Trigger Warnings Research Paper

Warning: The essay you are about to read may contain offensive or triggering material! Trigger warnings, like the one listed above, are defined on theguardian.com as “a note to readers that the material following the warning may trigger a post-traumatic stress reaction.” All across the nation, students are demanding that these kind of warning be enforced in college classrooms. But are trigger warnings a positive change we need to enforce, or do they cause more damage than they do good? Ultimately they do more damage than good, the new use of trigger warnings stop students from talking about growing issues because they are to “triggering”. They have become a way for students to hide from their issues or discomforts instead of talking through them; they have become misused, and no longer follow their original meaning. …show more content…
Originally they were commonly used with feminist blogs and fan fiction; “In the early days of feminist blogging, trigger warnings were generally about sexual assault, and posted with the understanding that lots of women are sexual assault survivors and lots of women read feminist blogs,” (theguardian.com). Trigger warnings served to protect rape victims from reading about rape or an abused woman from reading about assault. They were created to protect women, and all those effected, from serious issues; but trigger warnings now cover a wide variety of topics and no longer have the same affect that they were originally created