![]() colleges and universities reported no rapes whatsoever, and 95 percent of all college presidents defended their institutions’ handling of sexual assault cases. Ziering and Dick make their case against the universities primarily through anecdotal evidence and statistics, which show that only 5 percent of campus assaults are reported and only a small percentage of those lead to expulsion or criminal prosecution. Many of the women claiming they were assaulted saw their complaints go nowhere and had to get used to seeing their assailants strolling around campus. “What would you do differently?” Melinda Manning, formerly an assistant dean at UNC, reports that administrators discourage victims of sexual assault from going to the police, and Kimberly Theidon, a professor at Harvard, explains that universities consider sexual assault a PR problem more than a matter of student safety. “Rape is like a football game, Annie,” Clark remembers hearing from the woman who listened to her story. Pino and Clark aren’t the only ones: about a half dozen other women come forward to share their stories, and in one damning montage, Dick collects their accounts of trying to report sexual assaults to college administrators, who immediately placed the onus on them. A title insert, citing six different academic studies, estimates that 16 to 20 percent of women are sexually assaulted at some point during their college careers. According to Clark, the year she arrived at UNC two incoming freshmen were raped before classes had even begun. Images of women arriving on campus and moving into their dorm rooms follow, but the dream turns ugly as Andrea Pino and Annie Clark, two students from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, recall being forcibly raped at frat parties. ![]() The movie may inspire a sense of outrage, but it’s less likely than The Invisible War to bring about any change.īoth movies begin with credit sequences that define the institutional promise made to women: in The Invisible War an old army-training film and recruitment TV commercials celebrate women in the ranks, and in The Hunting Ground a montage of home video shows young women anxiously opening response letters from their dream schools and shrieking with excitement as they learn they’ve been admitted. Yet the crimes alleged in The Hunting Ground are governed not by the Uniform Code of Military Justice, a closed system that allows the armed forces to police themselves, but by university administrators subject to the messier arenas of civil and criminal law. Like The Invisible War, The Hunting Ground presents allegations of sexual assault from a variety of witnesses and culminates in a crusade for justice that brings those witnesses to Washington, D.C. According to the filmmakers’ projections, some 100,000 young people will be sexually assaulted on college campuses this year, yet only a small fraction of those crimes will be reported, and only a small fraction of those will be punished. With The Hunting Ground, Ziering and Dick shift their focus from the most powerful conservative institution in America to the most powerful liberal institution-higher education-and find it similarly ineffective in punishing sexual offenders. ![]() ![]() The day after seeing The Invisible War, however, Panetta ordered this policy changed so that victims file reports of sexual assault further up the chain of command, to a colonel or higher-ranking officer. One of the key problems identified in the movie was the policy requiring any military assault victim to report the incident directly to his or her commanding officer, who might be friends with the perpetrator or might even be the perpetrator himself. military, was screened for secretary of defense Leon Panetta in April 2012. Few documentary makers see their work bring results as substantial as those witnessed by producer Amy Ziering and writer-director Kirby Dick when The Invisible War, their exposé of sexual assault in the U.S. ![]()
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