Startup Idea: Content Trigger Warning App for Trauma Survivors
I volunteer for a rape victims advocacy nonprofit organization and work with crisis counselors to provide support and resources to survivors of sexual assault.
Frequently, calls are made to the center because survivors were triggered by one thing or another. Some things are innocuous (survivor is triggered by a scene in a tv show of a locked door because she was locked in a room/raped as a child) but most are trauma specific (survivor is triggered by a woman's face during a rape scene in 13 Reasons Why on Netflix).
First, a brief explanation of what being triggered is vs what someone being sensitive is: being sensitive about something is hearing a nasty rape joke and feeling uncomfortable about it because you don't think it's okay to rape people and you feel gross hearing people laugh at that and don't think it's appropriate. Being triggered by something is when you're watching a tv show and you see a rape scene (even not super graphic) and you remember the time that a bunch of guys drugged you at a party and raped you, and then you didn't know where you were and a guy found you walking around and took you home and then HE raped you too, and you have vivid mental images of these events taking place again and you dissociate for hours at a time and when you come back from dissociation your vagina hurts like you were just raped again and it feels like your mouth is dirty because you've just re-experienced the trauma/rape and it feels like some guy just came in your mouth. Sorry for the graphic nature of that, but many people don't realize that there is a difference between a trigger and snowflake feeling sensitive about certain content. I hope it's now obvious what the extreme difference is, and why one might need an app for triggers (as opposed to an app for hurt feelings).
The ideal solution here would be for there to be an app (or chrome extension maybe, but ideally an app for ease of use) where survivors can flip through a large selection of movie/tv material (like a netflix interface, but with many, many more options), select the show/movie they are interested in, and quickly see an expandable list of triggers (maybe tag buttons, like "SA" - click the tag and it becomes "Sexual Assault" -click that and it opens a short description of the triggering content, like "boy leads girl out to a field, no graphic rape scene, but rape is audible and lasts 14 seconds" that also has the time/duration of the content). This would be really helpful, because right now, survivors basically just have to take risks with triggers whenever they watch something and this seems avoidable/easy enough info to aggregate. This is awkward for survivors too because it's normal to be at someone's house, they want to watch something on tv, maybe they don't know you're a survivor of sexual assault and it's not like that's an easy/normal thing to mention casually, and then you have to take a risk of freaking out when you're just trying to be social and have a life. The only thing I've seen like this was a chrome extension (now offline) that was specific to netflix. It didn't list the triggering content, it would just pause whatever you were watching when something triggering was about to happen and honk a horn. To me, this was bad because a. it's specific to netflix, which is limiting, and b.it would be better to list triggers up front in an easy to read/organized way, so that a person can choose whether or not to start watching the program. Why would you want to waste your time watching 6 episodes of a show only to have to turn it off when there's triggering content in the next 5 episodes. Similarly, that relied on devs to always be updating and you were basically taking a risk whenever you watched stuff bc there was a chance that someone forgot to include a trigger. Just was a flawed system and this really doesn't need to be as complicated as pausing content as it plays. Just give people info up front, tell them where the content is (so they can choose to skip over it if they still want to watch at all), and let them make a decision about what to watch.
Submitter: Please do let me know. I'm going to make this app if you don't. Plenty of grant money out there for it. Sarah Rubin - (view contact info)