Justice for Sandia Dia looks further away then ever. It looks like the lawyers of the accused will use every trick in the book to make sure their clients walk away with hardly any sanction at all.
What they did to Sanda is horrific. When we read about how the doctors eventually had to call Sanda’s father to tell him how his son had suffered irreparable neurological damage our heart broke into a thousand little pieces.
The ones responsible for the brutal hazing ritual (systematic torture is a more accurate term) are responsible for the death of a very bright and by all accounts very kind young man and they have ruined the lives of his family members forever. Their actions were so shocking that they seriously hurt society as a whole. How many parents will be terrified to send their kids off to college knowing that such sociopaths run influential fraternities? This isn’t some gratuitous horror film. What they did to Sandia Dia is all too real.
If they had any decency they would accept an appropriate punishment and not try to weasel out of this.
We’ve written about this case before.
See for example this post.
Or this one.
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I really wonder why Sanda even got that far. If Reuzegom is that racist (which they undoubtedly are), why would they even have considered him? Is it possible that they just wanted him to take part in this hazing ritual because they wanted to torture some black guy?
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I think your analysis nails it. So basically it’s even worse than everyone thinks. It also explains the odd incident where Sanda had to clean up after all of them had already left. Even the owner of the place thought that was weird and Sanda just shrugged it off. Maybe some sort of Stockholm syndrome. Too bad none of them tried to stop it. It doesn’t take a physician to figure out what they were doing to him was very extreme and harmful
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I think your analysis nails it. So basically it’s even worse than everyone thinks. It also explains the odd incident where Sanda had to clean up after all of them had already left. Even the owner of the place thought that was weird and Sanda just shrugged it off. Maybe some sort of Stockholm syndrome. Too bad none of them tried to stop it. It doesn’t take a physician to figure out what they were doing to him was very extreme and harmful
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Yeah, your point about the Stockholm syndrome also raises the question why Sanda even wanted to join that club. Likely for the connections, but he must have realized at some point that he will never really be one of them. That’s probably where that Stockholm syndrome comes in…
It’s a strange case, and it doesn’t get a lot of coverage outside Belgium. I don’t think I’ve ever seen it mentioned here in the German media for example.
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https://www.sueddeutsche.de/leben/rituale-an-universitaeten-kein-erbarmen-1.5072741
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The German article I sent you is excellent. They offer lots of details and spoke to several people who are active in the student community in Leuven. In a documentary Sanda’s friends said they also didn’t understand his motivation. The move was way out of character. Their best guess was that he did it to get connections to further his career later. I mainly teach adults, but quite a few of my students are 18-ish. The degree to which they obsess over their future career, money making abilities is rather shocking. It’s as though there is little else going on in their lives. They are serious, not playful, hardly have a sense of humor and are constantly calculating as to how to ‘invest’ their time. Maybe I remember my time in college differently but we had other priorities and we definitely laughed a lot more. We often laughed so hard our bellies hurt. I can’t imagine that with the young students I have. Or maybe I just attract the embodiments of the neoliberal Zeigeist. I don’t know. I don’t want to sound too much like an old fart
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Thank you for the article. It’s indeed very good and in-depth.
Sorry about those students of yours. They’ve probably been tamed into conformity by smartphones and social media (said the other old fart while typing blog comments on his own smartphone).
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Based on the stories they tell me I would say their parents are unhappy and think money, cars, titles, material success can compensate for that. There seem to be two general reactions to this, depression or narcissism. In one group I have both cases and the narcissist can’t stand the depressed one. The depressed is a way, way better student than the narcissist. It’s extremely sad to watch this unfold.
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