That’s the only place I’ve seen them – on eating disorder fora where users are dissuaded from posting specific food items, etc., as they may be a trigger.
There is a difference between informing someone for information and informing for protection. That is why they are called warnings, they are meant to warn of danger, not provide information.
The warnings will inevitably lead to a ban or self-censorship. At Wellesley college they tried to have a statue removed because of concerns it might be triggering, at UCSB there was a movement to ban pro-life demonstrations because they might be triggering, at Reed college a student was banned from a class because his opinions might be triggering, at UC Irvine the student council wants to ban the American Flag from their lobby because it might be triggering, and there have been already been proposals to make trigger warnings mandatory in college syllabi.
Here is a quote from an Oberlin professor talking to the New York Times "“If I were a junior faculty member looking at this while putting my syllabus together, I’d be terrified,” Mr. Blecher said. “Any student who felt triggered by something that happened in class could file a complaint with the various procedures and judicial boards, and create a very tortuous process for anyone.” Fear is the censors greatest weapon, make someone afraid and they will self-censor. This is already happening.
What an incredibly odd thing to say. A warning is information. That’s its exact nature.
Frankly, it is the responsibility of the fearful person to deal with their fear, not the responsibility of the others to avoid triggering that fear (within reasonable parameters.)
If someone has a phobia of snakes, it’s unreasonable for them to demand that people avoid wearing T-shirts with pictures of a python or that society provide trigger warnings that “an image of an endangered species of python is around the corner.”
Also, can’t the trigger warning be a trigger in itself? If someone is afraid of blood - then what if a movie DVD label that says, “Warning: This movie depicts blood” sets off the trigger, simply by saying, “blood?”
It’s like saying, “Don’t think about parakeets.” Your brain automatically then thinks about parakeets.
But, that’s exactly the reasoning that suggests trigger warnings. The proper way for a fearful person to deal with their fear is sometimes to avoid situations where it would present a problem. Which they can’t do unless they know what those situations are.
Viewing a film that depicts a person being violently injured and spraying blood is clearly a more visceral experience than “The following film contains images of violent injury and blood”.
Do you actually think that content warnings are not useful?
That’s the good side. The bad side is that an abuser or potential abuser can probably click through it also without getting his consciousness raised one bit. For ours if you get a question wrong you can go back and answer it again. I doubt he would get that real people are hurt by his actions.
I have no idea as to how this dilemma should be resolved.
I saw a portion of “Robo-Cop” as a teen when a friend of mine rented a copy. I then went into his front yard and vomited, because it was that gross.
Trust me: “This movie is extremely, viscerally gory and gross” won’t make me vomit in my friend Roger’s front yard.
I’m still lost at the difference between trigger warnings and the content warnings that have been a part of media for decades.
The only differences I can see are:
1)The actual phrase “trigger warning,” which I’ll admit is a little precious, but hardly worth getting mad over.
- The fact that content warnings are being posted by ordinary people, which is simply from the nature of the internet, where all of us can post content, instead of just a few media outlets.
Except that those warnings work because they provide information. Instead of age warnings on DVDs, for example, we could simply write “Don’t watch this.” That would be a warning for protection alone. But we don’t. We give an age guidance rating, which allows us actually quite a lot of information. It lets us at the simplest level see if a piece of media is suitable for children; it allows us to generally judge the content of the media; it allows us to compare with previous media we may have consumed; it even gives us some meta-level knowledge about the working of the ratings powers.
Similarly, think about dangerous substance warnings. They don’t just say “Do not touch this.” They tell us what’s within the container/behind that door, whether particular safety equipment is necessary for the danger, what to do in the event of exposure or contamination.
That’s what trigger warnings do - give information about a potential harm. They declare the nature and form of the content, they inform as to the potential threat to others, they even can inform us about context that changes our response - think of NSFW warnings, which allow us to decide when the best time would be to view such media if we wish to. Trigger warnings can allow us too time in which to prepare for a potentially harmful piece of media, which can allow us to view more safely.
Given that of those, I know from the thread on here that the UC Irvine one has already been overturned and was roundly mocked as a decision, I’m afraid I have to consider the potential for your other examples to be questionable. Could I ask for a cite for them?
You’re correct on your last point.**You’re the one doing it. **Right here in this thread. “You can’t use trigger warnings - look at all the bad things that will happen! They are already happening!” That sounds a lot like a desire to censor backed up by attempts to make people fearful of the consequences to me.
What makes it acceptable when you do it?
The original use seemed to be about content for things that people in a group were supposed to read, like novels for a class. Content warnings are about optional purchase decisions. However, IIRC, the original discussion of content warnings included complaints by parents that seeing a nipple scarred Johnny for life, so a warning is required.
Trigger warnings are more for a small number of people (like peanut warnings) and are justified by harm, not just offense.
I know I could have written the OP better but this hasn’t taken the direction I wanted.
I really don’t have a problem with trigger warnings. My question is; **how common is it that people actually suffer from adverse physical reactions to reading content such that trigger warnings are advisable? **
I am here interpreting “Trigger warning” as meaning that the enclosed content could in fact have an unadvisable physical effect on a person, such as causing an anxiety attack. Such an effect obviously merits warning. But I wonder how frequent an occurrence that is? Do people really get the vapours, as it were, from seeing a racist word, or reading about a murder, or something like that?
Context matters. NSFW warnings on SDMB make sense while NSFW warnings on a porn site make no sense.
If you’re on posting to “Cat Pics Chat” and you post about the animal abuse a cat endured before you rescued the poor thing and took the cute pic, you may want to note that in the title rather than jumping in with “I rescued my cat from…,” detailing extensive animal cruelty, and concluding with a pic of your cute happy rescued cat.
If your movie is titled “War Movie” and rated R, I think you can leave out the warning. If you’re posting a description of those events to a Vets Coping w/ PTSD board (and not in the “Details of my service” section, where it might be expected per the above), you may want to give a general idea of what the content is before jumping in.
Warnings don’t need to be framed as “trigger warning.” If your post is titled “Details of the physical abuse I endured in my marriage,” I think we generally get what the post will contain. If you click on that and are traumatized to read about physical abuse, you’re not too bright. If somebody posted “My bad marriage - please advise” and you start reading details that make you recall your own traumas, you have my sympathy.
I don’t see this kind of warning as the same thing as a professor not teaching rape law in a criminal law course or removing the American flag from campus because it might been seen as imperialistic. In some ways, that kind of warning is the opposite. The warnings mean “You may find this content objectionable or dangerous. I’m still going to say what I want to say. Avoid it if you choose to.”
My understanding is that the kind of triggers that cause PTSD level anxiety attacks tend not to be the kind of thing that are actually advertised with warnings. For example, a rape victim is more likely to experience a strong reaction from hearing a laugh like the perpetrator had or seeing someone in the same color shirt he had than a discussion or description of a rape. If this is true, then trigger warnings are pretty ineffective. I will hunt for a cite on this.
Can’t seem to find the study that found that. All I could find were ones suggesting that warnings to avoid triggers are bad for the person with PTSD.
You can make me feel sick or anxious if you say certain things. I would imagine most of us have things that would cause these reactions. I don’t think of them as being “triggers” though, in the way I understand a trigger to be. It’s not a single word, just certain images and descriptions.
I demand that all trigger warnings be eliminated because the word “trigger” triggers me by invoking images of gun violence.
I see this kind of “hilarious” response in most conversations involving this topic. It seems oddly tone-deaf to me. The people making this joke seem to feel that the very idea that they would ever be asked to think of another person’s feelings is practically obscene.
I will grant that there are people who go overboard in demanding trigger warnings on everything. Mostly in communities (I see it primarily on Tumblr) that think and talk a lot about this kind of topic. But usually it is not being demanded at all; it is simply something people do in a friendly way to let people know, yo, there are things in this thread/post/article that might be upsetting. Big whoop.
My opinion is that you’re both wrong and focusing on a trivial dispute about terminology rather than the larger issue. Here is what the Harvard Law prof said
I first encountered this more than a year ago, when I showed “Capturing the Friedmans,” an acclaimed documentary about a criminal-sex-abuse investigation, to my law students. Some students complained that I should have given them a “trigger warning” beforehand; others suggested that I shouldn’t have shown the film at all. For at least some students, the classroom has become a potentially traumatic environment, and they have begun to anticipate the emotional injuries they could suffer or inflict in classroom conversation. They are also more inclined to insist that teachers protect them from causing or experiencing discomfort—and teachers, in turn, are more willing to oblige, because it would be considered injurious for them not to acknowledge a student’s trauma or potential trauma.
So she did not say that students only insisted on being protected from experiencing discomfort after watching the video. The last sentence of that paragraph says that such insisting has grown more common in general, not just in one particular instance.
I think it does back up my case; I guess we’ll just have to disagree on that.
The word “trauma” could rival “epic” as the most overused and misused word these days. Were I to take every claim of trauma that I hear seriously, I’d have to believe that traumas have multiplied a thousand-fold since I was a kid.
To say that someone has suffered trauma implies serious harm; a trauma is not something you just walk away from and go about your business. Most college kids who complain about trauma when a professor uses the word “violate” or when they see a statue or read a newspaper article or something like that are actually experiencing annoyance or displeasure or some other emotion, rather than suffering severe pain. If a student truly suffered trauma whenever he or she heard the word “violate”, that student should see a psychologist for treatment, rather than asking professors to censor classroom discussions.
If we really have lots of kids who endure severe pain merely at the mention of commonplace words or topics, we should be asking why such a strange thing is now true.
I wonder if the term “trigger” may have been getting abused beyond recognition.
I would have no problem with posting a content warning detailing what troublesome or disturbing depictions or themes are in the assigned material. However, do I have to actually call it a “trigger warning” to make it be recognized to satisfy a standard? Or on the opposite end, does using the word mean it will be derided regardless what it is I actually warn about?
“Assignment: R. Gallegos, Doña Bárbara. Content Advisory: contains scenes of nonexplicit sexual assault, alcoholism, murder, occultism, feudal exploitation and early-20th-century farm practices”
vs.
“Assignment: R. Gallegos, Doña Bárbara. Trigger warning for survivors of rape, alcoholism, armed violence, dispossession, animal mistreatment”
Difference?
Or in the Law School example:
“Attention: The 3rd day of the 7th course week will deal with the unit on the laws on sexual assaults. This will involve reading the statutes and case law regarding sexual assault and specific cases in which there will be depictions from the Court record on sexual assault events”
… with no “______ Warning:” heading to it… satisfactory?
Or do I have to worry that repeating “sexual assault” three times in two sentences could be a trigger itself?
My bigger source of concern would be in the sense that as mentioned in earlier posts I can’t really absolutely know what is a trigger.