![]() ![]() While Dick tracks their grassroots activism, he and his talking heads attack the universities from the top down, citing their financial and reputational disincentives to ignore and downplay the ubiquity of campus rape. They become the film’s protagonists, creating a network of survivors equipped to take legal action against the administrations of other schools, and eventually reaching the halls of Congress. Andrea Pino and Annie Clark, two University of North Carolina survivors incited by this state of bureaucratic entropy and condescension, use a novel but noble interpretation of Title IX (the federal law preventing gender discrimination in higher education) in order to sue their alma mater. When the investigations aren’t rampant with victim blaming, they remain halfhearted: the vast majority of assailants go unpunished the few that are face paltry sentences (community service, small financial penalties). They’re asked what they were wearing and how much they’d been drinking before the assault, and how they’d behave differently in future social excursions. Dick and producer Amy Ziering interview experts on sexual abuse and dozens of survivors, who discuss their reluctance to go public and their disquietingly similar experiences with campus police and administrators. The Hunting Ground follows the template of its predecessor precisely. Dick’s films don’t go far enough in explaining how a culture of rape can pervade in vastly different institutions, but they’re ruthless about holding them accountable. Glossy but dogged, the filmmaker’s new film, The Hunting Ground, is an unsettling primer on the campus-rape epidemic, armed with a battery of statistics and testimonials demonstrating how university systems fail to address the severity of the problem. Devastatingly, the same proportion of women are abused on America’s college campuses. One of the many stark statistics in Kirby Dick’s last documentary, 2012’s The Invisible War, revealed that 20% of women who serve in the military report being sexually assaulted while enlisted. ![]()
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