Trigger warnings are the opposite of censorship

by Doctor Science

The NY Times reports that students at a number of colleges are starting to request "trigger warnings" for classroom material. The story has been picked up all over the place, and articles and posts about it either say trigger warnings are censorship (and therefore bad), or the comments do.

This is bollocks. Trigger warnings aren't censorship, they're the opposite.

I can state this with some authority because I've actually seen trigger warnings used, in a variety of online settings, over a long period of time. Unlike the vast majority of recent commenters, I actually know what I'm talking about.

Regular readers here will have noticed that I use trigger warnings when I'm discussing rape and/or abuse. It's so usual and customary in fanfic-dominated parts of the Internet that I hadn't really noticed I was doing something that needed explanation, but now that the custom seems to be breaking out into the wider public I'll explain why I use warnings and how college courses could benefit from them.

Fanfic writers and readers have been arguing about story warnings for a long time; other communities should take advantage of our hard-earned experience. In fact, I wonder if the students who are speaking up about this learned about such warnings in fandom, on Tumblr, or elsewhere on the Internet.

I'm cutting here as a trigger warning, because talking about the warnings means talking about the topics: rape, assault, PTSD, and vile and demeaning language.

I believe the concept of trigger warnings came into fandom from online feminist communities. The specific problem the feminist internet had was needing to be able to discuss rape, in a space where there were many rape survivors with varying levels of trauma. Trigger warnings are a way to give people with PTSD a heads-up, so they could avoid or be mentally prepared for material that might be a horrible reminder.

I am not using the term "PTSD" metaphorically, here. The National Women's Study found that: Almost one-third (31%) of all rape victims developed PTSD sometime during their lifetime; and more than one in ten rape victims (11%) still has PTSD today. Overall, about twice as many women suffer PTSD as men, and the ratio is more like 3:1 for young adults such as college students. Sexual assault is epidemically common, and the rate of PTSD among victims is extremely high.

In our society in general, the chance that someone with rape PTSD will be "triggered" is very high, because rape is not actually taken seriously. Comedians make jokes about it, movies and TV shows include it to be "edgy" or "dark" or less sexy, books play with it, gamers use it as an all-purpose insult.

Most rapes are never reported because victims know that they won't be taken seriously, even if they're believed. And our culture in general is a minefield of reminders to rape victims that they're unimportant, liars, laughable, not in control and not worthy of being in control.

Trigger warnings are a way of making a space that is safer for survivors, a place where they are in control of what they get exposed to. Trigger warnings are the opposite of censorship, because they give people who want to talk about difficult topics the freedom to do so without restraint -- as long as they warn off people who might be hurt.

Personally, I don't use trigger warnings to be "politically correct", as a self-admiring display of my sensitivity or whatever that fartface Dan Savage thinks. I use them because of specific people who I know are following my posts and who have varying degrees of rape PTSD. I am doing it to protect my friends, because I respect their feelings and I don't want to hurt them. I could try to "just be more sensitive" in my writing, but that would be me making judgments about what they can or can't deal with. I put up the trigger warning to give *them* control over what they're exposed to, so they can judge for themselves.

And this may be why many people perceive the warnings as "censorship": because it is a way of ceding some control, from the writer or teacher to the reader or student. If you're used to having (or thinking you have and ought to have) dominating control, then yeah, letting other people have a chance will indeed seem like a horrible infringement.

But you'd be wrong. Allowing the audience/reader/student to control their own experience is nothing like censorship -- censorship would restrict what you, the writer/teacher, can do.

Trigger warnings let me be *more* free about what I write, because I don't have to worry that my forthrightness will hurt people I care about, and who already have more than enough hurt to deal with. As far as I'm concerned, people who say "trigger warnings are unnecessary and restrictive" are actually saying, "hurting people with PTSD is just the price we pay for learning."

My extensive experience with trigger warnings on fiction is that the custom emphatically does *not* have a chilling or censoring effect on the production of (written) porn or violence. What it *does* tend to do is make writers more aware of how they're writing sex and violence, and make them think about whether they're doing a good job, about how they're treating human experience.

For college courses, trigger warnings are an opportunity to present material in a complex way, that recognizes that the classroom is part of the world. They force the teacher -- and the students -- to confront the fact that different readers (or viewers) come with different experiences of reality, and will always have different reactions to the same text.

Here's an example: Warner Brothers now releases classic Looney Toons shorts with the following, well, trigger warning:

The cartoons you are about to see are products of their time. They may depict some of the ethnic and racial prejudices that were commonplace in the U.S society. These depictions were wrong then and they are wrong today. While the following does not represent the Warner Bros. view of today's society, these cartoons are being presented as they were originally created, because to do otherwise would be the same as claiming that these prejudices never existed.

This is exactly the sort of thing that college courses try to do: teach about complexity, ambiguity, and the importance of context.

The Looney Toons warning also reminds me of an important point that's being generally ignored in the mess. From the Times article:

Bailey Loverin, a sophomore at Santa Barbara, said the idea for campuswide trigger warnings came to her in February after a professor showed a graphic film depicting rape. She said that she herself had been a victim of sexual abuse, and that although she had not felt threatened by the film, she had approached the professor to suggest that students should have been warned.

I saw a post about a very similar incident last year, where a student in a film course talked about how shocking she found it when rape scenes to be just thrown up on screen as though they're no different from any other scene. "You warn for that shit!" was her gut reaction, honed by what fandom considered normal practice.

The point is that video needs more of a warning than text, especially video that's watched in the classroom -- where the student/viewer can't control the playback and where everyone can see if you start to lose it. Not to mention that film has a much broader bandwidth than text, it packs much more of an emotional punch.

Film teachers should look at trigger warnings as a golden opportunity: to talk about what kinds of material are considered "appropriate" for what audiences, about variations in audience reactions, about how people get used (or not) to different kinds of emotionally-difficult films -- and about how triggery material can be used as a barrier, to repel the "wrong sort" of viewers or film-makers.

To those who say that literature, and film, and teaching itself, are supposed to be "provocative", to shake people out of their easy complacency:

Yes, sometimes teaching *does* involve giving students a metaphoric kick in the shins. But (as Sprog the Elder pointed out to me) shin-kickers need to realize that some people already have broken legs, and there are enough invisible broken legs around that you can be sure there are some in your class. Not giving students a *choice* about being kicked means that some people will be badly hurt, as the price for the others getting a salutary lesson. Is that really what you want?

Comments

[thompson]

Fair enough, dr ngo, I'll turn in my ethernet cable at the door.

[russell]

Look, I'll share a personal story. Nothing to do with sexual abuse, or PTSD, or universities. Just a story about dealing with reactions to stimuli.

For many years, beginning in my 20's, I was subject to panic disorder. Agoraphobia. It runs in my family.

It's basically fine now, but for a lot of years even simple, innocuous cues - pictures, movies, conversations - could induce quite strong mental and physical reactions in me.

Dissociation, physical pain, highly elevated heart rate, dizziness. Basically, GET ME THE F*** OUT OF HERE NOW!!!!

Just a plain old garden variety organic mental illness, if you will. And, a dead common one. Lots of folks deal with it.

If you had told me in the middle of a class meeting during that time that - surprise!! - we were going to all file out, get in a bus, and drive over a large bridge, I would have freaked the hell out. Like, really. I would have fought you with my fists rather than let you make me get on the bus.

Nothing bad about it, nothing infantilizing about it, nothing weird about it.

Stimulus -> reaction.

Trigger.

It's really not that hard for me to imagine, in any given population of 17 to 22 year olds, that, let's say, 10 or 15 percent of them have some kind of issue that would make it a really hard experience to be exposed to strong violent, or sexual, or otherwise disturbing content.

In public, surrounded by their peers, with no advance warning of what was coming.

That's just my wild-ass guess, I could be off by miles.

But my experience is that "weird people" - people with issues of one kind or another - are just not that unusual.

Especially if you're talking about very young adults, for many of them first time away from home, living in the big fishbowl that is university campus life.

Maybe my opinion is skewed by my own experience, but I'm just not seeing trigger warnings as a very big deal.

My two cents.

[liberal japonicus]

I don't know. It seems to me that students on the IP conflict find plenty of ways to complain about the content of courses when they find it offensive. Some methods they use are simple expressions of their right to free speech, while other methods amount to attempts at censorship.

Well, students with a chip on their shoulder will use whatever means necessary to express it. (This is not to dismiss IP issues, just to say that unless you grant someone the sole right to choose what is appropriate and what is not, any topic as divisive as IP is going to attract that attention) That's what people with shoulder chips do. And the idea of teachers and students co-creating a curriculum is something that happens so rarely, it is a statistical blip. But that plugs into my next observation off of Russell's comment

It's really not that hard for me to imagine, in any given population of 17 to 22 year olds,

One of the things that has changed in the university is the prevalence of the non-traditional student. In fact, a quick google suggests that non-trad students are now the majority. Of course, the debate focusses on schools that may have more traditional students, but as the part time student becomes more prevalent, taking the pre-requisite courses often are reduced choices because they have their jobs and lives to deal with. So the question of what they are exposed can be just like a requirement, so trying to anticipate these things is important. And someone might seize on this paragraph

Two-year students, for example, are far less likely than their four-year counterparts to study subjects such as English, history or visual arts, and much more likely to be in technical training or in career-oriented fields such as health care, according to education department data. Among four-year students, there’s a similar split by age: Older students are disproportionately likely to major in business, computer science and engineering.

as evidence that this doesn't really concern them. However, American universities still operate, I believe, on a system of core requirements that are shared by all students, and it is in these classes, where teachers are trying to capture the interest of the students (because department funding generally depends on how many people chose your department for a major), which leads to classes that might have some compelling videos and such.

Here in Japan, folks are trying to make the universities more non-trad friendly, to counteract the demographic cliff we are running off of, so I have spent some time looking at how other university systems do this. One thing that has made the US university system such a powerhouse (in terms of financial clout and foreign interest) is the ability to incorporate non-trad students, which then opens the door to foreign students. I believe that this change is fundamentally due to the GI Bill, where you had huge numbers of WWII vets coming into the university system, which necessitated changes in thinking about a wide range of conditions. That impulse is still there when you see that UCSB has a high population of veterans as students. I always find it problematic when someone from outside a class seeks to dictate some conditions within the class. But I also realize that when you have a product that is as ephemeral as teaching, you also have to think a wider range of things than if you are just turning out plastic widgets.

[thompson]

LJ:

However, American universities still operate, I believe, on a system of core requirements that are shared by all students

That's not entirely correct, I believe. Many universities have core requirements, but they are increasingly a la carte: e.g. you must take 3 writing classes from this list of 20. You must take 2 history classes from this list 40. Etc, etc

I know not every university operates on this system, but the ones I'm familiar or partially familiar with do, and some quick googling through some university requirements point to that being a common system.

So, core requirements, yes. But specific classes? Infrequently, if I could hazard a guess. But I haven't done an exhaustive search.

it is in these classes, where teachers are trying to capture the interest of the students (because department funding generally depends on how many people chose your department for a major), which leads to classes that might have some compelling videos and such.

And conversely, I would argue, it may lead to teachers unwilling to alienate students before they even take the class by use of overly broad and poorly granulated trigger warning policies.

russell:

Thank you for putting a face to some of the challenges that might be faced by students. The emotional toll is a really hard thing to quantify and measure, and often leads to such costs being dismissed out of hand.

This isn't an abstract concept for me. I don't wish to delve into my personal history, but I have been "triggered" by movies in the past (never in a classroom setting). To be clear, while it was obvious to other people that something was wrong, I didn't really panic or make a scene, so not that severe. But I really don't have to extrapolate very far to see how someone with more recent and/or severe trauma could have a worse experience.

But in the pro-trigger warning policy posts and articles I've read so far, they have all referred to students that might have a reaction, or know some students that were uncomfortable, etc. Not pointing to actual data on the frequency or severity.

Which isn't denying that certain imagery or situations couldn't induce panic or pain in some population of students (both trad and nontrad...LJ makes the great point about veteran populations).

It's questioning that the mix of student with trauma and unwarned triggering stimuli occur with regularity. If there is evidence of that, I'd like to see it to educate myself.

If there isn't, there could be many reasons for it. Foremost among them is that trauma (especially sexual violence) underreport. Also, a student experiencing a panic attack is unlikely to advertise that fact, and more likely to hope people forget about it.

It's also possible (and I could also be miles off) that in a university setting, its fairly rare that traumatized students are, without warning, exposed to stimuli that trigger severe responses.

but I'm just not seeing trigger warnings as a very big deal.

I think there's been a number of arguments made about how there may be chilling or censorship issues with misuse of TW *policies* (not the TW themselves). If you are unpersuaded by them, that's understandable, its hardly an argument supported by masses of data.