The Hunting Ground - Why Don't We Believe When Women Say They've Been Assaulted

As a part of me trying to recover and healing myself, I've been trying to feed my brain good content. Good, meaningful content. Watching TV shows, movies and documentaries. Reading articles and books. A part of this brain food was the award-winning documentary "The Hunting Ground" which is about sexual assault on college campuses all over the United States. It was such a moving, troubling documentary. It was extraordinarily done - the set up, the narratives - but also terribly infuriating. In all of these women's stories, there was one common thread: the fact that they weren't believed in. They were attacked and upon filing reports and denunciating their attackers they were met with judgment, victim-blaming and victim-shaming. They weren't met with empathy and compassion, as they should have, after being victims of violent assaults. They were met with disbelief and didn't have their accusations taken seriously.

It made me think - what do women have to do before they are taken seriously upon accusing someone of rape? Why are the rapists, the perpetrators of a crime, seen as victims, as young men reaching their potential with an accusation of rape being a pebble in their shoe, in their paths to success? Why do we keep seeing this narrative happen over and over again? All of the men mentioned in the documentary did not receive proper punishment for their crimes - most of them did not receive any type of punishment at all. The women, the victims, received plenty of punishment: from online abuse to not being able to fulfil their academic obligations properly. We see this narrative in the media all the time - Bill Cosby has been accused of raping over 20 women and yet people claim he is innocent. Chris Brown beat Rihanna's face into black and blue bruises and people defend him. Woody Allen has been accused of sexual assault by his own daughter and people participate in his movies dandily and happily. Terry Richardson has been accused of assault and harassment by countless women and yet he still gets booked regularly for photo shoots. Why? Why don't we believe women when they say they've been assaulted?

Men have set up patriarchal systems in which a woman's value is not as meaningful as a man's potential. Women are not held to the same standard of significance as men in society and, therefore, when our safety and health is put in danger, that is not as relevant as making sure the male part of the equation is unhinged and can carry on merrily, regardless of if he has committed a crime or not. As long as we, as a society, do not start holding men and women to equal standards and seeing them as equally valuable human beings, women will always get discredited when they accuse a man of assault. The man's potential will always be more important than justice. "The Hunting Ground" is truly an amazing documentary that will make you re-examine the way you see the value of women in our society and truly how low it is on our collective list of priorities. We need to start doing better, for ourselves and for the future generations of young women we are raising.