Lady Gaga recorded this song for The Hunting Ground, which is a documentary film that documents the lives of young people affected by rape on college campuses in the United States. Penned by Diane Warren with Gaga, one version is used during a scene in the movie to underscore the pain of a survivor of sexual assault. Producer Amy Ziering told MTV News: "[When it plays], you're watching one of our lead subjects, who is an assault survivor, and she's just reflecting on the impact of the trauma, and walking around campus. The song just beautifully and hauntingly and poignantly underlines her pain, in a way that words alone couldn't do." A second version of the song plays during the movie's end credits.
Gaga revealed to Howard Stern in 2014 that her ARTPOP track "Swine" was based on a teenage experience of being sexually assaulted by a man 20 years her senior. The Hunting Ground director Kirby Dick commented to MTV: "Lady Gaga recently came out as an assault survivor, so to write a song… to have a song with her signing it, singing 'you don't know what it's like until it happens to you,' you know the voice of that person has experienced very similar things to what our subjects have experienced. I think that adds a deeper level to the music."
Diane Warren wrote the original draft of the song after being shown scenes in early 2013. She took the song to Gaga who promptly recorded it. "There are a lot of levels to the song," Warren told Billboard magazine. "There's something very vulnerable about it and something very defiant about it, especially the way [Gaga] sings it. The first verse is vulnerable - 'You tell me its going to get better?' - and the second verse comes in and it builds. Really? It gets better? No. You don't know until it happens to you."
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