About two-thirds into director Kirby Dick’s (This Film is Not Yet Rated) latest documentary, The Hunting Ground, an alarming, but no less timely or essential, examination of the rape crisis on university campuses in the United States, one of the interviewees describes the personal arc undergone by several women Kirby features …
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The plot of this documentary alone is one of incredible frustration. After reading it, it’s shocking enough as it is and when you finally press play, it only gets worse and your feeling of disgust intensifies. There are a lot of problems with the armed forces, many of which are ignored because of the dangerous nature of their careers, this is one of the things that is ignored within it and really shouldn’t be. This documentary helps cement the fact that respect should be earned and not given automatically because of your title. It’s the reason why respect for soldiers goes overboard as they get privileges that others don’t because of the risk involved with their work that they voluntarily sign up for.
The Invisible War is one of those rare documentaries that not only exposes an unseen issue, but does so in a timely manner when action can still be taken. It moves ahead with its nonpartisan message with statistics directly from the United States’ own government studies and outlines a terrifying reality of tolerated sexual abuse and victim-blaming within the US military. Reported cases of such abuse are rare, and proper justice is difficult in institutions that have been historically self-policed, but what happens to the victims after the dehumanizing indignity of the assault is so severe and unjust that it causes a higher percentage of PTSD (post-traumatic stress disorder) than actual combat. Some victims must wait years only to be denied benefits for permanent physical and mental damage because of inconclusive evidence while rapists continue to serve, blissfully unaware of the magnitude of the damage that they have inflicted on another brother/sister-in-arms.