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15. The rape culture says: shut up!

Kirby Dick is a director that I came to greatly admire for his talent and courage in addressing sensitive subjects. My last post was based on his 2015 documentary The Hunting Ground about the sexual assault epidemic on American campuses. I'll wrap up the subject with the story of two rape survivors in the film, Annie Clark and Andrea Pino, and their incredible journey.

Annie and Andrea were students at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill. In her first year, before classes had even started, Annie and a friend were raped. Annie had her head banged against a wall while she was assaulted. The aggression affected her to the point she felt she needed help, but she kept quiet.

When another of her friends was raped and asked for advice, Annie decided to report her own assault in the hopes of getting support and resources to deal with the situation. This is what the school administrator told her: "Rape is like a football game. If you look back on the game, what would you do differently in that situation?" The administrator—a female, like many administrators included in the documentary—kept blaming her: "Were you drunk? What would you have done differently if you could replay the situation again?"

Andrea Pino was raped in her second year, when she was dragged into the bathroom during a party. Her aggressor repeatedly banged her head against the tiled floor as he raped her, and that was how she lost her virginity. Andrea later learned she wasn't the only one raped on that weekend, but at the time she didn't speak out because "no one did." Afflicted with constant nightmares and depression, she contacted Annie for help.

With Annie's aid, Andrea reported the abuse to the university and started a movement on campus against rape. Nothing happened. Feeling unsafe on campus, Annie and Andrea filed a federal Title IX complaint against the school to the Department of Education. That was when retaliation began. As others who spoke against rape on campus, they received death and rape threats. The two of them decided to leave the university.

Andrea and Annie travelled across the country talking to students and trying to assess the real situation on campuses. Early on, they became the front page story in the New York Times and, thanks to the exposure on the media, they received a deluge of messages from students sharing their own rape experience and looking for support.

The Hunting Ground shows Annie and Andrea's journey in real time. We see their interaction with rape survivors through chat and in person, and the stories are all the same. One student tells the dean accused her of having a drinking problem. Another had her scholarship taken away from her. One girl despaired because she couldn't stop cutting herself after her rape.

Some students didn't muster the courage to tell their families about the sexual assault they've suffered. All of them say their rape was bad, but the way they were treated by the school was much worse. Annie and Andrea can obviously relate to that. For them, though, the worse is not their rape but listening over and over to the same stories—cases that might have been prevented if schools weren't omissive.

Annie and Andrea wanted the voices of victims to be heard and start a public discussion. The two created a support network of activists and rape survivors to help victims speak out and teach them to file federal Title IX complaints. Along the way, they found an epidemic of sexual violence on campuses across the US. They mapped it, and later their map matched the 100+ institutions that went under federal investigation after students filed complaints against them.

The invisible war

There's more going on in the rape culture. In 2012, a new report from the military found that suicide by active-duty soldiers hit another record in 2011 and violent sex crimes jumped more than 30%. More than half of the sex crimes victims were active-duty female soldiers. Defense secretary Leon Panetta held a news conference in which he said sexual assault had no place in the military. His statement was delivered just as Kirby Dick's award-winning documentary The Invisible War  premiered at the Sundance Film Festival.