THE HUNTING GROUND SERIAL
If Lisak, who is presented in the film as an authority on the subject of campus rape, is correct and the “core” of the campus-rape problem is serial offenders, then addressing campus rape mostly means targeting a very small slice of hardened predators who are committing an astounding proportion of the assaults that occur on a given campus. This claim marks an important tone-setting moment in The Hunting Ground, and it’s important to understand its ramifications. “So when you start looking at, then, the rapists who are committing these crimes, it is the repeated offenders who are the core of this problem.” Text appears onscreen: “Less than 8% of men in college commit more than 90% of sexual assaults.” Additional text below cites the source for these numbers: a 2002 paper by Lisak and Dr.
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Twenty-five minutes into the film, he lays out his general theory of the campus-rape problem: “The vast majority of men don’t rape, won’t rape, haven’t raped,” he says.
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David Lisak, a retired clinical psychologist who has greatly influenced current anti-campus-rape efforts - his research has even been cited in materials published by the White House. The social-science issue is separate, and it involves Dr. Both Emily Yoffe of Slate and a group of 19 HLS professors have argued that the film misrepresents the facts of that incident in important ways. One set of criticisms leveled against The Hunting Ground has to do with its portrayal of an alleged rape involving Harvard Law School students. It’s probably important to get our controversies straight here. (Updated with a statement from Kirby Dick, the film’s director, at the bottom.)
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Unfortunately, it also presents some extremely questionable research about campus rape in far too credulous a light. The Hunting Ground, a documentary that aired on CNN Sunday night after garnering a great deal of publicity on the festival and campus circuits, tells some horrific stories about sexual assaults on college campuses, and in doing so it raises a number of important, damning questions about how campus administrators handle rape allegations. Update: A response from Kirby Dick, the writer and director of the film, has been appended to this article.