After reading the passage below, answer the questions that follow. Be sure to "submit" your response for each question. You will initially receive full credit for each question, but your grade may change once your instructor reviews your responses. Be sure to check the grade book for your final grade.
Sensitivity or Free Speech?
Persuasive speeches can often involve controversial topics. For your persuasive speech, you have selected the topic of preventing rape on college campuses because you think it is an important issue in today’s culture. Your instructor has approved your topic, you have conducted your library research, and you are scheduled to give your speech one week from today. You have just heard a rumor, however, that someone in your class has been a victim of sexual assault on your campus, and you are anxious about how this classmate may react to your speech.
You bring your concern to your professor, who tells you that you have the option to provide a warning to the class prior to your speech. Content warnings (also known as “trigger warnings”) are statements before a lecture, reading, or other activity that inform the audience of potentially sensitive material, such as depictions of violence (Barnes, 2016). Certainly educators believe that compassion for students who may be struggling with trauma is a valid concern (Dickman-Burnett & Geaman, 2019).
And most students support content warnings (Barnes, 2016). On many campuses students have increasingly demanded content warnings in regard to course topics they believe will elicit strong, negative emotions (Wilson, 2015). But your professor also tells you that many faculty worry that these warnings go too far: they have a chilling effect on the kinds of controversial content that can and should be discussed in classrooms (American Association of University Professors, 2014). Some researchers also suggest that warnings don’t help that much — and if students who have experienced trauma use warnings to avoid an issue altogether, they may also avoid getting the therapy they need (Sanson, Strange, & Garry, 2019). Recent research also shows that one outcome of content warnings is that they increase the perception that content warnings are necessary (Boysen et al., 2019) In other words, warnings make people think they need warnings.
You are torn about these different perspectives. You know how much you want to speak about rape prevention because you feel it is critical for your peers to hear. And yet, you are still sensitive to your classmate’s potential reaction.