And she said The Hunting Ground skates over major changes to campus policies as a result of governmental pressures. Yoffe contends those studies conflate far less serious and murkier interactions between young adults, often inebriated, with starker and rarer cases of assault and rape. Yoffe says the reliance on studies that suggest 1 in 5 women on campus will be raped or sexually assaulted creates an unwarranted sense of panic. "Many of these procedures against the accused are unfair do not offer due process. "In some ways, we are correcting one injustice by creating another injustice," Yoffe says. Some journalistic critics say the film has helped to push the pendulum too far in the other direction.
Those policies started changing in earnest in 2011 under reforms promoted by the Obama administration and a series of reviews conducted by the U.S. Law For Students Accused Of Campus Rape, Legal Victories Win Back RightsĮven some critics of The Hunting Ground acknowledge that university procedures for handling accusations of rape and sexual assault have long handled victims' concerns inadequately.
In showing the movie on campuses around the country, Ziering said, they heard from many female college students about their own experiences being sexually assaulted. Ziering said the film arose from their work on an earlier acclaimed documentary, The Invisible War, about the toll of sexual assault on women in combat. administrator and also by the fraternity at the center of the allegation. The magazine has been sued for defamation by a U.Va. Last year, Rolling Stone published a cover story expose about college sexual assault but later had to retract its key anecdote - an allegation of a gang rape at the University of Virginia for which there were few concrete details and no evidence. Yet Ziering and Dick are mindful of the context in which their film emerges.
On Tuesday it landed on the official shortlist for next year's Academy Awards. The next day, the Producers Guild of America nominated The Hunting Ground for best documentary film. It was the most-watched programming of any in cable news that night among adults 25 to 54, considered the prime demographic. I have great concerns with the basic assumptions of the film.Įmily Yoffe, contributing editor at The AtlanticĪside from the controversy, the documentary has had a good fall. The filmmakers themselves are very clear they're advocates, not journalists. Our concern is that if our pressure is not on them, and national attention is focused on other issues, they will slide back to a business-as-usual policy." "Yes, we are seeing schools starting to move.
It's evidenced by how often they're showing this film on their campuses," Dick said in the interview. And they say each incident and assertion presented in their film stands up to scrutiny. They say much of the negative reaction stems from defenders of universities reluctant to change. I have great concerns with the basic assumptions of the film."ĭick and his collaborator, producer Amy Ziering, agreed to speak jointly to NPR in an effort to refute the criticism.
"The filmmakers themselves are very clear they're advocates, not journalists," said Emily Yoffe, a contributing editor at The Atlantic magazine who has written extensively on campus rape.
A group of 19 Harvard law professors wrote that it "provides a seriously false picture both of the general sexual assault phenomenon at universities and of our student" accused in a case depicted in the film. Those concerns have continued to reverberate since the documentary's broadcast early last week on CNN, a co-producer of the film.įlorida State University's president has denounced The Hunting Ground. The film has also inspired a backlash - not only for its perspective but for the factual foundation on which it is based and its reporting methods. Since its debut early this year, The Hunting Ground has been cited as an inspiration for action by the White House and by New York Gov. "If approximately 1 in 5 women are being sexually assaulted, the schools are really failing in this area." Obviously being sexually assaulted is completely a safety issue," Hunting Ground director Kirby Dick told NPR. "Colleges and universities have a real responsibility to keep their students safe. The documentary The Hunting Ground, a searing look at the failure of American universities to grapple successfully with campus rape, has been embraced by CNN and shortlisted for next year's Oscars, while helping to sharpen the focus of college administrators. "Schools, rather than addressing the problem, have in many, many cases covered this up," says Kirby Dick, director of The Hunting Ground.