What Does the Stop Campus Hazing Act Require Colleges to Disclose?
For decades, hazing was governed almost entirely by a patchwork of state laws and campus policies, which meant that what a college had to tell the public about hazing incidents depended on where the college happened to be. In December 2024, that changed at the federal level.
The law itself
The Stop Campus Hazing Act was enacted as Public Law 118-173. Rather than creating a standalone system, it amends the Clery Act — the existing federal campus-safety disclosure law — which is why the new requirements flow through the same reporting channels colleges already use for campus crime statistics.
What institutions must now do
In broad strokes, the law does three things:
- Adds hazing to campus crime statistics. Colleges that receive federal student aid must include hazing incidents in the statistics they compile and disclose under the Clery Act.
- Requires a Campus Hazing Transparency Report. Institutions must publish information about student organizations found responsible for hazing violations — meaning that findings which once lived quietly in conduct offices become public, organization by organization.
- Requires hazing policies and prevention programming. Institutions must maintain and disclose their hazing policies and provide research-informed prevention education.
The law also establishes a federal definition of hazing for these reporting purposes, which matters because state definitions vary widely.
Where the disclosures live
Clery Act disclosures are published in each institution's Annual Security Report, a document every covered college must produce yearly; the Clery Center, the national nonprofit focused on Clery Act compliance, is a good resource for understanding how those reports are assembled and what belongs in them. The hazing transparency information is typically found on the institution's website alongside or linked from its other campus-safety disclosures. If you can't find it, the campus office responsible for Clery compliance — often within public safety or student affairs — can point you to it.
How to read these reports sensibly
Two cautions, in both directions. First, a transparency report entry describes a finding against an organization at a point in time; chapters change membership almost completely every four years, and a violation from years ago may or may not describe the current group. Second — and this cuts the other way — an empty report is not proof of a clean history. Reporting obligations phase in, incidents must be reported and adjudicated before they appear, and research compiled by groups like the StopHazing Research Lab has long indicated that hazing is substantially underreported. Treat the reports as one source among several, which is exactly how we use them in our guide to checking a chapter's record.
What this page is not
This page explains a disclosure law: what documents exist and how to read them. It is not guidance on recognizing or responding to hazing itself. For prevention frameworks and state-law resources, StopHazing maintains dedicated materials; for concerns about a specific situation, the people to contact are your campus's fraternity and sorority life office, its conduct or public-safety office, and the organization's national headquarters.