Why are cam­pus rapists treat­ed bet­ter than their victims?

The pow­er­ful state­ment writ­ten by Stan­ford cam­pus rape vic­tim, Emi­ly Doe, has been read close to 15 mil­lion times at the time of writ­ing. Its vis­i­bil­i­ty is a reflec­tion of the 23-year-old’s com­pelling elo­quence but also the time­li­ness of her illus­tra­tion of the dam­age caused when vic­tims of sex­u­al abuse are giv­en less con­sid­er­a­tion then their assailants. Any­one fol­low­ing the Brock Turn­er case will be famil­iar with Judge Aaron Persky’s jus­ti­fi­ca­tion for the six month coun­ty jail sen­tence giv­en to the for­mer stu­dent found guilty on three counts of sex­u­al­ly assault­ing an uncon­scious woman. Any longer would have a ​“severe impact” on the promis­ing and baby-faced cham­pi­on swimmer.

Direct­ed by Kir­by Dick, The Hunt­ing Ground is a great film to watch to under­stand the scale of America’s cam­pus rape prob­lem and the far-reach­ing rea­sons why it is rou­tine­ly brushed under the rug. The doc­u­men­tary (a the­mat­ic fol­low-up to The Invis­i­ble War, about rape in the US mil­i­tary) is root­ed in damn­ing sta­tis­tics and coloured by an end­less pro­ces­sions of young faces singing the same abhor­rent song. They were raped. They went to their col­leges. They were dis­missed – often by author­i­ties who turned the blame around onto them.

“So many sur­vivors come for­ward and say that my rape was bad but the way I was treat­ed after­wards was worse,” says Annie Clark, who was raped at Uni­ver­si­ty of North Car­oli­na before her first year class­es even began. After being dis­re­gard­ed by her col­lege, she and fel­low stu­dent sur­vivor, Andrea Pino, did some deep research and dis­cov­ered that they could appeal to the board of edu­ca­tion to take action against their col­lege for neglect­ing to pro­vide a safe atmos­phere for stu­dents. As the film pro­gress­es, and the girls devel­op sur­vivor net­works across the whole coun­try, edu­cat­ing oth­ers on how to take sim­i­lar action (known as Title IX) hope and sad­ness inter­twine. It’s won­der­ful that sur­vivors are becom­ing activists and forc­ing progress, but dis­ap­point­ing that they have to take jus­tice into their own hands.

Why do the-pow­ers-that-be have more invest­ed in pro­tect­ing rapists than in look­ing after their vic­tims? The Hunt­ing Ground shows this invest­ment as a lit­er­al one. Stu­dents accused of rape are more like­ly to sue than their vic­tims, and a pub­lic scan­dal is always bad for busi­ness­es. We are giv­en a light­ning analy­sis of col­leges as busi­ness­es, striv­ing to main­tain a gleam­ing image for the sake of prospec­tive stu­dents and donors. ​“Numer­ous times I was tak­en aside by a senior, tenured female fac­ul­ty per­son and told the way to make it at Har­vard was to be a duti­ful daugh­ter. If you hear it, pre­tend you didn’t. If you see it, you shut up about it,” says Har­vard pro­fes­sor, Kim­ber­ly Thei­don, who coin­ci­den­tal­ly lost her tenure when she spoke about what she saw.

The stakes are mul­ti­plied for the col­lege when the accused is an ath­lete and there­fore a lucra­tive cog in a mil­lion-dol­lar sports-busi­ness net­work. Mean­while, as the con­ser­v­a­tive machine grinds onwards, rapists are learn­ing that there are no con­se­quences to per­pe­trat­ing sex crimes. The most reveal­ing of all sta­tis­tics is that less than eight per cent of men in col­lege cause 90 per cent of the assaults, so pun­ish­ment in the first instance could save a vast num­ber of would-be victims.

There has been much quib­bling and nit­pick­ing about indi­vid­ual case stud­ies by crit­ics of The Hunt­ing Ground but they ignore the vital impor­tance of its breadth. This nation­wide pic­ture of abuse fol­lowed by neglect is only deni­able if you believe that hun­dreds of thou­sands of peo­ple lie and feign the after-effects of trau­ma every year, which is only believ­able if you are a sex­ist con­spir­a­cy theorist.

Those who accuse the doc­u­men­tary of hav­ing an agen­da are right because there is no such thing as jour­nal­is­tic objec­tiv­i­ty or film­mak­ing impar­tial­i­ty or per­son­al neu­tral­i­ty when it comes to review­ing the treat­ment of rape vic­tims. We either choose to believe sur­vivors of sex­u­al assault and advo­cate for a world that cares for them, or we dis­miss and silence their pain, because it’s incon­ve­nient and cost­ly to do oth­er­wise. The Hunt­ing Ground is great because it shows the val­ues of estab­lish­ments that rou­tine­ly fail those who most need to have their faith in human­i­ty restored, there­fore show­ing exact­ly which val­ues need to be chal­lenged in order to show sol­i­dar­i­ty with sex­u­al assault survivors.

The Hunt­ing Ground is avail­able to watch on Netflix.