Human Branding - Persisting Practices

Persisting Practices

• Generally voluntary, though often under severe social pressure, branding may be used as a painful form of initiation, serving both as endurance and motivation test (rite of passage) and a permanent membership mark, seen as male bonding in violent 'macho' circles. Branding is thus practiced:
  • By some street gangs
  • In organized crime as "stripes" to signify a violent crime that the person committed. Typically on the upper arm or upper torso.
  • In prisons
  • Sometimes as an extreme initiation in the increasingly less common tradition of painful hazing (otherwise mostly paddling).
  • Some members of college fraternities and sororities voluntarily elect to be branded with their fraternity/sorority letters. This is far less common in sororities than fraternities.
• Branding can be used as a strictly voluntary body decoration, permanent body art rather like many tattoos.
• In the sadomasochistic scene, it is practiced as a form of bodily mutilation with consent. See: Branding (BDSM)
• In extreme BDSM dominance and submission relationships, a consensual slave may desire/accept a branding as a mark of belonging and commitment (possibly to slavery rather than to the specific master).