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Trigger Warnings, Safe Spaces, and the Language of Victimhood

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The Rise of Victimhood Culture

Abstract

Victimhood culture includes more than microaggression complaints. Campbell and Manning describe contemporary calls for trigger warnings and safe spaces, and how they mesh with victimhood culture’s central moral concerns. They consider whether these practices actually help those they are intended to protect or whether they are counterproductive. They note that both phenomena rely on the language of physical harm and discuss the role of expanded concepts of harm in the moral language of victimhood. This language, which includes new moral jargon and distinctive usage of common words, leads to confusion and conflict between campus activists and the outside world.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Modern rugby, for example, is descended from a medieval game in which an unrestricted number of people, some on foot and some on horseback, played according to loosely defined rules, without a referee, using cudgels to batter fellow players (Dunning 1983:132–133).

  2. 2.

    Legal scholar Lawrence Friedman (1994) argues that historical increases in safety and security have led to a greater expectation that life will be safe, such that modern people are less likely than their predecessors to tolerate accident and misfortune as normal parts of existence. While we emphasize the role of the legal system in providing security and suppressing violent conflict, Friedman points to other social trends—such as improvements in medical technology and food production—that could also contribute to a greater cultural expectation of safety.

  3. 3.

    English gentlemen in the sixteenth century also considered “sexual rapacity … to be an essential characteristic of men of fashion” (Dabhoiwala 1996:206).

  4. 4.

    In seventeenth-century England, where being honorable and being fashionable went hand in hand, many gentlemen turned to suicide after squandering their fortunes on gambling and other kinds of expensive living that were the outward mark of their social status (MacDonald and Murphy 1990:278–280). Urban ethnographer Elijah Anderson (1999) describes how fashionable shoes, clothing, and other status symbols are a crucial part of “campaigning for respect” in a poor black neighborhood in Philadelphia, such that young people spend their meager resources on acquiring these symbols and then flaunt them even though it makes them a target for predators. Honor is, as sociologist Mark Cooney observes, “the antithesis of middle-class rationality” (Cooney 1998:113). Dignity, on the other hand, is more consistent with the so-called Protestant ethic of systematic labor, frugality, and savings famously described by the early sociologist Max Weber (1958).

  5. 5.

    Black proposes that all kinds of social behavior conform to underlying social conditions—or, in technical terms, social life is isomorphic with its social field (Black 1989:91, 2004:21; see also Campbell 2015:322). The result is that different types of behavior often exhibit similarities in form and style when they occur in the same social setting. For example, Black (1989:Chapter 4) argues that the conditions that lead people to handle conflict with extensive negotiations also promote extensive negotiation in other realms of life, such as in economic exchanges or arranging marriages between two family groups. Similarly, Campbell (2015) proposes that social structures conducive to extreme, coercive, one-sided moralism—as in genocide—are also conducive to extreme, coercive, one-sided economic transactions—as in the extensive looting and enslavement that often accompany genocide.

  6. 6.

    These examples are based on personal observations.

  7. 7.

    For example, the president of the American–Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee supports the recognition of Arabs as a distinct racial category on the US census, saying, “We want to be counted in the census as Arab Americans…. Right now, Arab Americans are defined as white” (Devaney 2016). Note that white is a category that includes multiple ethnic groups (Spaniards, Albanians, Germans, Irish, etc.), so the campaign is not simply a matter of ethnic pride, but of preferring to avoid a supposedly privileged racial category.

  8. 8.

    In some ways these complaints about the dangers of modern media resemble earlier moral panics about the threats of comic books, rock n’ roll music, heavy metal music, and so on. Notably, though, these earlier campaigns focused to a greater extent on entertainment’s influence on children and adolescents, whereas contemporary campaigns do not restrict themselves to concern with protecting the very young. Also notable is that adolescents and young adults appear likely to support and partake in campaigns for trigger warnings, and may be much less resistant than youth in previous generations were to such protection and regulation.

  9. 9.

    For instance, it is plausible that men are, on an average, more likely to assume the ignorance of a woman than of a fellow man, and thus mistakenly explain to her things she already well knows. Identifying and labeling this behavior could make men more likely to recognize and curb this behavior in their own lives.

  10. 10.

    Haslam (2016) refers to this shift in meaning as “concept creep” and notes that it occurs in two forms: Horizontal creep occurs when a category expands to include different types of thing, and vertical creep occurs when a category that once referred to an extreme degree of something is expanded to include lesser degrees. Most of the examples we discuss involve both sorts of expansion.

  11. 11.

    Lukianoff and Haidt (2015) argue that the rising rates of mental health problems among students are not entirely a matter of increased recognition. As discussed above, the practices of victimhood culture can directly encourage symptoms of depression, anxiety, and other mental conditions. The increase in diagnosed mental and emotional problems may stem from a combination of broader definition of what constitutes a mental health issue, greater willingness of people to seek help from therapists, and an increase in the underlying symptoms.

  12. 12.

    One study reported that using this version of the DSM, rather than the older one, led to a 22 percent increase in the number of traumatic events in their sample (Breslau and Kessler 2001, cited in Haslam 2016:6).

  13. 13.

    We have noted that the complaints and concerns of some activists might easily be described in terms other than harm. It even sometimes seems like some of their reactions, though described in the language of harm, derive from one of Haidt’s (2012) other moral bases. The push to ban speakers with opposing views, for instance, could be understood as a concern for ideological purity, analogous to religious campaigns to cleanse their communities of heretics and unbelievers. Yet campus protesters appear to genuinely view it as a matter of safety.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. California State University, Los Angeles, CA, USA

    Bradley Campbell

  2. Sociology and Anthropology, West Virginia University, Morgantown, WV, USA

    Jason Manning

Authors
  1. Bradley Campbell
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  2. Jason Manning
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Campbell, B., Manning, J. (2018). Trigger Warnings, Safe Spaces, and the Language of Victimhood. In: The Rise of Victimhood Culture. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-70329-9_3

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-70329-9_3

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  • Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-319-70328-2

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-319-70329-9

  • eBook Packages: Social SciencesSocial Sciences (R0)

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