When a Michigan mother picked up her freshman son from his high school team football camp in June and found that his head had been shaved, she was not pleased. In fact, she was angry enough to go straight to a Board of Education meeting and utter a word no athletic director wants associated with their athletic program: hazing.

The local press attending the board meeting ran with the story, printing it in the next day's edition, and Goodrich (Mich.) High School Athletic Director Al Martus had his hands full. "Unfortunately, the mother didn't go through the proper step of bringing such a complaint to me first," Martus says. "Needless to say, I was surprised, and so were the board members."

Martus also had a difficult question to consider: Can shaving heads as a team activity be considered hazing? Looking further into the incident, he concluded that in this case it was not. "There were 10 freshmen at the camp, and only three got their hair cut," he says. "It was strictly a volunteer situation, and he volunteered."

From there, Martus met with the mother to talk about his findings. "We had a meeting that included the mom, her son, our head football coach, and myself to discuss everything," he says. "I explained why it was not a hazing incident, but she was already on board and withdrew the complaint."

However, future haircuts at Goodrich's football camp have been banned. Martus and the football coach decided that they didn't want to put their student-athletes in a situation that might be seen as creating peer pressure.

While the situation at Goodrich High has been resolved, it exemplifies the difficulty of knowing exactly what constitutes hazing. Mary Madden, Associate Professor in the University of Maine's College of Education and Human Development, recently co-authored a study on hazing with fellow Associate Professor Elizabeth Allan, and says the line is thinly drawn. "Without more specific details, I cannot say whether the situation in Michigan was hazing or not," she says. "However, shaving heads can be a hazing activity.

"It's all in the context," she continues. "Who is encouraging whom to have their head shaved? Did the people who had their heads shaved feel like they had to in order to be accepted into the group? If the adults in the situation are confused about whether an incident was hazing, then the kids are surely confused, too."

Misunderstandings on a true definition of hazing was a major finding of the study, "Hazing In View: College Students At Risk," which was released in March. It involved over 11,400 college students at 53 institutions across the country who were also asked about their high school experiences.

"There is a huge gap between how many students have actually experienced hazing behavior and how many realize or admit to it," Madden says. "By our definition, half of college students have experienced some kind of hazing, but when asked, 91 percent say they've never been hazed. They justify or exclude the behavior they've participated in by minimizing the seriousness of it or saying they didn't do anything they hadn't agreed to do."

Allan and Madden define hazing as "any activity expected of someone joining or participating in a group that humiliates, degrades, abuses, or endangers them regardless of a person's willingness to participate." In the over 300 in-person interviews the two researchers conducted, many students used the words "low-level hazing" to describe an incident, but Madden says there really is no such thing--hazing is hazing.

"What's low-level for one person might not be for somebody else," she says. "We would ask athletes if there was hazing on their team, and they would say, 'Oh no, we don't have hazing. It's not allowed.' But when we asked if there were initiation activities, they would say, 'Oh yeah, we have rookie initiation.' In many athletes' minds, initiation was not hazing, so that justified the activity for them."

Another important trend the research revealed was that almost half the college student-athletes in the study said they had experienced at least one hazing behavior in high school. "While it may be more difficult for high school coaches and administrators to monitor their athletes because they don't live on campus," Madden says, "it is very important they make an effort to prevent hazing behaviors in the first place."

Prevention is key, and the take-home message from Allan and Madden is that more discussion needs to happen. "Have conversations with your athletes about what is involved in the power dynamics of peer pressure and groupthink," Madden says. "What we want is for students to develop a moral compass and make ethical decisions. If we can teach them to analyze a situation and make a good decision, we're teaching these kids an important life skill they will carry with them."

For more information about Allan and Madden's study, including a downloadable copy of their initial findings, visit: www.hazingstudy.org.