Gender-based violence and safety work in Higher Education

Abstract

Safety work describes the strategies that women implement to avoid men's violence, particularly in public spaces. These strategies involve resource, time and energy but paradoxically cannot actually produce safety. In this research, we extend the concept of safety work to Higher Education to make visible the work that goes into engaging with the learning environment for survivors of gender-based violence. We move beyond the application and/or problematisation of trigger warnings to focus on what Higher Education tutors and student survivors of gender-based violence do to facilitate learning. Drawing on empirical data from UK Higher Education staff in the arts, humanities and social sciences via surveys and focus groups, and focus groups with student-survivors of gender-based violence, we explore what is done in the classroom to make the space conducive for learning (and teaching). We start by critically examining views of and engagement with ‘trigger warnings’ and then critically engage with Ahenkorah’s concept of the ‘accountable space’ to argue that it should not be the responsibility of victim/survivors to have to perform safety work but that we should all consider how to create these conditions. The value of bringing safety work into the ‘trigger warnings’ debate is that it allows us to consider the materiality of the labour involved even as we recognise that the safety it promises is illusory. We argue that we should move beyond the illusion of safety in the classroom and create conducive learning spaces for all: including student and staff victim-survivors of gender-based violence.

Introduction

In a 2012 article ‘The illusion of safety/the safety of illusion’, feminist writer Roxane Gay takes issue with the popularisation of ‘trigger warnings’ within the feminist blogosphere and beyond. Gay argues that ‘trigger warnings’ do little to challenge male violence or to improve safety for women and are rarely based on an understanding of how ‘triggers’ are experienced by victim/survivors. She questions how trigger warnings can be meaningfully applied, where the threshold for the requirement of a trigger warning lies and who makes these decisions. Her central argument is that trigger warnings produce an illusion of a safety that cannot be meaningfully guaranteed. Gay's article is a useful starting point for our discussion of trigger warnings in UK Higher Education as it is a potent reminder that ‘safety’ is – for many of us – an illusion. Yet, there is a material aspect to that illusion which our research on the experiences of tutors and student-survivors in UK Higher Education has revealed. In a previous article drawing on this research (Boyle et al., 2025), we used Vera-Gray and Kelly's (2020) concept of safety work as a way of holding these contradictions together: in this article we extend and expand this application.

Vera-Gray and Kelly use the term safety work to describe the actions that women routinely take to avoid men's violence, particularly in public spaces (e.g. mapping our routes home, travelling with others, staying on the phone whilst walking alone). This work does not, however, produce safety: that depends on men not assaulting women. Safety work is thus akin to Gay's critique of trigger warnings: it creates an illusion of safety. Vera-Gray and Kelly demonstrate the materiality of the work that goes into creating that illusion: the emotional energy, financial resources and time that women put in to making public space ‘safe(r)’. They also demonstrate that giving up that work is untenable in a world where women are routinely responsibilised for men's violence against them. One of the inherent contradictions of safety work is that it is typically only visible when it fails. Yet, even in those moments of failure – when women are assaulted by men in public spaces – women's safety work comes into play in determining who is held responsible for their victimisation. When women are assaulted or even murdered by men in public spaces despite having done everything right, the attacks on them are deemed so much more egregious (Vera-Gray, 2018). Thus, safety work becomes a requirement for women: ‘When it is not performed, or not performed successfully, women are perceived not only as having done something wrong, but as being something wrong’ (Vera-Gray and Kelly, 2020: 271). In this sense, safety work is ideological work, producing certain kinds of female subjects. Recent research by Rebecca Lennox has suggested that safety work can be a form of ‘virtue maintenance work’, whereby women practise risk management in public places as a means of ‘gendered safekeeping’ (Lennox, 2022: 657). Notably, Lennox identifies that safety work can increase women's fear whilst, as Vera-Gray and Kelly (2020) also argue, being an untestable form of actual mitigation against risk and harm.

In extending the concept of safety work to learning environments, we are not arguing that either the work itself or the consequences of its potential failure are the same as Vera-Gray and Kelly's concerns. Vera-Gray and Kelly's ‘safety work’ is a gendered phenomenon: something that all women undertake in pursuit of personal, physical safety (though its manifestations are different for differently situated women). In adapting their concept to make sense of the data from our research into the use of trigger warnings in arts, humanities and social sciences in Higher Education in the UK, we are interested in ‘safety work’ as something undertaken by and for victim/survivors of gender-based violence (hereafter GBV) in the classroom. Whilst women are disproportionately represented within this group, victim/survivors of GBV are not all women, nor are all women victim/survivors. In relation to the curriculum, safety work is not undertaken in pursuit of physical safety, but in pursuit of learning. We expand on existing research into the safety work that women and victim/survivors perform as protection against material violence (Gillett, 2023; Ison et al., 2024; Vares, 2024), to a focus on the safety work performed by – and on behalf of – victim/survivors to facilitate their learning.

Intellectual risk taking is easier from a position of relative safety and that position is more easily attained by some groups than others. Vera-Gray and Kelly's (2020) suggestion that, in safety work, women routinely trade freedom for safety (or its illusion) is instructive here: much of the concern with trigger warnings has been that they stymie academic freedom. However, the analogy is imperfect. For Vera-Gray and Kelly (2020), it is those who are (or are perceived to be) unsafe who are responsibilised by safety work. In a Higher Education context, one of the reasons that trigger warnings have proved so controversial is that they potentially require others to trade their freedom for those who are (or are perceived to be) unsafe. This has – in some quarters – solidified the sense that it is the person demanding safety who is wrong, that they do not fit in the academic environment.

The word ‘safety’ can seem like something of an oxymoron in relation to learning: many critics of the use of trigger warnings in Higher Education express concern that they can stifle intellectual risk, curiosity and innovation (Bass and Clark, 2015; Cooper, 2014; Halberstam, 2017; Lukianoff and Haidt, 2018; Proctor, 2017; Vatz, 2016). These concerns are echoed in debates about ‘safe spaces’ in Higher Education. For instance, Boostrom (1998) suggests that ‘the “safe space” metaphor drains from classroom life every impulse towards critical reflection’ (Boostrom, 1998: 406). Critics have also pointed out that it is not clear what a ‘safe space’ looks like, how it would work or how ‘safe’ is being conceptualised (Barrett, 2010; Bentley, 2017). Ali (2017) argues that even if the tutors in the classroom try to construct a ‘safe space’ (in whatever guise they assume it takes), they have little control over the views and behaviours of others in the space. As Barrett (2010) notes, no amount of class management can negate student inequalities and no ‘safe space’ can neutralise preexisting power imbalances. Barrett proffers an alternative conceptualisation focusing on ‘student civility’ whereby ‘student behaviour, citizenship, and responsibility, rather than a focus on student comfort’ is the aim (Barrett, 2010: 10). Building on this, some have suggested that educators should focus on creating brave – rather than safe – spaces: these environments are not free from debate, but the parameters of acceptable behaviour and codes of conduct are agreed by all participants (Ali, 2017; Arao and Clemens, 2013). However, Ahenkorah (2020) argues that the brave space construct places the responsibility onto marginalised groups to create the conducive environment for their learning. Ahenkorah therefore proposes ‘accountable spaces’, which she defines as ‘being responsible for yourself, your intentions, words, and action’ (Ahenkorah, 2020). Integrating Vera-Gray and Kelly's (2020) analysis of safety work with Ahenkorah's (2020) accountable spaces thesis allows us to think about extending the responsibiliation for victim/survivor ‘safety’ in the classroom.

Drawing on empirical data from tutors and student-survivors, this article explores how this framing could work in practice, exploring what student-survivors and tutors actually do – the safety work they perform – in order to engage with curricula relating to GBV. We then explore boundary cases which emerged in both tutor and student-survivor discussions, using these to return to Lennox's ideas about the ideological aspect to safety work. In doing so, we argue that much of what is at stake in the debate about trigger warnings is who – and what – belongs in universities and what counts as knowledge.

Methods

In Spring 2023, we conducted an online survey of teaching staff in arts, humanities and social sciences in UK Higher Education followed by staff focus groups / interviews and a smaller number of focus groups / interviews with student-survivors of GBV. ¹ Survey participants were recruited using email lists and social media. The survey asked about participants’ perceptions of, and use of, trigger warnings and related content notices. Whilst we deliberately used the term ‘trigger warning’ in advertising the survey as this is the term most commonly used in the popular debate, we used the survey to explore a range of related practices and how these were commonly described and understood by tutors.

In total there were 525 completed surveys. Just over half of respondents were in arts and humanities (51.0 percent), 33.1 percent social sciences and 15.8 percent working across all three. A range of disciplinary areas were represented, with concentrations in Language & Literature (23.6 percent), Film, Television & Screen Studies (22.3 percent), Media (17.3 percent) and Sociology (11.8 percent). A majority of respondents (71.4 percent) were women, 23.8 percent were men and the remainder either identified in another way (3.4 percent) or preferred not to say (1.1 percent). According to the latest data from the Higher Education Statistics Agency (2025), women and men are employed in roughly equal proportions in arts and social sciences in the UK, with women outnumbering men in humanities subjects. Whilst our participants are, therefore, unrepresentative in this respect, given the gendering of safety work observed by Vera-Gray and Kelly (2020) and the well-documented gendered nature of pastoral care in university settings (Quickfall, 2025) this is perhaps unsurprising.

At the conclusion of the survey, we included an invite to contact the project email to participate in follow-on online focus groups: 31 respondents participated in five focus groups, plus three individual interviews for staff who could not attend the scheduled groups. As with the survey, the focus groups and interviews represented a range of disciplinary backgrounds, levels of seniority, lengths of service and views. As the particularities of job titles may identify institutions and/or individuals, staff participants are referred to as tutors. Some taught specifically on GBV but the majority did not. Our intention was to include a range of views rather than aiming for a representative sample and our data reflect that.

We also ran focus groups with students who identified as victim/survivors of GBV in order to compare their perspectives to tutors’ perceptions of their needs. To do this we worked with one local and one national rape crisis organisation with whom we have an established relationship. They agreed to share project information and we additionally advertised the research through our on-campus rape crisis support service and our faculty virtual learning environment. We recruited 11 student-survivor participants – all of whom identified as women (including one trans woman) – and held three focus groups with between two and three participants and three interviews with individuals, all online. A local rape crisis centre worker also attended and participants were informed that she would be available afterwards should they need support.

Focus groups and interviews were transcribed in full and transcripts were shared across the research team. Using a recursive approach, we individually read the transcripts then met to discuss what overarching themes we identified and developed a coding frame. We reread the transcripts and all three of the team then coded each transcript. We then met again as a team to discuss and compare. Using this method, as developed by Braun and Clarke (2006), we worked as a team to analyse our dataset.

In what follows, we first report on the safety work that student-survivors do, turning then to tutors before bringing the experiences of both together.

Safety work: What students do

Student-survivors implement a variety of actions and strategies to enable them to engage with class content that relates to their own experiences of GBV. Some of these strategies are enabled by practices that have become relatively routine: for instance, student-survivors spoke of accessing class slides uploaded to virtual learning environments in advance of sessions in order to ‘go in a bit more prepared mentally’ (S2.2). ² But these practices could not be taken for granted. For instance, one student-survivor explained:

for my seminar group, the professor didn’t give content warnings for the content. But when I went on to the other staff for the other seminar leaders, they all had content warnings. So, I ended up using their material to prepare myself for that class. (S1.3)

When information was not routinely available, student-survivors also described requesting information prior to the class or at the start of an event, speaking to tutors in advance about their particular needs or seeking out summaries and reviews of required texts (including fictions) from Wikipedia or other online sources.

Where the topics under discussion related to their own experiences of GBV, student-survivors spoke about having to find a way to ‘decompress’ after class (S2.3). Managing emotions in the classroom was also a topic of discussion: for instance, S5.1 remembered ‘crying in the classroom’ and how embarrassing this had been for her. She discussed this with a supportive classmate afterwards but noted that, although she liked her lecturers, she did not discuss it with them: ‘I don’t think I’d be wanting to burden them with that’.

That some classes are routinely recorded also has implications for survivors. One law student who described walking out of classes because the teaching on sexual violence was – in her view – so poor noted that her comments being recorded was ‘the worst thing’ (S1.2).

Complex organisational structures meant that student-survivors were not always sure who they should speak to about their needs and some reported putting a lot of emotional energy into building relationships with staff. This could also involve having to reveal details of their experiences, including ongoing criminal cases, without any guarantee of a sympathetic response. Extending beyond course content, tutors’ responses to student experiences and needs could make the difference between students being able to stay with their studies following experiences of sexual violence or opting out completely. For instance, one student-survivor told us how she reached out to her class group chat asking if anyone could recommend a member of staff she could approach on these issues:

Didn’t get a response in the group chat, because nobody has any good experiences. But what I did get was four direct messages from other survivors in the group chat, saying they’ve all dropped out of uni, or were taking a year out, because there was no support in the department. (S3.1)

Within the wider university context, student-survivors described having to disclose the details of their experiences of GBV without any guarantees that their disclosure would be sympathetically responded to. Both S1.3 and S4 had registered with their university disability services in order to identify appropriate adjustments but reported finding the system challenging to navigate. Likewise, S4 noted that to qualify for support (within and outside of the Higher Education setting) she had to repeatedly tell her story, identifying this as a barrier for her.

Beyond the university environment, S5.2 discussed the challenges in managing placement contexts where people can also disclose their own experiences of GBV and S4 highlighted how course reading on this topic had felt like an intrusion to her home, noting that ‘it's in my house. It's in my safe space. I can’t leave that. I can’t walk away because I’ve read it in my living room’.

These are powerful reminders of the daily work of surviving GBV and how this extends to learning environments. Not all of this work can – or should – be taken on by others, nor can it always be anticipated in advance (see Boyle et al., 2025). It is worth stressing here that the student-survivors in this research did not, on the whole, want to avoid content about GBV: indeed, some specifically sought to study these topics in order to make sense of their own experiences. But what they did want was a ‘heads up’ about the material: ‘it's much more about just being aware of what I’m about to experience for me, rather than like, I’m not going to go to that class because they’re talking about that’ (S2.2). Advance notice of this kind gave student-survivors some choice and control:

I’ve chosen to do this [degree], I’ve put myself into a position where I know I’m going to have to access stuff I will find challenging. I can’t control other people's opinions on it. But I can control how I feel when I access it. But the only way I can do that is knowing what I’m accessing in advance. (S4)

When such information was not provided, this not only required additional labour on the part of the student-survivors but also created a sense that they did not belong in that learning environment: ‘we don’t want to cause a problem. And don’t want to be a burden. And don’t want to have to have these things in place’ (S4). Whilst the tutors who participated in our focus groups / interviews were, overall, motivated to provide an environment conducive to learning for all their students, the construction of the ‘problem’ student was, at times, in evidence there too. For instance, in relation to teaching a literary text that features sexual violence, one tutor told us: ‘I do feel for the student, but at the same time I don’t want the scope of the discussion to be limited because there's a student in the class that has a problem, you know?’ (T1.6). This approach not only makes students feel like they don’t belong, it also negates the importance of embodied knowledge. This was powerfully articulated by one law student who reflected on a frustrating encounter with the head of her department over the teaching of sexual offences: ‘What did they say to me, “Oh, you’re a bit tearful”. Well, yes. I am. Is that not allowed?’ (S1.3). There are echoes here of Vera-Gray and Kelly's (2020) argument that women are responsibilised for the abuse of men and tasked with securing their own safety. As they argue, women can thus be constructed as simultaneously the problem and the problem solvers.

If we integrate Vera-Gray and Kelly's (2020) analysis of the responsibilisation of safety with Ahenkorah's (2020) aims of democratising responsibility for creating accountable spaces, we can begin to remove – or at least share – some of this burden from/with student-survivors. Our data demonstrate that advance content notifications can play a role in this. That these practices are appreciated by all students is suggested by Cebula et al.’s (2022: 1129) work – focusing on a general student population – which found ‘what students seemed to be asking for was simple, “accurate and proportionate” information about the nature of the content that was coming up’. For student-survivors, having some control is particularly important given that GBV is, at its core, predicated on removing power from women:

I think like even though a trigger warning can make you feel like a wee bit anxious about what might come up, I think still having that like autonomy, to decide whether or not you view it, like whether or not it's given in the appropriate way, but still having that autonomy to be like, ‘Okay, I’m going to sit through this’. Like you’re making that decision rather than it just like popping up. So yeah, I think it is helpful. (S5.2)

Debates around the usage of trigger warnings which situate them as a tool that students use for avoidance miss this crucial point. In this sense, the term ‘trigger warnings’ has become a distraction. As we have argued elsewhere (Boyle et al., 2025), a simple preview of teaching materials does not assume a particular response, nor does it address only student-survivors. However, this does allow for a sharing of at least some aspects of the safety work which can facilitate student-survivor learning.

It is important, though, to be explicit that this will not – and cannot – guarantee ‘safety’ for student-survivors even in the limited terms we have set out here. The examples that student-survivors gave of instances when they had been distressed – and even clinically triggered – by class content were not always ones that tutors could, or should, have anticipated (Boyle et al., 2025). Away from the more obviously emotive content which we have highlighted so far, in this research we have come across many powerful reminders – from students and tutors – that arts, humanities and social sciences classrooms are engaged with the material of our lives. For instance, one student-survivor recognised herself in datasets she encountered in her reading:

the years that were involved included my year. So, I knew I was involved in that. Like my statistics were in something I was reading. And it was like, ‘Rape cases since da da da da da da’, and I was like, ‘Oh, there's me’. And that really sucks. (S4)

This calls for something more systemic than simply adding trigger or other forms of content warnings. It involves an epistemological shift, a recognition that our data is not abstract but includes and represents our students, our colleagues and ourselves (Boyle et al., 2025). This does not only apply in the GBV field. By ensuring, at the outset, that tutors and students are attuned to the proximity of what we learn to what we live, we can perhaps offer a learning context where students who are triggered or distressed are not situated as – or see themselves as – a ‘problem’, disrupting or otherwise tainting the learning environment.

Safety work: What tutors do

In our survey and focus groups / interviews with tutors, we found numerous examples that tutors are sharing – or attempting to share – some of the burden of safety work: this is perhaps suggestive of the fact that, in a self-selecting sample, colleagues invested in the issue are more likely to take part.

Although we will concentrate on data from our focus groups / interviews, it is worth noting that our survey data revealed that the vast majority of respondents gave advance notice of content ‘routinely’ (43.8 percent) or ‘sometimes’ (33.3 percent). Only 8.2 percent of survey respondents did not make use of advance notice around class content, and the reasons given for this echoed the tenor of public debate, with respondents suggesting that they ‘infantilised’ students, failed to prepare them for ‘life beyond university’, ‘promot[ed] a retreat from intellectual ideas’ and ‘were at odds with academic freedom and thought’.

It is notable, though, that even among those giving advanced notice of content, the term ‘trigger warning’ was used to describe this practice by only 19.2 percent of respondents, with ‘content warning’ (57.5 percent) and ‘content note/description’ (39.8 percent) being more commonly used. Reasons given for the resistance towards the term trigger warning are pertinent to our discussion here as they highlight a concern that they could provide Gay's ‘illusion’ of safety without actually knowing the experiences of those in the classroom or being able to predict what might prove ‘triggering’ (in the clinical sense). These issues were discussed in all tutor focus groups / interviews. A number of tutors who identified as survivors during the discussions highlighted that triggers are ‘hyper-specific’ (T3.5) and can be linked to sensory perception (e.g. sounds, smells) rather than necessarily to content related to the traumatic experience or event. As one tutor who identified as a survivor told us: ‘I experience PTSD. And I do have triggers […] I’ve never seen a trigger warning for my trigger’ (T7).

For these reasons, many tutors resisted the term trigger warning whilst explaining the ways in which they do give advance notice of content and the reasons for doing so: ‘I think of it as something where they will have a better experience if they are able to prepare themselves in advance, should they wish to’ (T1.2).

Importantly, this approach extends the focus of ‘safety work’: this is not something targeted at a specific ‘traumatised’ subset of the student population, but something that is potentially valuable to all students.

Our focus groups / interviews provided concrete examples of the forms that this advance notice took and the challenges this could pose both in terms of workload and disciplinary norms. Some tutors outlined considerable advanced planning: one provided students with an outline of module content in the summer prior to the term to give students time to preview the course materials; another released information weeks in advance of sessions. Where course materials were already available on virtual learning environments, a number of tutors noted that they gave verbal reminders a week in advance of the material being taught.

For those in disciplines including literature and film, the content of set texts was also an issue, although the level of detail which it was desirable or feasible to provide was the topic of some debate. At the more comprehensive end, one literature tutor referred to a colleague who had compiled a ‘homemade film directory’ (T1.5) to share with students and described their own two-tier approach, providing detail for set texts (‘“this text will contain animal death”, or whatever else’) and then a list by topic (‘there will be gender-based violence in weeks 3, 5 and 7’). In this way, the tutor sought to navigate both the ‘spoiler averse’ norm they identified among literature students, and the needs of specific students. Whilst seeing T1.5's approach as desirable, another literature tutor in the same group raised practical concerns about being comprehensive in coverage:

I’ve got so many novels on the go at one time in my teaching, and it tends to be novels that I teach. So, the idea that I can sit and reread every one with specific emphasis on, you know, possible triggering subjects is, if only I had the time to sit and do that, you know? (T1.6)

Our intent here is not to say that one approach is better, but rather to highlight the labour, care and concern with which our participants were attempting to navigate this issue.

At the level of class organisation, tutors discussed scheduling difficult materials to allow for breaks and to ensure that students were aware whether/when they could opt out of engaging with particular content, ‘without, you know, 300 people watching them leave the lecture theatre’ (T5.1). In addition to the information about the course content, the need for pastoral support and signposting to relevant support organisations (within and beyond the university) was a recurring theme in focus groups / interviews.

What came through in all the focus groups / interviews was a concern with student wellbeing. However, whilst avoiding triggers (in the clinical sense) was broadly seen as desirable (even if practically unworkable due to their specificity), whether we could – or should – avoid distressing students was not so straightforward. Arts, humanities and social sciences are socially and ethically engaged subjects in which avoiding distress is not possible or desirable. Indeed, much of the content we teach is specifically focused on abuse and injustice: for instance, tutors discussed the challenges they faced teaching topics including GBV, child poverty, civil war, eating disorders, suicide and terrorism.

Complicating the picture further is a question about the place of emotion and personal experience in learning. In some disciplines the materials that tutors and students engage with – or, indeed, produce – are, as one marketing tutor told us, ‘designed to be emotive […] designed to pull the audience in, to have an emotional response’ (T2.5). Even so, some participants in our focus groups / interviews were clearly concerned about the possibility of causing distress to students. This was an ethical concern, but it was also – as this quotation demonstrates – a pedagogical one:

when you’re in a classroom, when you’re the person teaching, you have a duty of care to your students. I’m not out here trying to traumatise my students by just kind of going through material without giving them a heads up or without doing it sensitively. If somebody is distressed, they’re not learning. (T4)

This framing of emotions contradicts the work of feminist scholars including Ahmed (2014), who argues that emotional responses are a legitimate resource and not antithetical to learning. We have previously demonstrated the ways that the student-survivors in our study used their emotional responses – and the experiences underpinning them – to pursue change within their disciplines (Boyle et al., 2025). However, the desire to avoid distress indicated in the quotation above was a recurring one and was often linked to tutors’ anxiety about causing harm (occasionally filtered through a language of liability), to discomfort in knowing how (or if) tutors should respond to students’ distress and to concern that this could render students vulnerable in front of their peers. These anxieties were repeatedly and forcefully expressed and suggested the emotional toll of this work on tutors. One tutor, for instance, described being ‘very, very concerned’ about the impact on students, noting that it ‘plays on my mind’ and ‘really bothers me, and I don’t know how to deal with that’ (P2.2).

These concerns were voiced against a backdrop where most of the tutors in our focus groups / interviews were developing practice by trial and error, with little institutional support and inconsistency within and across disciplines. Our focus group / interview participants were not unique in this respect (although for many the motivation for participating was precisely to support the development of policy and practice within their area): just 3.8 percent of survey respondents stated that their university had a policy on this issue, though more identified policies (8.8 percent) and/or guidance (18.5 percent) at the department level. The lack of guidance and support, combined with the polarising and at times hostile popular debate about trigger warnings, meant that many tutors expressed anxiety over their practice. One tutor summed up the mood of their focus group thus: ‘It's fraught with danger is how it feels sometimes. It's quite a perilous place to be’ (T6.2). Indeed, many of the participants in our focus groups noted that a lack of support and clarity around what they should be doing was itself a cause of concern. One participant told us:

I kind of had a conversation with my Head of Department, where I was like, ‘I feel very untrained and unsupported’. And the response was that if I wanted to find some kind of bespoke training and go research it myself, then if I needed to pay, to go on a course that I found, then they would try and find some money for it. And of course, I didn’t really have time, given my workload, to do that research. (P1.2)

This suggests that where there is a lack of institutional ownership and responsibility for the issue, the workload – both material and emotional – seems to be falling on individual staff. In contrast, where policy does exist, this can provide some assurances for staff, albeit – as the quotation below indicates – there was also concern that institutions are not necessarily getting it right either:

So, my institution uses the term ‘content advice’. And my practice has wholly been informed by the guidelines provided by my institution. So, I follow those rather than take any initiative on it, partly because I’m just worried about being naïve, and inexperienced, and getting it wrong, frankly. So, I follow the University's policy, and I follow their wording, and I don’t like that to be honest, I don’t like the wording. It's inelegant and not very good, but it's what we’ve got. (P2.3)

Part of what seems to be at stake here is the difficulty of knowing what actually works. This was articulated by one focus group participant who wrote in the Zoom chat: ‘How would we reframe “not upsetting”? student well-being measures? or retention (rather than drop out) rates and less complaints? how do we measure any long-term output of teaching?’ (T3.6). A participant in another group commented:

you’ll never see the success of it if it works well. Because all you’re doing is achieving not traumatising people or not making people unhappy … And because you don’t then get an uptick anywhere else, the way we metricise student success, it becomes invisible … So, the invisibility of the success of the labour is very frustrating. (T2.4)

Both of these participants assume that avoiding distress is the goal, but their concerns echo Vera-Gray and Kelly's (2020) discussion of safety work: the evidence that safety work ‘works’ is an absence (of harm) which cannot be measured; only its ‘failures’ can be evidenced. These discussions are not just abstractions but raise questions for tutors investing time and emotional energy into initiatives to make the learning environment ‘safer’ whilst not knowing whether these efforts are making any difference and where their own responsibility for this begins and ends. In that context, being able to place boundaries around what is – and is not – expected becomes key: as we discuss in the next section, this is both a material and an ideological concern.

The boundaries of safety work

In this final section, we bring together our tutor and student-survivor participants to reflect on their shared uncertainty and concern about where the boundaries of safety work should be drawn. We start here by returning to the concern about efficacy detailed in the previous section, but here the point we want to stress is that boundaries can both enable tutors to avoid unnecessary labour and enable student-survivors to access the information they need when they need it. Across both groups of participants there was a recognition that routinising ‘trigger warnings’ may work against their effectiveness. If ‘trigger warnings’ are used extensively they become, as one tutor put it, ‘like the warning on a cigarette packet’ (T5.1) and are easily missed by those who need them:

One of the most interesting conversations I had with students following a session for which I’d given a trigger warning was that they said, ‘I wish you warned us about this content’ and I said ‘I did! Lots of times. Did you miss it somehow?’. And they said, ‘no, no, we heard the warnings. We just didn’t believe you. And we went to the screening, and we wish we’d listened’. And has made it really difficult for me to think, how do I communicate warnings to people who need them? (T2.7)

A student-survivor made a similar point:

The overuse just meant that if anything did come up that was actually potentially triggering, particularly in the sexual violence kind of format, that you weren’t listening, anyway, because you knew that this guy was going to be like, ‘Oh, everything is really triggering’. (S1.2)

This points to a concern not only with information overload but also with the dilution of the meaning of ‘trigger warnings’: if the term is too loosely used such that ‘everything is really triggering’, it becomes easier for students to miss the relevant information or feel unable to discuss their specific needs.

A critique of ‘trigger warnings’ is that they can themselves become performative and, therefore, as both the tutor and student-survivor quoted above suggest, are not taken seriously. To give a different example, ‘trigger warnings’ were also identified as primarily performative when it was not clear what their recipients were supposed to do with the information (Bryce et al., 2023). There was a concern that the formulaic use of trigger warnings was more about the avoidance of liability, about being seen to care, than actually about thinking of the needs of student-survivors.

At the same time, both among tutors and student-survivors there was a concern that the discourse around ‘trigger warnings’ has created some unrealistic expectations among students about what they have the right to be ‘warned’ about. Tutors and student-survivors offered examples of requests or complaints that they deemed illegitimate because they did not relate to potential vulnerabilities but to religious beliefs, ideological positions and personal preferences. For example, one student-survivor told us about a complaint from a fellow student that she described as ‘ridiculous’:

[fellow student] had been very angry that trigger warnings weren’t used to describe the fact that ghosts were in it. And I personally feel like if it's called The Haunting of Hill House, that's kind of, you know, there's going to be ghosts. It's in the title. (S6)

We cannot comment on what was at stake for our participant's classmate, but it is of interest to us because it functioned within the interview as a way for the student-survivor to assert the legitimacy of her own experiences. This process of distinguishing legitimate demands – and, crucially, responses to material – was not unique to this student. In another interview, for instance, a tutor who told us of his own PTSD diagnosis reported that when students told him they felt ‘triggered’ his response was to ask if they had a PTSD diagnosis. For him, the boundary was a diagnostic one. For the student-survivor quoted above, the boundary fell elsewhere.

Interestingly, one of the instances where the student quoted above felt that her tutors had failed her was in relation to an uncritical use of the word ‘dyke’ by a classmate. It is worth quoting her at some length here:

he used the ‘D’ slur for a lesbian. And everyone just burst out laughing. And the lecturer even burst out laughing. And as a queer woman, I just was a bit shocked to hear that. And then he followed up by saying, ‘I’m gay, so I’m allowed to say that’. And for me … if it had been a novel where that language was used, my lecturer would have provided us with a trigger warning. Because it's offensive, homophobic language. But a member of my class was allowed to just say it and joke about it, and it was fine. Which made me wonder, you know, should that be something … I feel like it should almost be a warning. (S6)

This student had come to the interview with a list of examples to discuss with us and clearly felt strongly about them. In the extract above, she presents her response to the class as representative (‘as a queer woman’); her proximity to ‘the “D” slur for a lesbian’ renders her both vulnerable and authoritative whilst also differentiating her from the ‘gay’ classmate. Notably, the student reports trying to make sense of this moment in relation to what she identifies as class norms (‘if it had been a novel […] my lecturer would have provided us with a trigger warning’). The uncertainties in the last sentence ('should that be’, ‘should almost be’) suggest that it is no longer clear to her what it is reasonable to expect.

To make sense of this, we want to return to Lennox's (2022) account of the ideological functions of safety work. For Lennox, the safety worker seeks to establish themselves as the kind of person who will not be the object of violence partly by establishing a proximity to a victimised position: I recognise that I could be victimised, therefore this is what I do – and am expected to do – to ensure I am not. Importantly for our argument here, Lennox sees this performance of ‘safekeeping labour’ as ‘a habitualized, uniquely gendered response to a normalized experience of marginality that reflected women's subconscious awareness of their precarity in a social, economic, and political system that remains dominated by men’ (Lennox, 2022: 657). The student-survivor we quote above seems to be tussling with this, her experience of marginality being both the source of her legitimacy in the interview and her precarious sense of belonging in the classroom.

At the same time, a concern with ideological alignment emerged in many of the examples that we were given by tutors about student requests and complaints about language, and this was often where tutors expressed the greatest anxieties about the perceived costs of getting it ‘wrong’: ‘I’ve read stories in the news of people losing their jobs for things like this, so I’m very cautious now’ (T7). To be upfront about our own investment here, part of the reason that we have returned to this example is that we have used ‘the D slur’ in our own teaching without the kind of ‘warning’ our participant was asking for, partly because – in light of its reclamation by lesbian-feminist groups and texts from the 1970s onwards – we do not see it as a slur. We would not want to lose examples of ‘dyke’ activism from our teaching, but this has reminded us of the importance of contextualisation and being alert to the fact that language that has been reclaimed in one context may still be weaponised in another. Clarity and consistency around expectations seems to be key to squaring this circle. We cannot give students advance warning of every term they may encounter, but we can establish ground rules which make it possible for language to be explored and problematised within the class, whilst making it clear to students that offence is not covered by our approach to content advice.

We want to link this back to our discussion earlier in this article about the place of emotion and experience in the classroom to suggest that – as experienced by our participants – the trigger warning debate has become, at least in part, a debate about who and what belongs. Given the impossibility of being truly comprehensive, warnings per se may be unhelpful. In the example above, would the tutor's ‘failure’ to challenge the gay classmate have seemed so jarring to the student if she was not routinely being ‘warned’ about language elsewhere?

At the same time, we have heard from student-survivors how much they have valued that ‘heads up’ that many of the tutors in our focus groups worked hard to provide. In developing our guidance on the use of content advice, we have therefore identified consistency, clarity, proportionality and timeliness as key principles which should drive our approach (Boyle et al., 2025). Adopting these principles can allow staff and students to manage expectations and remove the sense that some staff care more – or less – than others. This is not just a question of perception: as we have shown, both students and staff who spoke with us were explicit about the additional labour that some tutors take on. Having a shared and well-articulated response to these issues within units of learning thus supports tutors as well as students and need not be particularly burdensome. For instance, we propose the routine inclusion of ‘short, factual descriptions’ (Boyle et al., 2025: 14) of class content and the forms that learning materials take (e.g. when audio-visual material will be used) in class descriptors / handbooks / virtual learning environments. Routinely providing these descriptions about all classes removes guesswork on the part of tutors over what is (and is not) potentially ‘triggering’ and gives students information they can use to manage their own learning. There will be some students who have more specific needs which cannot – and should not – be the responsibility of tutors to anticipate and so it is also important to ensure that students have information about how to request reasonable adjustments where these are needed. We also recommend a move away from the terminology of ‘trigger warnings’, recognising that this language can be misleading and counter-productive, producing a narrow category of the ‘problem’ student who these warnings are designed to protect.

But this in itself is not enough. Given that we cannot predict what will be triggering or distressing for our students – nor can they predict this for their peers or, indeed, for us – we need to recognise and, to some extent, normalise distress and other emotions in the learning environment so that their impact is not heightened by their perceived illegitimacy.

Conclusion

This article has used Vera-Gray and Kelly's (2020) concept of safety work as a means of making visible the work that student-survivors and tutors do to create a context conducive to learning. The value of bringing safety work into the ‘trigger warnings’ debate is that it allows us to consider the materiality of the labour involved even as we recognise that the safety it promises is illusory. Using Lennox's (2022) analysis of how safety work is applied by women, we have also suggested that there is a performative aspect to this work, both on the part of those asking for and those providing the trigger warnings. At its worst, this can produce, as Gay (2012) feared, an illusion of safety without challenging the material conditions which produce unsafety, whilst creating new exclusions.

However, in an unsafe and unequal world, we also need to recognise that survivors do engage in additional labour and consider whether there are ways of sharing this labour that do not remove agency or situate them as ‘problems’ to be solved. After all, the fundamental reason for having to invest effort to do this work, and create these spaces, is not because of survivors’ needs but because of perpetrators’ intent to dismantle and erode agency, bodily integrity and emotional stability.

The way that the ‘trigger warnings’ debate has played out in recent years has done little to support student-survivors. Instead, it has solidified the contradictions of safety work. Student-survivors are carrying out material and emotional labour which they are made to feel should not be necessary. If this additional labour is still something they do – or feel they have to do – then their position as learners is undermined. At the same time, as our work with tutors has suggested, the uneven and inconsistent approaches to this within universities means that the emotional labour of supporting these students is also being unevenly distributed. Hidden (or unseen), gendered, time-consuming and often worrisome care work undertaken by mostly female staff in the academy is well documented, and our study suggests that ‘safety work’ may be another example of this (Boyle et al., 2025; Lennox, 2022; Vera-Gray, 2018; Vera-Gray and Kelly, 2020).

There are some practical steps that we can take to share the burden of safety work more evenly, as we have outlined in the previous section and discussed in more detail elsewhere (Boyle et al., 2025). But alongside these practical considerations, making safety work visible in all its messy contradictions – as we have tried to do in this article – is itself a step in the process of creating accountable learning spaces (Ahenkorah, 2020). Ultimately, the goal should be to move beyond the illusion of safety in the classroom to actually creating conducive learning spaces for all, including student and staff victim-survivors of GBV.