Hadley Freeman on trigger warnings

[WarriorN]

A really interesting article exploring ideas around words, resilience and hurt.

I always feel these new Times articles of hers could go to several more pages...!

x.com/hadleyfreeman/status/1695712541475840251?s=46&t=A2fpFNgDRyXF2d6ye97wEA

She’s brilliant. And she’s so right on trigger warnings.

Excellent article. Unbelievable that students studying law in the US didn’t want to know about rape law in case it was too “triggering”.

Thanks for sharing this.

The importance of resilience generally.

I have always hated football but have seen a new side of it for my growing boys - just being outside, active and learning about failure the hard way.

Appropriate sportsman ship too - a few don't handle failure if the team well and are quick to judge and blame. Ds 1 is very sensitive to some types of criticism from peers so it's been an important learning situation to help him develop perspective in those situations.

I recently heard a snippet about girls who play football have more confidence (though do they join a team because they have the confidence to go against the grain already?)

Yes, she writes very well about this in her book, Good Girls. About how anyone trying to avoid triggering her when she was anorexic was doomed to failure as everything was triggering in some way, and even the avoidance of topics was also triggering because she knew they were avoiding them! She argues that it isn’t the responsibility of the rest of the world to tiptoe around trying to avoid upsetting or offending someone who is 100% bound to be upset or offended regardless.

Trauma is extremely debilitating - and there's obviously extremely varying degrees. There are methods that support resilience in handling reoccurring trauma. CAT there for example.

Some of the word policing banded around among some younger people at the moment seems extremely misplaced and in fact coercive.

I recently heard a snippet about girls who play football have more confidence (though do they join a team because they have the confidence to go against the grain already?)

I think it was Leah Williamson who said that being in football as a teenager saved her from body issues as she was more focused on being strong and fit than having a specific body type.

My daughter had some slides from school for biology and I'm not joking there was a content warning for 'blood' on the opening slide.

Blood. In a biology lesson.

I agree with the argument that helping your children develop resilience is a really important part of being a parent.

I'd also agree that trigger warnings are mostly about loudly proclaiming that you understand other people's trauma, and that they frequently miss the things that actually trigger people, which can be incredibly specific.

I was triggered to a point of escalating distress the other day in a work meeting. It was truly horrible. I ended up leaving the meeting and I did take a bit of time to regroup. I think people should be allowed to do that. But we can't not discuss the risks involved in our work.

I think there was actually more understanding of human distress and pressures in the past. The vast majority of children never took exams, they left school quite young and had a job sorted out for them usually by their parents. They wouldn't be constantly bombarded with images and stories of disasters and tragedies of every type from all round the world. They wouldn't be required to learn how to manage huge debts of more than they are ever likely to earn; most people didn't have bank accounts. I'm not hankering after the past but it's also in fact completely reasonable that resilience varies in the face of these factors.

Apparently Thomas Hardy novels now come with trigger warnings.... at university. Jude the Obscure causes anguish because the children kill themselves. I know he's not the cheerful type of author, but do 18-21 year olds really need a trigger warning?

Wtf?!

Also i have no idea what Covid is doing in that article - she doesn't follow that up. Feels like she started writing one piece and ended up somewhere else.

It’s good that you are privileged enough to scoff at this, but I’ve taught children for whom that warning would be very necessary and you would not even want to imagine the reasons why.
In general, resilience is great but offering a trigger warning is kind and often necessary.
As for Hadley Freeman, I don’t believe that she is interested in the world being a better place or she wouldn’t be working for Rupert Murdoch

Here's a shared link to the Sunday times article itself - I didn't have time to read yesterday, there's a column by Kathleen stock too so id better grab a coffee and read them before more MN!

www.thetimes.co.uk/article/the-easiest-way-to-fail-a-child-never-let-them-fail-b7b2fqdbx?shareToken=73150f6f065e5dbc1b8a999c591737f4

Trigger warnings annoy me so much. Life is sometimes upsetting. Sometimes you will hear or witness things that don't make you feel great, but if you avoid everything you think may upset you then you will never build resilience and be able to function in life.

We are seeing this with the current generation of young adults raised on trigger warnings all over everything. They seem so much less able to cope than previous generations.

Which publication should Hadley Freeman write for? She was made persona non grata at another newspaper , I assume she works for the reasons we all, so what should she do?

The culture of safetyism continues to permeate.

Rupert Murdoch explicitly has never had editorial control of the Times and Sunday Times. Glibly sneering at these papers with their long and continuing history of investigative journalism is a facile attempt to deflect from the content.

I think there was actually more understanding of human distress and pressures in the past

People knew of babies and children who died young, mothers who died giving birth, neighbours, friends who died of disease and men who died in war and having to flee invading armies. That's on top of the everyday distress like losing your job and having to resort to the workhouse, being thrown out by your landlord or finding out your husband has gambled and drunk away the housekeeping and you're all going to go hungry. They couldn't avoid suffering by way of trigger warnings, they were in the thick of it and they had to deal with is as God's will or however they saw it.

We live in a society in the west that's largely sanitised and safe, certainly the most sanitised and safe it has ever been. Doctors can cure conditions that fifty years ago would have been a death sentence. Cars are the safest they've ever been and health and safety warnings proliferate. We can take for granted clean water, heat and light and sewage so diseases our great grandparents would have encountered are practically unheard of. Trigger warnings almost feel like they're putting that danger back into life - 'warning! you're reading a Thomas Hardy novel that might arouse uncomfortable feelings and make you sad!' 'Careful, you might see blood on these biology slides!' 'Beware! this book was written in 1923 and has the attitudes of the time!' It's like a mass infantilisation.

(Disclaimer - I do realise that some people have suffered genuine trauma and trigger warnings work for them).

@MrsDanversGlidesAgain yes, agree, and “mass infantilism” is an excellent phrase!

I regularly present on a topic that includes child sexual abuse - however that isn't obvious from the title of the lecture.

So I include a Content Warning - not a trigger warning- as most people will think they have come to hear one thing and then discover we are talking about paedophiles at some points.

I think this is fair enough as so many in the audience will have had personal experience and not be expecting the subject.

However trigger warnings for anything vaguely upsetting in lectures that are clearly going to cover that topic - no.

Yes - there are times when a 'content warning' is appropriate. A school biology lesson noting there may be blood in the next practical class is one - some people are squeamish even apart from trauma-induced 'triggering', the audience are children and they've normally no choice about attending lessons.
But a warning about blood wouldn't be appropriate for anyone in med school, or lectures involving rape and violence in law school. Students surely know what's on the syllabus, what the eventual job may entail?

I’ve had extreme trauma. In therapy for over a decade now. Part of therapy is learning to manage and face triggers because you can’t expect the world or people to change for you. Also triggers don’t work like people think. I’ve been through grooming gang type abuse. Rape scenes etc aren’t nice for sure and hearing about it but honestly it doesn’t trigger.
a scene in Paddington triggers. The smell of bonfire triggers. Examples here.
Stuff you wouldn’t expect. so you can’t trigger warning everything.

I’ve chosen a life away from people. I live rurally and interactions with others are when I’m up for it because my nervous system is damaged and I am slowly rebuilding it. Trigger warnings don’t help rebuild it, they keep me stuck.

One of Hadley's important points, it seems to me, is that you can't predict triggers. The things that triggered her as an anorexic probably seemed inconsequential to other people, whereas the things that might be expected to trigger her didn't.

I think trigger warnings are OK up to a point. You just need to know when to stop.

I know plenty about trauma, thank you, both personally and professionally so please don't talk down to me.

I love Hadley and I get what she's saying here but there is another side to this - the adultification of children and destruction of safeguarding - which really needed to be in the article too.

Because society is on the one hand trying to coddle kids so they don't hear things they don't like with trigger warnings etc but also on the other determined more and more to let them make grown up decisions and that is doomed to catastrophe.

Children and teens also now have unfettered access to the most horrendous images online. Some of which are really destructive (e.g. the videos of suicide, the videos of rape that you don't have to dig too deep to find). So if the adults are too scared (because of 'trigger warnings' and talks of 'safe space' and the fear of cancellation I'm assuming) to talk to them about difficult things, they will get a warped and one sided view of those things online.

Gender is a good (but not the only) example of this because it's simultaneously 'this child is so fragile you must change the use of the tiniest words you use unconsciously and reprogram your brain i.e. pronouns' and yet 'They are simultaneously also so mature and capable of making decisions that they can make the decision to do something to their body that may result in sterilisation, serious lifelong side effects and complications and loss of sexual function'. It's totally ridiculous.

Of course the push for drugs and surgery for children is a masterclass in manipulation because it's framed as what you have to accept as the price for saving mental health, though there's no evidence at all this is true - and some evidence to suggest the opposite is true.

However, it doesn't really stack up that children are so lacking in resilience and maturity that normal correct sex pronouns will send them into a tailspin of declining mental health but at the same time they're competent to consent to surgery and drugs which could irreversibly harm them and (in the process) harm their long term mental health. Of course the only reason they're interpreting using normal pronouns as harm is because an adult somewhere along the line has fed them that lie and told them it makes them 'unsafe'.

The two things work in tandem to destroy children - take away honesty about the world and how it works then thrust them into adult decisions they are completely ill equipped to make.

It is a hard thing to do to expose kids to the horrible side of life of course but it is an essential part of parenting and education if you want them to grow up into resilient and competent adults. It's what responsible adults should do in an age appropriate, gradual, nuanced way.

To have a law degree that doesn't teach rape law would fail the students and fail their future clients. I hope and assume that the adults in charge at Harvard law said no to this request.

One thing I can say for certain having volunteered for a while in a legal aid charity in the USA, any students who are avoiding discussing rape law in their degree are completely ill equipped for the clients who will come to them as adults.