It’s not that surprising to me, after googling this subject the last day or so, that many would believe trigger warnings are a problem. There are so many headlines. Since my social group is heavily academic and people talk about such things, I didn’t necessarily believe the top google search results. It takes pages to get to something not sort of histrionic on the subject.
I’m also trying to read about the author of the book in the OP. Mainly I’m finding a wikipedia page, so I have to work on that some more. I learned a whole lot about the folks at FIRE when we had that thread. The background of all this is interesting to me.
I assume you are asking why resiliency and trigger warnings might be mutually exclusive?
For the same reason the management of a theater does not hand out tissues at the beginning of a sad movie. The appropriate assumption is that the audience can take care of itself. A better example would be handing out tissues prior to a comedy on the expectation that laughter might be a trigger for someone and therefore everyone must be coddled.
Movies are kind of a bad example, as they are rated and a justification is given for the rating. How different is that from the dreaded trigger warning?
The warnings at movies are unnecessary regulations imposed by the federal government. That aside, movie labels are for grownups to decide what movies are appropriate for their children and to prevent unattended children from admission to certain movies. We could consider graduation from high school to be its own trigger warning for adult situations to come. Deconstructing adulthood with situational trigger warnings to meet the exquisite sensitivities of some should seem condescending to adults.
One difference is that the MPAA rating system is primarily used to protect minors, not to prepare adults for particulars of a given film’s content. If the potential audience for films consisted entirely of those eighteen and over, the system would never have been developed.
I also think we treat movies differently because of their visual nature. Novels can be intensely disturbing, but there is something more visceral about watching a realistic depiction of rape or murder.
(a) Not everyone is visually oriented—one of my daughters, for example, has no issues with blood and gore in a movie, but that same thing in text? Revulsion.
(b) My question about why trigger warnings and resiliency would be mutually exclusive still hasn’t been answered. @WISdad23 presented one saying it was “for the same reason” as other things, but I don’t get why those were given as parallels. Seriously, assume not that I disagree with the premise, but that I don’t even begin to get the premise even enough to disagree (since that’s precisely where I am). So, with that, how in the world would trigger warnings and resiliency be mutually exclusive?
Not picking on your daughter but in that situation how could one dare to read a book given that it rarely (I have never seen one) includes a trigger warning? Is one resilient to the revulsion? Should the revulsion be avoided at all costs due to the delicacy of one’s sensitivities? Just rhetorical questions.
Have it your way - trigger warnings and resiliency are independent of one another. When I think of resilient people, I don’t think of people who wait with bated breath for the trigger warning before starting the next lesson in life. When I think of people who need, or even demand, trigger warnings…they keep me busy at work.
Okay, maybe I’m getting it now. You seem to be assuming that (a) all those who request trigger warnings actually require trigger warnings for every possible thing that could disturb them, and also that (b) because you have defined a desire for trigger warnings as being non-resilient, that therefore requesting trigger warnings is non-resilient.
If this is what you’re actually saying, with (a) you’re engaging in the fallacy of the excluded middle, and with (b) you’re begging the question.
I think the trigger warning phenomenon has been taken too far in some instances but that doesn’t mean the idea isn’t sound. My daughter sure could have used a trigger warning in middle school the morning a couple of older girls came to her classroom to give a PSA presentation on Breast Cancer Awareness Month. These well-meaning kids emphasized the need for research and funding by quoting dire statistics on the number of women who die from the disease every year. Apparently, until they realized she was silently weeping in the back of the class, no one realized this information might be upsetting to a kid whose mother had started chemotherapy the week before.
IMO, trigger warnings when used properly aren’t about preventing discomfort, they’re about allowing a student who has experienced trauma to prepare themselves for discussions or materials that might bring back that trauma. Students are captive audiences in the classroom. Unlike reading or watching the news at home or having a conversation around the water fountain it’s not easy to turn off the discussion or walk away.
Even those of us who teach them sometimes forget this. Yeah, they can freely walk out the door (at the college level, at least), but at the cost of missing course material—thus, captive.
I’ve posted before that I had a sibling who committed suicide. When I was a freshman in high school, the book we read in English was Ordinary People, and that was the movie of that year. Mary Tyler Moore was everywhere all the time. It was very painful and difficult for me, but helped me to work some things and come to a mature understanding of my own situation. As a result of my experience, I’m really not a fan of trigger warnings because I think a lot of growth is personal and should be done privately. I can imagine circumstances (like with Romani posted above), where a person might speak privately with a teacher or TA, which I think is completely appropriate, but I think it’s silly to try to warn about every possible event or character in a book/movie that might upset someone. In a large enough class, there could be a lot of people who would need to be warned.
Zoosermm, how difficult that must have been for you in HS.
I was barely 30 when I was being treated for melanoma. The movie Terms of Endearment came out, and I wouldn’t see it for many years. I wasn’t in jeopardy of dying, but that year was so tough I didn’t need any reminders.
@alh The Minister for Universities in the United Kingdom has stated announced that regulations are being drafted that will effectively put an end to trigger warnings. He stated that in future universities will assume that students are capable of handling challenging and potentially offensive literature and lectures and that if a medical condition is at issue, it will be for the student to seek appropriate guidance from university faculty.
The odd thing about all this is that at present while students can elect not to read a particular book on the reading list, they are still liable to be examined on it!