The Hunting Ground.

The statistics currently stand that 1 in 5 young women will have been sexually assaulted by the time they graduate college in America. 1 in 5. The Hunting Ground (2015) is a documentary which illuminates the prevalence of sexual violence at American universities through the heart-wrenching stories of victims who have been overlooked by their educational institutions as a means of upholding a prestigious and untarnished image. I have never felt so shaken up after watching a documentary as I did after watching The Hunting Ground. 

Following the aftermath of their assaults, The Hunting Ground‘s young women and men describe the symptoms of their trauma - nightmares, panic attacks, self-harm, and suicide attempts. Many of the victims eventually decide to speak out, and the responses from university administrators is at times unbearable, the most crude and unbelievable response one of the girls received being “rape is like a football game. If you look back on the game, what would you do differently?” So many of the young women were questioned on how they were led to be in a position of rape, and even more scarring is the amount of young women that left administrators' offices feeling as if it were their wrongdoing. 

One of The Hunting Ground's biggest accomplishments is its exposure of the great lie and deception of college fraternities. Fraternities, for decades, have been nothing other than a haven for raping, hazing, drugging, and horrible mistreatment of women. Sigma Alpha Epsilon (SAE), one of America's largest domestic fraternities, which is known as "Sexual Assault Expected" by numerous people on university campuses, have been cult-like hellholes for many years. The documentary does not sugarcoat the sickening behaviour that runs extensively at these places. And rightly so – vulnerability is not the cause of this issue; mistreatment of a person is.

It is a timely and important subject, and that has become even more clear since the recent Stanford assault case. As a young woman, watching this documentary shone light on an issue which is far too prevalent in society today, and has made even more real the lack of support that vulnerable young people are receiving from the institutions that have some power to monitor the issue at hand. What the documentary does most poignantly is to present the issue through survivors' first-person testimonies, impacting their audience. Something needs to change, and this documentary leaves you with greater awareness and knowledge, feeling confronted and affected, and urging for change. I could not recommend this more. 

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