The Hunting Ground

Watching the documentary, The Hunting Ground, the scene that affected me the most was when a female student from St Mary, Notre Dame University, was being interviewed and was asked to share her tragic experience. She went in detail on how she was a freshman as the time, it was just her first week living on campus. She was the type of girl to stay in on the weekends and that kept to herself. A group of her friends decided to go to a party and drink, but then she got a text from a group of friends that there was party at this student’s house and to come. She decided to go thinking there would be lots of people there, but when she got there if was just her and a couple of guys, that were the roommates. The roommates soon left them alone and she started to feel uncomfortable. Then, that is when it happened, she was raped. After that she was never the same, she felt weak, betrayed, and unsafe when she went anywhere but her dorm. This made me feel heartbroken because she was not asking for it, she was quiet and did not want that kind of attention. Because of this act, it turned a good, strong minded person into feeling damaged and useless on the inside.

What surprised me the most is how these students from these various universities, big or small, were not treated with the respect or given the emotional support they should receive after such a traumatic experience. The advisors would treat these students as if the attacks were their fault and they were asking for it, with what the student was wearing or how much the student drank that night. With on top of that, the universities not moving forward on the victim’s case and in server cases not even upholding a form of punishment.

Especially when to colligate athletes being involved or accused within the situation. Since athletics plays such a big role in university funding and promoting school spirit, the university would downgrade the punishments for the specific athletes. For example, the specific athlete would still continue to play in NCAA competitions because they are valuable to the sport. This does nothing but teach the athlete that his or her behavior is tolerable and most likely they will abuse again.

After viewing this documentary, I still wonder why universities are continuing in their patterns of not reporting or following up with investigations to help protect the victims and other students on campus from these sexual predators. It seems that universities are so occupied by the business behind the university that what they are told or see, they just look the other way and pretend that it did not happened, to help save the university’s representation and funding by the state and sponsors. In my opinion, I would respect the universities that actually report and help find the abuser and get to say that they took care of the situation in the right way, then to have a university try to hide and cover it up, that does not seem like that is a university that cares about its students, just about another paycheck.