Butler's Cinema Scene

“THE HUNTING GROUND” My rating: B+

90 minutes | MPAA rating: PG-13

When they last teamed up in 2012, documentarists Kirby Dick and Amy Zierling gave us “The Invisible War,” a look at sexual assault in the military so damning it forced the Pentagon to review its procedures.

Now Dick and Zierling deliver “The Hunting Ground,” a study of rape on college campuses that should be mandatory viewing for teens and their parents.

But even as this film throws a spotlight on the problem of campus rape, it also explains why American colleges will have to be dragged kicking and screening to confront the issue.

The doc begins with footage of young people learning that they’ve been accepted by their first-choice universities.  Tears of joy, high fives, back slaps and big hugs are in order.

For some the joy won’t last long. “The Hunting Ground” is filled with young women talking about being sexually assaulted — often even before their freshman classes have begun.

Dick and Ziering also interview a convicted campus rapist (allegedly reformed, his face is blurred) who discusses his methodology for locating, cultivating and attacking women.

The statistics presented here are horrifying. As many as 100,000 American women will be sexually assaulted on campus each year. And yet nearly half of all U.S. campuses report no rapes at all in any year. Something’s not right.

The film doesn’t suggest that all college men are rape crazy. These crimes are committed by no more than 4 percent of male students.  Yet the reluctance of the schools to investigate rape allegations and expel the perpetrators means that this criminal 4 percent are usually repeat offenders.

This doc works superbly on several levels.  First it lets these women tell their stories — and we find that overwhelmingly they have received no satisfaction from their administrations, which bury rape reports lest word get out that their campuses are unsafe. (One of the film’s subjects is a former college head of security who prematurely ended his career rather than be complicit in rape coverups.)

Campus rapes are rarely committed by strangers. “It’s the people you do know you’ve got to be worried about,” says one young woman.

Certain fraternities on certain campuses have earned reputations for drugging and sexually assaulting women at their parties. Several young women note that SAE stands both for Sigma Alpha Epsilon and “sexual assault expected.”

The film makes the case that many universities allow fraternities to get away with sexual assault because the Greek system provides private housing without which the school would have to build and maintain many more multi-million-dollar dorms — not to mention that most of the big financial doners have fraternity ties.

The same goes for college athletes, who are cash cows for their schools. The film concludes with the testimony of a young woman who accused Florida State University quarterback (and Heisman Trophy winner) Jameis Winston of sexual assault.  The school delayed for nearly a year getting a DNA sample from Winston — and even after testing showed his DNA matched that obtained during a post-rape medical examination, the star athlete was cleared of all charges by a school judicial panel.

The victim, meanwhile, received so many threats from her fellow students and FSU football fans that she dropped out.

And then there’s the Mizzou footballer who was accused of rape and yet allowed to play for two seasons…until he was accused yet again by a different woman.

Lest “The Hunting Ground” come off as an unbearable downer, Dick and Ziering (she does many of the on-camera interviews with rape victims) do offer hope in the form of University of North Carolina students Andrea Pino and Annie Clark, who fought back by creating a network of rape survivors and eventually saw their story on the front page of The New York Times.

It’s a glimmer of hope in a very bleak picture.

| Robert W. Butler