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Standing in the scorching sun, her hair tied up in colorful ribbons, and carrying a large burlap sack is nothing compared to the psychological abuse Mona received during her first week at university.

As one of hundreds of freshmen at the University of Indonesia, Mona has had to sign up for orientation week, ostensibly an opportunity to get acquainted with the campus and the senior students.

“It’s actually been a week full of embarrassment,” says Mona, a literature major.

The story is the same at colleges all over Indonesia. During the first week of class, all freshmen must carry out inane tasks and undergo psychological pressure from seniors and even alumni as part of orientation.

Mona says her seniors ordered her to braid her hair with different-colored ribbons every day, wear oversized skirts, string together a necklace from hard-to-find candy and use a burlap sack as her bookbag.

During the week, freshmen must also go through a series of activities “probably designed to temper our courage, now that we’re no longer in high school.”

“The seniors make us watch war movies,” she says. “Maybe it’s to provoke us to find our own voice and not be afraid to speak up.”

Mona is one of the fortunate few with an inkling of the dubious benefits of such tasks.

Howard, from Jakarta’s Tarumanegara University, says that five years after enrolling, he still doesn’t get the point of hazing.

“I just don’t know what purpose it serves,” he says. “I think it’s pointless.”

Besides on-campus orientation, seniors frequently take freshmen to countryside camps to continue the hazing. In Howard’s case, he was taken to Puncak in Bogor, where he and other freshmen were order to go trekking in the middle of the night.

“We were only allowed to light our way with a candle,” he recalls.

Deadly Tradition

The tradition goes back decades, and once the freshmen are seniors, they do the same to the new batch of new students, thus perpetuating the custom.

Widyo Nugroho Sulasdi, a lecturer at the Bandung Institute of Technology (ITB), says orientation week is aimed at giving new students a chance to get to know their campus and boost their organizational awareness.

“However, orientation activities must comply with a certain set of ethics,” he says, adding that all universities must guarantee that the week provides lessons students can use in the future.

What might seem a fun way to meet new people, however, can be deadly, with several students having died over the years from the physical abuse sustained during hazing.

In February 2009, an ITB student was killed during an off-campus orientation camp in Bogor. Last September, a student from Bogor’s National Cryptography Institute died after being beaten during orientation activities at the school.

Widyo, who until last year chaired the orientation activities at ITB, says that since 2005, the campus has imposed restrictions on hazing,

Hearing the horror stories associated with orientation week have become a daunting rite of passage for high-school graduates like Ikhsan.

His dream of studying at Bandung’s Padjadjaran University, one of Indonesia’s best, has come true. Only now he has to face the seniors chafing at the bit to vent their orientation week baggage on him.

“I’m scared of what the seniors will do to get their revenge on us freshmen,” he says.

Lita Arlina, whose daughter Ina has been accepted into the University of Indonesia, says she is worried the hazing will affect her daughter’s health.

“There’s peer pressure for kids to get involved in orientation week,” she says, adding that Ina might be ostracized if she refuses.

Seto Mulyadi, chairman of the National Commission for Child Protection, says the physical and psychological abuse can have a bad impact on new students.

“It can lead to trauma and also create a culture of violence on the campus,” he says.

Seto adds the ideal orientation week would feature activities aimed at developing students’ creativity while getting to know their universities, “a world so different from high school.”

Orientation, worried mother Lita says, should include more useful activities such as workshops or discussions.

Changing Culture

In an effort to change the image of orientation week as a form of legalized bullying, Widyo says ITB now holds seminars about education and current affairs to replace outdoor activities during orientation week.

But he says more needs to be done to monitor off-campus hazing.

“When the student died during the 2009 off-campus event, we immediately fired the dean who allowed the event to go ahead,” he says. The seniors were also punished, either through suspensions or docking of credits.

Seminars have also taken over from hazing during orientation week at Pelita Harapan University (UPH) in Tangerang. Campus spokeswoman Rosse Hutapea says hazing and bullying have no part in shaping a student’s character.

Since 2006, the university has replaced the traditional orientation week with the UPH Festival, where freshmen take part in seminars, workshops and arts and music performances.

The National Education Ministry has also issued guidelines. Suyanto, the director general for primary and secondary schools, says no orientation activity may include violence.

“The purpose is to introduce new students to the campus,” he says “Violence is, of course, prohibited.”

Though officially banned by most universities, the tradition survives in unofficial forms. Mita, a second-year student at Jakarta’s Trisakti University, says the annual orientation week camp-out sees the freshmen put “under pressure.”

“They say it’s a charity event for the underprivileged in remote areas in Bogor,” she says. “But besides the philanthropic aspect, the seniors also use the event as an opportunity to scold us.”

As long as universities fail to monitor such events, the tradition is most likely to continue since it is based on a self-perpetrating cycle of vengeful seniors taking out their wrath on freshmen.