do what they want. But there’s a line in the sand that is being crossed,” he said.
“They’re made to do these things – and there’s one or two of the older guys that are making them do these things. [Getting] blind drunk, drinking from a bucket, eating dog food, eating rotten cheese … young 18-year-old guys have to stick a match up their penis, light it and drink a bottle of wine before the match gets burned to them.
“Now that is not [and] will never be socially acceptable to do that to anybody. That’s what makes my blood boil.”
The student chose not to report the incidents to his university, instead turning to his father, who suggested leaving the institution after his first year and getting a local job while he considered what to do next. One year later he still has not returned to higher education.
Students who do choose to report dangerous behaviour at initiation ceremonies often come to regret it. One said that he has been ostracised by the wider rugby community – which he says can feel small, insular and gossipy – for speaking out.
“Since leaving, it got out that I had reported what had gone on to the university. I bumped into someone who went there and they said: ‘If it’s you, I’m going to kill you.’ And that was straight to my face,” he said.
“It’s really following me around. For instance, I was dating a girl and we went to a ball, and one of the people there went to my university, and they basically identified me and said: ‘Oh he’s the snitch.’
“And then in every day [terms], I mean I was playing rugby recently and one of the guys turned around and he says: ‘Oh if I ever get my hands on you I’m gonna f*****g kill you.’ It’s because of how small the community is – it sort of heightens everything.”
Banning individuals – not clubs – is the solution
A change in tactics has started to occur from institutions with some universities realising that banning entire sports teams has so far failed to stop dangerous initiations and even driven events beneath the radar, and are instead targeting the individual perpetrators directing them.
“If a complaint comes to you about a rugby society doing X, Y and Z, you can mostly point exactly to who it was, and then you ban them specifically,” the sports events officer at one Russell Group university said.
“You don’t stop rugby teams from going to their fixtures, because then you kind of paint them all with the same brush. It’s really important that you pinpoint who the users are, who are the people perpetrating such activity, and then you make them responsible.
“It’s a really bizarre phenomenon. It’s definitely something that not enough has been done about or said about, but I think everyone’s waking up that this exists at university.”
An RFU spokesperson said: “The RFU continues to work with universities, student club committees and the SRFU [Scottish Rugby Union] to ensure that the rugby environment is positive and inclusive to all who wish to play. We recently launched the Behaviours Toolkit resource as an extension of the Higher Education Behaviours Charter, a joint charter with BUCS, the SRFU and other home unions that provides education and guidance to universities and colleges around conduct.
“We actively encourage anyone involved in the sport to report any inappropriate conduct as we can only act if we are aware an issue exists. The BUCS website provides an email for issues to be reported, discipline@bucs.org.uk, or you can contact the RFU via SpeakUp@RFU.com.”
