Bailey Loverin didn’t set out to help spur a national debate about trigger warnings. But that’s what happened after she sponsored one of the first student-government resolutions urging professors to warn undergraduates before presenting sensitive material in class.
She helped make trigger warnings a campus debate.
Before this, trigger warnings had been used primarily online as feminist blogs sought to alert victims of sexual assault to content that might disturb them. But students like Ms. Loverin have made such warnings a classroom issue, calling on colleges to apply them to academic material related to to a variety of issues — sexual violence, suicide, and abortion.
In 2014, Ms. Loverin, then a literature major at the University of California at Santa Barbara, came up with the idea for the resolution when she attended a class and without any warning, she says, the professor showed a film that included a graphic depiction of rape. “It was incredibly difficult to sit through,” says Ms. Loverin, who had been abused when she was 15 by an older boyfriend who was manipulative and who stalked her after they broke up.
She says the experience led her to talk with high-school students about how to recognize the warning signs of an abusive relationship. As part of those talks, she met women who had been sexually assaulted. She came to realize that for those women, having to watch a classroom film depicting a rape, without warning, could potentially trigger post-traumatic stress.
The resolution she sponsored at Santa Barbara asked for warnings about material related to “rape, sexual assault, abuse, self-injurious behavior, suicide, graphic violence, pornography, kidnapping, and graphic depictions of gore.” It also asked that professors allow students to be excused from class during depictions of graphic material.
The Academic Senate at Santa Barbara never considered the student-government resolution. But Ms. Loverin quickly became the face of a student movement to endorse trigger warnings. She showed up as an advocate in major media outlets like The New York Times, public radio, and USA Today.
In the past year or so, other colleges have wrestled with requests like Ms. Loverin’s. While faculty members on some campuses accommodate students’ requests, at other colleges they have refused to do so, saying that the warnings violate academic freedom. At American University, for example, the Faculty Senate unanimously adopted a free-speech resolution that discourages instructors from granting students’ requests to be shielded from certain readings or discussions. The resolution says faculty members can continue to issue “trigger warnings,” but only to prepare students to deal with material, not to suggest that they can opt out.
Once she gained national attention, Ms. Loverin felt a backlash. She was accused of threatening free speech and of infantilizing students by critics on social media, and an article in New Republic criticized her encouraging a “hypersensitivity to harm and a paranoia about giving offense.” She says she received death threats. She quit posting online about where she was going and when, and became more careful when walking alone.
Ms. Loverin, now 21, graduated from Santa Barbara in the spring and is applying to law schools. She says she isn’t fragile or afraid of discussing controversial ideas — or even fraught ones like racism and sexism. “I’m not talking about being offended,” she says. “Offend me, I love to debate things.” Her only concern, she says, is that undergraduates who have experienced trauma be allowed to prepare for material that might trigger uncomfortable feelings. “This is for a girl who got raped last week and is just back in class,” says Ms. Loverin, “and there is a movie with very violent rape scenes and she has no idea that it’s coming.”
Robin Wilson writes about campus culture, including sexual assault and sexual harassment. Contact her at robin.wilson@chronicle.com.
