The speech and debate forensics community is a safe space where students can express themselves and their past trauma. Sometimes, this requires content warnings before the pieces in case any competitor in the room may be triggered by the piece. However, judges do not have the option to know which piece in their round contains content warnings. If a judge goes into a round with a piece that could trigger them, they are forced to watch.

With this community of exploration and self-actualization, judges are the reason this event happens. They provide their time and energy on weekends watching events and helping the organization thrive. Their well-being is at stake by not implementing content warnings for judges early on. 

The platform SpeechWire is a common tournament website that provides tournament information and posts the round times. They have made the option to edit competitor's names to their chosen name and add pronouns as they wish. Now more than ever we need to implement content warnings for judges early on. This petition is for Ben Stewart, the founder and owner of SpeechWire, to create an option for competitors to add content warnings to their pieces on the website. 

Along with this request, we request that SpeechWire allow judges the ability to put any potentially triggering content warnings under their accounts. 

This way, judges can have the opportunity to change their judging paradigm, helping them avoid triggering content, as well as allowing the tournament to see which judging placements would work best.

Speech and debate is a safe space for the students and competitors. It is time it becomes one for the judges, too.