The Hunting Ground
For this paper I will be discussing and summarizing the movie The Hunting Ground, and explain how it is related to two concepts that I have learned in class so far. This film is based on sexual assault that has been happening on campus and none of school administration has done anything about it. The school administration take the complaints as a joke and question the victim if they are sure that is what happen and if they are not misinterpreted the things. The film start off by showing video clips of women getting accepted to the college they have applied for
The first victim that is presented is Andrea, who was really excited to go to college and just wanted to get of the state that she live at. She then tells her story of what happened to her, she went to a party and was pulled to the bathroom by a man. The man then pushes her, hit her head on the tile floor, and then rapes her. She felt like she could not scream for help, like her voice was not there. The next victim that is presented is Annie who went out drinking with friends at party and then was raped right after. After her raped she found out that two of her friends were also victim of sexual assault, she went to go report it in and the administration told her that rape is like football. What the administration was trying to say when she used that metaphor was to let Annie think what she could have done differently to prevent it from happening, her case was not being taken seriously.
When the reports are given from girls the school tells them to just drop the case and if they are really sure they want to report it, and they let them know that they can affect someone’s career. For the males, which are sexually assaulted at the school, the school just tell them to drop out of school. The problem with the school are that they do not report any of the assault because they want to keep their school reputation look good and to keep receiving the funds. In 2012, 45% of the colleges reported zero sexual assault. This just shows that the school does not want to be seen as the rape school and want people to continue to come to their school to keep receiving their tuition money. The number of assaults that are reported are increasing but the number of explosion was between 0-3, but for the explosion for cheating there was a higher number.
Later on Annie and Andrea find information based on the title IX, which is a federal law that prohibits discrimination of sex in education. With this information of the title IX they wanted to take it higher to school in order to show the school that they are breaking the law. For some many sexual assaults that were not being taking seriously from the schools, student males and females end up committing suicide.
One of the concept that I feel that was mentioned in the film was consent, throughout the film it showed that the perpetrator did not understand the meaning of consent. For example in Yale University there was a video that got released for males outside of the female room yelling “No means Yes, Yes means Anal”, this just shows that these males are not taking it seriously what the meaning of consent means and not respecting women on their decision about sex. It is also shown that the perpetrator does not care if their victim is drunk by them raping them when they are drunk it makes it harder for the victim to try to fight off the person or realize what is happening to them after it is too late. The next concept that I fell is a big impact throughout the film would be who they are blaming on the sexual assault, there are gender differences outcomes when it comes to the victim. For the females they will tell them why did they not fight back, what were they wearing, why did they not yell for help and are they really sure that they want to ruin someone life just for a misunderstanding. For the males they would tell them why they not fought back, men cannot get sexual assaulted. This just put more stereotypes on the gender on who the victim and the perpetrator are and will blame the victim for being in that situation.
The student activist used the federal law to hold the university accountable for sexual assault, but they also did other things to keep their school accountable for their actions which would be protesting, confesses and making posters. By them doing that they were informing all the students on that campus what is going on and they would gather more and more people that went through what happen to them and it would just make the school look bad because they did nothing to stop the assaults on their campus. I felt that the most powerful approach was the Title IX and also confesses they had on their campus. The reason why I think it was powerful is because it made other student to speak up and realizes that they are not alone
In this film it shows how there is a systemic problem of sexual violence across college campuses and students, parents, and administrators should work together to improve the campus safety by, having more services, should talk more about this problem and that everyone should be treated the same by receiving the justice they deserve. If a person who gets expelled from the school for cheating it should be the same thing for causing sexual violence on a student, there should not be treated as if the situation is not a big problem and it should not be not spoken about just to keep the school from having a bad image.