OCTOBER 27, 2015 - NOVEMBER 3, 2015
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RED ZONE: How trigger warnings affect
sexual assault victims and sufferers of PTSD
Psychology director Claudia Lampman sheds light on the issue
By George Hyde
gchyde@thenorthernlight.org
Sexual assault is often a traumatic experience, and some schools and universities around the nation are taking the initiative of warning their students about subject matter that may trigger a stressful reaction. For example, the student senate at the University of California, Santa Barbara passed a resolution in 2014 to mandate trigger warnings in all syllabi. At first glance, this seems like a decent idea. After all, there was an option to opt out of sexual education back in elementary school, so why shouldn’t there be a way to preview what’s happening now? “If you’re teaching a college level class, you shouldn’t hold back or sugarcoat anything,” Jarett Tucker, a student of education at UAA, said. “But I feel like if I’m going to take a class, I would want to know what infor-
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mation is being offered.” Like many ideas, it sounds good on paper. However, it may not be the best idea in practice. According to a 2008 study from the Institute of Medicine of the National Academies, those who suffer trauma from events like a sexual assault are often better off confronting the trauma rather than avoiding it. Dr. Claudia Lampman, a professor of psychology and director of UAA’s Psychology Department, agrees. “On a basic psychological level, the only way you get over something that’s hard for you is to be exposed to it,” Lampman said. “That is the only way.” Lampman considers the idea of trigger warnings ludicrous and counter-intuitive. According to her, they’re better at spreading fear than they are at spreading awareness. While it is important to ease victims into discussions of that nature, it’s still important for them to face that discussion. “If someone has a fear of flying, you don’t make them avoid airplanes,” Lampman said. “You systematically make them closer and closer to taking a real flight. It’s exposure in that therapy that’s necessary. Avoidance of those things actually makes you fear them more, not less.” While trigger warnings, according to psychological study, don’t necessarily work, there are students that agree that there should at least be an alternative. “Presenters always need to be aware of their audience and how they present their content,” Riley Creed, a biology student at UAA, said. “It is important to be respectful and prevent crude or crass remarks and ideals, and
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also understanding that sympathizing with someone else’s situation is not censorship; it’s being respectful.” There’s not just psychological basis for that argument, however. According to Lampman, the idea that collegelevel students would need warnings for possibly offensive material is almost kind of offensive in its own right. “I think that we want college students to be prepared to be professionals in the workplace,” Lampman said. “To do that, you need to be a resilient, strong person. Trigger warnings kind of make the assumption that college students are not resilient, strong people. It kind of means you’re a weak and fragile person that can’t be exposed even at an educational level to a conversation about something.” Thankfully, in a collegiate environment, students have the choice of looking into what they’re studying, they still have the opportunity to know what they’re getting into. “If an individual who has PTSD would like to go to an event, then by all means they can go,” Creed said. “Just as a person who doesn’t have PTSD has the same opportunity. They also have the right not to attend. If [the study’s] findings are true, then this could possibly be integrated into the counseling system.” It is important for students to know what they’re getting into. However, being in college, it’s also important for those students to challenge the ideas that they find offensive. PTSD is a real issue, especially for victims of sexual assault. Trigger warnings may seem like a reasonable measure. According to psychologists, though, they’re very, very far from being the ideal solution.
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