Trigger warnings don’t help people cope with distressing material — they do the opposite

Imagine you’re a lecturer teaching a celebrated novel that features violent scenes – say, F Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby (1925). It transpires that one of your students has themselves been a victim of violence and now, thanks to your words, they are reliving their trauma. Could you, should you, have done more to protect this person? Beginning in 2013, many students at universities in the United States began demanding that their lecturers do just that and provide ‘