Others bearing the brunt of the directors’ attention included the University of Notre Dame, Harvard University, and the University of California at Berkeley. (Full disclosure: I am on the full-time faculty of Florida State University, one of the universities featured prominently in the film.
These women are individualist heroines, working to restore personal dignity, in the face of institutional intransigence. These were women motivated by their sense of injustice, rooted in their own experience, searching for a practical way to hold college and universities accountable for not addressing sexual assault on campus. Let’s be clear: This was not an initiative started by the federal government or enlightened bureaucrats.
Second, two young women with no legal experience or direct knowledge of the legal process had to creatively interpret federal law to force change. The first is the intransigence of private and public universities and colleges in addressing an issue that continued to put hundreds of their students at risk even as they were witnessing the personal destruction of human dignity that resulted from sexual assault. These young women, facing intransigence, impotent administrators, and bureaucratic stonewalling, launched the initial efforts that led to the tidal wave of Title IX investigations now forcing college and university administrations to address sexual assault more forthrightly.Īs a matter of public policy, two aspects of this case are troubling. The use of two rape survivors and activists from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill- Andrea Pino and Annie Clark-as the primary vehicle for telling the story is both effective and important. Its goal is to use the injustice of sexual assault to provoke advocacy. The film itself, like many documentaries, is a call to action. And this is a failure of civil society on our campuses. Almost every student will know someone who has been sexually assaulted by the time they graduate (although most will not have experienced it directly themselves). The film is much more pointed than that, and the filmmakers clearly have an agenda, but its power is in using rape survivor testimony to strip away any pretence that sexual assault on college campuses is somehow exceptional. They have said that their main goal is to create a “conversation” on campus rape. I doubt the filmmakers had this insight in mind when they conceived, filmed, and rolled out the marketing for the film. This is unfortunate because campus sexual assault may be one of our society’s most significant contemporary examples of the failure of civil society, and hundreds of thousands of women and men have suffered as a result. I was joined by one other woman and a couple by the time the opening credits flashed on the screen. I saw the film in a commercial theater on opening weekend in Tallahassee. The Hunting Ground, a documentary about sexual assault on college campuses, opened recently across the country.