The Hunting Ground by Kirby Dick

Author:Kirby Dick
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Skyhorse Publishing
Published: 2016-03-15T00:00:00+00:00

Dispatch from Hunted Ground

by Roxane Gay

I have spent most of my life on the hunting ground, as an undergrad, a graduate student, and now, a professor. I am, I suppose, one of the lucky ones. The campuses where I’ve spent my time, particularly as a student, have never felt like a hunting ground. I’ve been able to attend classes, or not on my less responsible days when sleeping in felt like the better choice. I partied. I made regrettable but consensual choices. I made awesome and consensual choices. I somehow avoided becoming a campus assault statistic. I learned, and made mistakes, and had invaluable experiences and grew, and now I teach and work with students from the other side.

The hunting ground where I was raped, at twelve years old, was the woods behind the neighborhood where my family lived. I was gang raped in an abandoned hunting cabin, by boys I went to school with, boys I thought I knew. I didn’t know I was on a hunting ground until I knew, and then there was no escape. In some ways, I am still trapped there. This is, I suppose, what lucky looks like.

As I watched The Hunting Ground, as I bore witness to the testimony of young women and men who have been sexually assaulted on college campuses, I thought of how egregiously these students were failed by institutions that are, at their best, designed to help those same students find their way into the world. I recognized that victims of campus sexual assault all too often have no escape from the ground where they were hunted unless they choose to leave their school.

I was stunned by the documentary, though I am not sure why.

Certainly, I knew there was a problem with sexual violence on college campuses. Whenever there is a sexual assault at my university, I receive an email that reads, ALERT: Campus police investigate sexual assault report. Details, if there are any, follow: where the assault happened, what the suspect looks like. We are urged, as members of the campus community, to come forward if we have information.

I travel to dozens of college campuses to speak each year. When I am being driven around I am shown where, for example, a young woman was raped while people stood around videotaping the incident on their cell phones. I meet with groups of students who say, “Have you heard …?” and I listen as they tell me of recent campus assaults, of their outrage at being ignored by administrators, of their fear of being prey rather than students.

There are the national statistics that never seem to improve. On September 21, 2015, the American Association of Universities released a report of the largest survey on sexual assault on college and university campuses ever conducted. There were more than 150,000 respondents, and the report largely told us what we already know: One in four undergraduate women will experience some kind of sexual violence during her college years. The report also indicated that victims of sexual assault are reluctant to come forward.

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