For or Against?: Criminal Justice and Criminology Faculty Attitudes toward Trigger Warnings

Abstract

Since 2014, a debate has raged over trigger warnings in college courses. Proponents see trigger warnings (oral or written advance notification of course content with the potential to trigger adverse health responses, and therefore, inhibit academic performance) as supportive of students, particularly those who have experienced trauma. Critics see them as harmful to those same students, and as a threat to learning and academic freedom. Using data from a survey of criminal justice and criminology faculty (N = 791), this study found three domains of faculty attitudes, with trigger warnings as a student-centered teaching practice, an academic harm, and compromising content. Female faculty, those who had taught victimology, those in criminal justice departments, and those who identified as more liberal had more positive views of trigger warnings. Only attitudes viewing trigger warnings as a student-centered teaching practice predicted use of trigger warnings. Future research should undertake inter-disciplinary comparisons.

Keywords:

• trigger warnings
• criminal justice education
• scholarship of teaching and learning
• content advisory
• college teaching

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank Dr. Cortney Franklin for early contributions to the project; Benjamin Comer and Daniella Pitruzzello for their work as research assistants; and the content experts for providing their expertise in developing the scales used in this study.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by an Assumption College Faculty Development Grant; and a Faculty Research Support Grant, Center for Criminal Justice Research, School of Criminal Justice, University of Cincinnati.

Notes on contributors

Alison C. Cares

Alison C. Cares, Ph.D., is Associate Professor of Sociology and a member of the Violence Against Women Cluster at the University of Central Florida in Orlando, Florida, U.S. Her career in the efforts to end violence against women started over 20 years ago as a community educator in a sexual assault and domestic violence services agency. Dr. Cares' research focuses on violence against women, primarily intimate partner violence and campus sexual assault. Her recent work has appeared in Journal of Criminal Justice Education, Journal of Interpersonal Violence, Violence & Victims, and Violence Against Women. She enjoys teaching undergraduate and graduate courses including victimology, sexual violence, domestic violence, and research methods.

Arelys Madero Hernandez

Arelys Madero-Hernandez is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Criminal Justice at Shippensburg University. Her research focuses on the correlates of crime prevention, the link between race/ethnicity and crime victimization, and immigration effects on crime and victimization. Her work has been published in Justice Quarterly, Victims & Offenders, and Race & Justice.

Lisa Growette Bostaph

Lisa M. Growette Bostaph is a Professor of Criminal Justice at Boise State University. She received her Ph.D. in Criminal Justice from the University of Cincinnati. She has been working in the field of victimization for 28 years, starting her career at the Duluth Domestic Abuse Intervention Project in Duluth, MN. Dr. Bostaph was also the founder of Project P.E.A.C.E, a crime scene crisis intervention project for four suburbs of Minneapolis, MN serving victims of domestic violence, sexual assault, and child abuse. Dr. Bostaph's research focuses on police decision-making, criminal justice system response to victimization, and criminal justice education. She is currently working on two multi-year projects: a series of biennial reports on victimization and victim services in Idaho and another examining the prevalence, incidence, and systemic response to the victimization of people with disabilities.

Bonnie S. Fisher

Bonnie S. Fisher is a Distinguished Research Professor in the School of Criminal Justice (SCJ) at the University of Cincinnati. Her research interests span victimological topics ranging from the measurement and estimate of interpersonal violence against college students to the identification of theory-based predictors of interpersonal victimization to understanding state-level regulation of campus conceal carry laws, and most recently, to the design and implementation of a longitudinal study of interpersonal violence against and by emerging adults. During her career, she has published articles in Criminology, Justice Quarterly, Journal of Quantitative Criminology, Journal of Interpersonal Violence and Violence Against Women. She was the Co-P I, with David Cantor, on the 2015 and 2019 Association of American University's Campus Climate Survey on Sexual Assault and Misconduct and a consultant, with Professor Sandy Martin, on the University of Hawai´i's 2017, 2019, and 2021 Student Climate Survey on Sexual Harassment and Gender-Based Violence. Since 2018, she, along with the UC SCJ team, has partnered with a local non-for-profit organization, Women Helping Women, to evaluate their Domestic Violence Enhanced Response Team (DVERT). Annually she teaches an undergraduate course in victimology and a graduate-level Seminar in Victimology—hence her interest in the use of trigger warnings.