Speech Tournaments are a place where we as public speakers share heartfelt stories and celebrate each other through performance. However, over the years, speech has become an activity that necessitates the faking of trauma to extend our advocacy. While this is understandable in an activity such as speech, victims, and survivors of trauma who have to watch speeches that can possibly retraumatize and trigger them are left voiceless. In an activity that is meant to empower voices, not diminish them, we must help our fellow competitors in need.

This means a few things: we need safe spaces at speech tournaments, places students can go if they are triggered. Tournament directors need to make this a requirement at speech tournaments so students can go somewhere during the day to cope with pain. Ideally, a classroom not being used where students can go to put their head down for a few minutes or let their emotions out. Additionally, we need to establish an open-door policy at speech tournaments.  Students should be able to leave rounds if they feel like they will become retraumatized and judges should not be able to doc students for doing so. Finally, at speech tournaments, to help judges who may face the potential to be retraumatized, schematics need to include content warnings for competitors' pieces and judges should be able to decline to judge rounds if necessary. This last solution isn't required at all, but should be encouraged; the normalization of trigger warnings. This is the primary way competitors who gave the real potential of being retraumatized can know if the performance is one they may have to leave during. At the end of the season, I am taking this to various tournament directors to push for these policies to be implemented at tournaments.

I have sat through rounds where judges and competitors alike have looked uncomfortable, even triggered, by a performance. My sophomore year, during a POI round, a judge said they needed to leave the room in the middle of the round because of the subject matter of some of the student's speeches. In my junior year, a good friend of mine was sweating and looking away while watching another competitors performance, when I asked them about it after the round they told me that they had been triggered by what they had seen. This is a very real problem that can afflict anyone and we need to recognize clear ways to help.

Ultimately, this petition which is apart of the speech I am giving is not to earn championships or win trophies, it is to mold our community into the safe space we herald it as. This petition is subject to change (wording of it at least) but the message of it will remain exactly the same. We need to help our competitors and every single signature matters.