The film takes care to not indict those systems out of hand but rather the harmful power they have when left unchecked.
Primarily, the fraternity and sports cultures. If the first half of The Hunting Ground chronicles Clark and Pino’s tireless work toward raising awareness of the severity of this problem, the latter expands its focus, forming an indictment of certain hyper-aggressive facets of college culture in general. For Dick, it’s easy to write it off when it’s a news article, far harder when you have to listen to a person.
Much of this information can be found in the news, through the right channels, but there’s something distinctly different about seeing it in practice. Through Clark and Pino, the film illustrates in detail the frustration felt by going through the legal system as they were instructed, only to be interrogated about how drunk they were, whether their clothing was too revealing, whether they were actually raped at all or just had buyer’s remorse after the fact. The film’s many harrowing stories offer a distinct rebuke to those who consider most accusations false and asks audiences to simply watch and listen, to table politics for a while and listen to the many, many young men and women who lived through something that nobody should ever have to and were ostracized when they tried to seek out appropriate justice. While the film volleys disturbing statistics throughout (on average, 88% of rapes on campuses go unreported), The Hunting Ground keeps the focus exactly where it should be: on the survivors. This is a point Dick makes abundantly clear throughout the doc the supposed reprimands and “very serious” approaches schools purport to take to rape and sexual assault cases are too frequently nice-sounding buzzwords, rather than standard practices. Both were raped during their time on campus, both went through the proper hierarchical channels assuming that the situation would be handled in an expedient manner, and both tragically had to learn what so many women around America and the world have: nobody seemed to particularly care, and their rapists were essentially slapped on the hand so that the school might save face. One major contributing facet to that change is owed to the Herculean efforts of Annie Clark and Andrea Pino, two former students at the University of North Carolina. It’s just one that American society is finally starting to talk about. But despite the immediacy of these numbers, Dick is careful to point out that this isn’t a new problem. It’s not even so much an issue, really, as it’s an epidemic as the film states, one in five women (on average) are raped during a given school year, according to statistics gathered as recently as last year. Specifically, the safety and protection and equality promised on college campuses by schools as it relates to the issue of sexual assault and rape. The problem that Kirby Dick ( This Film Is Not Yet Rated, The Invisible War) addresses in The Hunting Ground is that this has become, in some respects, an outright lie.