“Is this football town putting its daughters at risk by protecting its sons in a situation like this?” asks one of the characters in “Roll Red Roll,” an upcoming documentary exploring the crime that put Steubenville, Ohio in national headlines. Nancy Schwartzman’s feature investigates how peer pressure, misogyny, and sports machismo factored into the rape of a young woman and its aftermath.

“Roll Red Roll” is a brutal reminder of what one character describes as “the complete lack of empathy” shown towards the assaulted teen. We see hateful tweets making light of the crime and the girl whose life it changed. And it wasn’t just her classmates who let her down.

“If teachers knew about it, if coaches knew about it, if the principal knew about it, if parents knew about it, why was nothing done about that?” a woman investigating the crime asks.

As Schwartzman explained in a soon-to-be published interview with us, “The film provides an opportunity to look at a regular American town. We are asking teenagers to ‘know better’ but the adults in their lives aren’t modeling better behavior. There were school administrators and teachers that heard rumors, and there were coaches who did nothing, or defended players without asking the tough questions,” she said. “And by doing nothing, and not taking it seriously, they were enabling it — excusing and justifying it, or looking the other way. This situation underscores the need for responsibility and for us to behave as friends, parents, family members, fellow classmates, teachers, school administrators, coaches, and everyone in our communities to make sure that we believe survivors, we investigate carefully, and this behavior stops.”

“Roll Red Roll” premieres at Tribeca Film Festival on April 22. It’ll also screen at Hot Docs later this month.