13 Reasons Why: Sexual Assault and The Trigger Hypothesis
13 Reasons Why, a popular television drama first airing March 31, 2017, has caught many peoples’ eyes for a number of reasons. The reactions to this show from the public are split as some praise the director for the acknowledgement and portrayal of real hard-hitting topics that many teenagers go through, while a number of others believe that this show is very controversial and might be a little too much. The show depicts a high school girl, Hannah Baker, who takes her own life because of numerous events that take place during her time at Liberty High School. But before her death, she creates 13 tapes with 13 reasons why she committed suicide, each tape directed at a specific person in the show that she felt contributed to her death.
Within the four seasons, copious amounts of triggers are brought to attention such as the graphic portrayals of abuse (both sexual and drug related), suicide, and rape. There is no questioning why this show got a TV-MA rating with the director choosing not to sugarcoat anything. The suicide and abuse scenes are graphic, but the rape scenes might be even worse. Bryce Walker, one of the main characters in the show, is known for being the bad guy. He is shown sexually assaulting three different girls in the entirety of the show and, when confronted about it, he states, “Every girl at Liberty High wants to be raped.” If that wasn’t bad enough, there is a painfully graphic scene in season two episode 13 that is proven to be the most controversial part of the show.
Tyler, a character in the show that is constantly bullied and harassed by the baseball and football players, is on the receiving end of a vicious attack. Monty, one of the football/baseball players at Liberty, is seen with a couple of his friends ganging up on Tyler in the school’s bathroom. Monty smashes Tyler’s head into the mirror before slamming his head multiple times on the corner of a sink. The group of guys then proceed to hold his head in the toilet while Monty pulls down Tyler’s pants, grabs a mop, and repeatedly shoves it up his rear until he bleeds. The choice of the director to show so much of the attack and to show the blood on the end of the mop after the attack is why fans are screaming controversial.
This show certainly contains a lot of sexually explicit material, which leads me to question if it also correlates with the trigger hypothesis. “The trigger hypothesis essentially claims that exposure to sexually explicit materials will cause a response in some individuals that will provoke them in such a way that it may lead them to commit a sex crime such as rape or indecent exposure” (Sparks, 139). Does exposing teenagers, or whoever watches this show, to these vivid sexual acts, that are extremely violent and non-consensual, incite ideas of possibly executing the same acts? There quite possibly could be a link that this show illicites between viewing violent sexual acts and then carrying out those violent sexual acts. If this is in fact true, 13 Reasons Why could be even more controversial than previously thought.
