Nuala Brennan Hunting Ground Reflection

Sexual assault/rape is a huge epidemic in today's society, as shown in The Hunting Ground. Not only is it way too common, but the victims often turn into the accused, especially on college campuses like the ones shown in the film. We need to raise awareness for both the crime and the treatment of the victims and lack of penalty of the aggressors.  Victims are taught that is is their fault and are supposed to not get raped, but instead of teaching to not get raped, we should be teaching to not rape. People should not have to change what they do because somebody else is being a criminal and abusing their safety and bodies. The best solution is to raise awareness of the issue through movies like this so that people see it's a real serious problem so we can start teaching consent education. Some ideas for how to do this could by creating organizations, making movies, TV ads, books and anything that uses the media because that is how news travels fastest. This needs to be taught in schools starting from a young age, obviously not too young because we don't want to scare children, but before it's too late, before our rape culture society has brainwashed the young people and possible aggressors.
Dana Bolger adn Alexandra Brodsky founded Know Your IX in 2013 after they had both been sexually assaulted in college. They created this organization which informs students that men and women have a right to influence reform of the title IX act in order to get better treatment of student victims. They are funded primarily through public donations. They published a guide for journalists about how to write about gender violence and it ended up being very controversial because some accused it of being supportive of the alleged victim and not considerate of the alleged attacker and their possible innocence. Some, on the other hand, saw the guide as very helpful and put it to use in their own work.