Friday, March 20th marked the national release of a new documentary by Kirby Dick called The Hunting Ground. You might have heard of the director’s name before from his famous trend of documentaries uncovering the hushed sexual assault cases within powerful institutions like the military. His latest film focuses on a new setting that hits close to home and maybe a little too close to comfort for Notre Dame students—the college campus.
Sexual assault on campus isn’t news though, right? We’ve sat through the building community seminars and get the campus safety emails. We’ve gone numb to the national headlines covering the major offenses. Within the past year, both TIME and The Atlantic had cover stories surrounding campus life and the violence behind these elite communities, but those glossy covers can be easy to overlook. However, Dick stirs up trouble by sharpening his cinematic knife and putting previously untouched elite universities on his chopping block, namely the University of Notre Dame.
The Hunting Ground only covers a handful of universities by name, and on that list, one of the few times it would rather be excluded from a list, is Notre Dame. Even when watching the trailer of the documentary, some gut-wrenching images of the campus and the golden dome flash across the screen.
Notre Dame is specifically featured in the section of the movie targeting schools with athlete privilege and how that privilege has allowed certain athletes to escape sexual assault investigations. The movie looks into the famous case of Erica Kinsman who claimed to be raped by FSU football player Jameis Winston, and then compares her case to a similar situation involving the Notre Dame football program. To quote one site investigating the movie, “A campus investigator at Notre Dame… says that administrators told him he could not reach out to athletes or coaches to locate a football player accused of sexually assaulting another student.”
Though his movie makes many bold assertions, Dick treads a muddled, questionable path. Most of the presidents, provosts, and other school officials for the colleges in the movie declined to be interviewed because it would be more of a manipulative attack, rather than an objective interview. The schools are also worried that, according to an interview, “The victim would undermine due process and lead to wrongful expulsion in cases where there’s little evidence.” With one person’s word pitted against the other, it’s hard enough for a university to make the right call without the pressure of a film crew.
Despite the grey area The Hunting Ground slips into sometimes, it’s a documentary styled to spark change, and so far, it’s accomplished just that. Since its early release at the 2015 Sundance Film Festival, The Hunting Ground has caused a lot of buzz, most of it directed at the national government. The Obama administration already kicked off the “It’s On Us” campaign to promote active bystander promotion, which has helped increase bystander intervention, but that’s obviously not enough. To quote the producer of this documentary, Amy Ziering, “It’s not just on us. It’s on the administration.”
Either way, The Hunting Ground raises a lot of questions of how universities and the government are handling sexual assault. Though it feels victimizing in itself to have Notre Dame under the scrutinizing eye of this documentary, it raises an often forgotten point that despite our best efforts, fewer number of sexual assaults cases will never be good enough until we can say that number of cases is zero.
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