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.