Sanda Dia and the Reuzegom fraternity
Entry meant paying with his life
The image of Sanda Dia at a Leuven University lecture theatre.
Today, and for the past three days, and, incredibly, for the past four years, a trial has been ongoing. A large trial: the defendants number 18. They are all being tried on the same facts, which occurred in December of 2018 on three separate days and took the form of a “student hazing” of a candidate who wished to join their student fraternity. The candidate’s name was Sanda Dia and, as a result of the humiliations he was put through in conditions of extreme cold, he died. It is the trial of those allegedly responsible for his death that is being held.
Those who come to the microcosm of what are fraternities, sororities, or even what are universities, with wide-eyed amazement are understandable in their reaction. When, some few years ago, the word “chumocracy” was bandied around as a description of life in Britain’s Whitehall, and despite my reading to my own surprise of late that Eton School, far from being where shamelessness is bred, is where it is, rather, perfected, it became clear, if clear it hadn’t already been, that it is in university clubs such as this that are fostered connections, life-long bonds and, so is it now, life-dependent trust.
Besides these facts, and the rest that are well-rehearsed surrounding the case, which anyone can read here (if need be, via a machine translator), the stage now reached, in which pleas of mitigation are being made by counsel, is one where the, at times, united front of the 18 defendants seems less of a bulwark.
It is all too easy to assume an, entirely natural, stance of shocked horror, and let that be the last emotion that passes through you when reading about this whole, sorry, very sorry affair. Emotions there are aplenty.
The defendants have addressed the court. They’re known by pseudonyms (Sondage, Strontvlieg, Shrek, Zaadje, Janker, Protput, Pronker, Rafiki, Flodder, Kelter, Kletsmajoor, Randi, Igean, Paterberg, Placebo, Rustdag and Sanda’s dooppeter), to protect them in recognition of their youth and because it’s deemed not in the public interest to divulge them (the normal case, and appropriate here). One has prayed and asked Sanda’s family for forgiveness; it sounds pious, and yet, if he doesn’t make an avowal of that in his defence in his own plea in mitigation, when else should he make it? A criminal summons is no red letter. Few are those who aren’t habitual offenders who receive one do so with anything approaching levity. To have one hang over you every waking moment, and most sleeping ones, for four long years is a trial in itself. Every time you pull yourself together, within seconds your thoughts have returned to the crime of which you’re accused. You pull yourself together a thousand times a day, every day and every night. The liberty that you continue to enjoy, at least for the time being, is no enjoyment. One might assert that this courtroom drama in and of itself has been punishment enough for the defendants, convicted or no as they may yet be.
That, however, is not a punishment the law prescribes. Our Criminal Code is absent provisions decreeing that the mental anguish of standing trial should serve as adequate punishment for the party convicted as charged. Instead, there come other tariffs to be applied: fines, forced labour, binding-over. For some members of the public, the burden of a sense of guilt carried with the accused through the rest of his life is well deserved and, whether or not that’s true, it isn’t out of place; Sanda Dia, for his part, certainly did not deserve to die; a model student of engineering, in his third year, preparing for exams that would launch him into career prospects that many can but dream of. All to nothing. Was it inadvertence; ebullient high spirits, a strain of disturbed character running through the organisers, emboldened by their committee structure, one that so often makes of a collective decision a decision taken, but by nobody in particular?
We look to our universities to form and mould the leaders of the future. It is a responsibility that they assume in earnest and honour. These hazings are a product of long-standing tradition, they’re part and parcel of the student experience. Perhaps they even make leaders of chaff. And perhaps, just perhaps, there are those among these 18 young people who are already developing skills of connivance and deceit which will be turned again to their advantage when, at length, they perhaps do achieve high office.
“I cannot look into another man’s conscience,” says Thomas More in the play about him. Nor can any of us. And it’s for that reason, if none else, that courts pay little heed to a troubled conscience.
Far less adjudicating an accused’s guilt feelings, perhaps the law should occupy itself with greater endeavour with what a hazing is, what it can become and what it may not be. That, at the very least, this State owes to the memory of Sanda Dia.
I was surprised to read this: “Als dopen niet meer mogen doorgaan, is het aan de wetgever om het te verbieden” – If hazing is no longer to be possible, it’s up to parliament to forbid it” (Joris Van Cauter, attorney at law).
If hazing, whatever form it takes, escapes the ordinary Belgian law principles governing the integrity of the person, perhaps for reasons related to consent, that consent is surely vitiated, extracted as a matter of purported honour, of acceptance, of entry to the circle the supplicant seeks to become a part of. As the test the supplicant is put through intensifies in its violence, that does not augment the constructive nature of the consent that is given, it betokens simply an augmentation in the duress that is applied in order to secure consent that is by then a mere formality. In Scots law, a victim cannot consent to an assault. So, if the same impossibility exists in Belgium to give consent to an assault of oneself, it would seem that, in its more extreme form, parliament could have already long since forbidden hazing. Even if, perversely, the standard falls back from “not causing harm to the hazee” to become simply “not causing his death” and, if everything’s okay provided you don’t actually kill him, that’s still a fairly hard level of endurance for any individual.
Assault in England is any act by which fear of harm is procured in the victim’s mind. It isn’t actually hitting someone. That is battery. As assault and battery, they each constitute an aggravation of the other in theory and, in practice, a single crime, whose commission must be intended. In Sanda Dia’s case, the charge against the defendants is not assault but culpable homicide: the taking of another’s life absent the intent to do so.
The law on whether consent can exclude guilt of the crime of assault varies from one jurisdiction to another. It’s an area pitted with exceptions and inconsistencies: consent excludes liability when taking part in contact sports or when smoking; but not when you’re asked if you mind standing in freezing water for an entire day in December while buckets of water are poured over you? The question is more what standard of care you can expect of your assaulter, regardless of what consent you might or might not have given or required to give. Turn the question away from the victim under his duress, and onto the perpetrator and theirs.