Ball State Alumni Center was packed full of brown paper bags Monday evening for the premier of "State of Assault," a documentary about sexual assault victims and the criminal justice system.
The 1,800 grocery-sized bags represented the number of bags needed to collect evidence for sexual assault crimes for one county for one year, said Ball State senior Kristin Larson. She said it usually takes three bags to collect all the evidence for one case.
"Our documentary basically is going to show the flaws in the criminal justice system and how we can make it better," Larson said.
Associate professor of biology, John McKillip said the project put together by a team of 12 students was a "truly immersive project."
"These products and this product is only a portion of what the students have gone through," McKillip said.
The students were broken down into three teams from across campus: research, coordination and interview.
McKillip said sexual assault was one of the only crimes that spanned across both genders and of all economic, racial and geographic backgrounds.
The documentary described two sexual assault victims' stories and their struggles to become survivors.
The video covered the process of assault starting with the crime, reports, evidence collection, DNA testing and survival.
McKillip said the two biggest problems for sexual assault victims was physical evidence and DNA evidence backlogs. DNA tests results have a minimum turnaround of 45 days. Prior to 2007, DNA backlogs were two years behind according to the documentary.
The documentary will help meet the needs of the victims so they can become survivors, said McKillip.
He finished the opening of the documentary by encouraging members of the audience to get a brown paper bag before they left. The bags contained a list of items needed to collect evidence by local agencies and their contact information.
Ball State student Brittany Albertson said the reason some of the students got involved in the project was because they were survivors and were motivated to be involved because of that.
"We can all say this is one of the most significant experiences we've had at Ball State," Albertson said. "We got to learn a lot about the criminal justice side and the survivor side."
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