Incredibly Credulous: Kenneth Turan's Embarrassing Review of "The Hunting Ground"

Kenneth Turan's breathless review of The Hunting Ground, a just-released documentary on the "epidemic of sexual assault on college campuses," is breathtaking in its absence of scrutiny and its profusion of credulity. 

The review is filled with sensational descriptors: 

"documentary on college rape chills with statistics" 

“Hunting Ground bristles with unnerving statistics"  

"powerful factors are arrayed against students"   

"wrenching first person stories"

(All that's missing are the exclamation marks!!)

Turan seems utterly seduced by the film's statistics, yet it's those damn statistics that are so, well, damning. Start with the "unnerving" statistic first cited, that "one in five college women, and one in 33 college men, will be sexually assaulted during their time on campus."

One in five? Did Mr. Turan pause long enough from his Thesaurus-browsing to think about what this statistic means in a practical sense? My two daughters each graduated from a four-year institution; nearly all of my daughters' friends graduated from a four-year institution; my son graduated from a four-year institution, as did nearly all of his friends. I have nieces and nephews who have graduated from four-year institutions. Let's say, conservatively, that this represents about 20 college grads in my circle of family and friends. You'd think, if the 1 in 5 number were true, there would be four instances of rape or assault in my little circle of family and friends. I have yet to hear of any of these young people being sexually assaulted. Are we just lucky? Were the odds ever in our favor?

Come to think of it, practically speaking, what parent in his or her right mind would send a kid anywhere with crime numbers like these? It would be tantamount to negligence. You may as well drop your kid off at the corner of Sodom and Gomorrah. "Bye, darling! We love you! See you at Christmas! Watch your back!"

The statistic is simply not credible.

Mr. Turan gives lip service to "skeptics" who have challenged the data, but he doesn't say whether those skeptics were consulted, let alone featured, in the film, so I'm guessing they weren't. Which would mean Christina Hoff Sommers was neither mentioned nor interviewed. That's a shame. Sommers is a former philosophy professor and Resident Scholar at the American Enterprise Institute who, according to her bio at AEI, is "best known for her critique of late twentieth-century feminism." For years Sommers has been debunking myth after feminist myth that most people take at face value (the 77 cent to the dollar gender gap discrepancy, Super Bowl Sunday domestic violence, the rule of thumb, to name a few).

Most recently, in her Factual Feminist video blog, Sommers refutes the 1 in 5 claim with newly-released statistics from the U.S. Bureau of Justice that suggest the real number is closer to 1 in 53 ("too many," Sommers agrees, "but a long way from one in five").

Of course one assault is one too many. No one is saying sexual assault isn't an important issue. But the idea of taking the misleading claims of a documentary at face value and presenting them as ground-breaking and important once again demonstrates the disdain people in the media (and politics, for that matter) have for average viewers.


That's what bothers me most about Kenneth Turan's uncritical and embarrassingly effusive review of The Hunting Ground: the film-going public will similarly accept without question these misleading claims. And next year at the Oscars, when the film wins its little award, the acceptance speech will, like Turan's review, be breathless and important. The celebs in the audience will rise to their feet and cheer and pump their fists in solidarity the way Meryl Streep and Jennifer Lopez did when Patricia Arquette called for pay equity (based on misleading data) in her acceptance speech at this year's ceremony. 

As Vladimir Lenin, founder of the Russian Communist Party, once said, "A lie told often enough becomes the truth." 

Yes. Who needs truth when you've got . . . unnerving statistics? 

Meanwhile, for an honest discussion on sexual assault and rape, here are two segments of The Factual Feminist. You can read her bio here.

Sexual Assault Myths (Parts 1 and 2):