Cambridge University has now decided that even Little Red Riding Hood is too dangerous for young minds.
Clare College issued an official content warning ahead of a free online humanities webinar for state sixth-form pupils, flagging “adult content including themes of violence, with reference to fairytales.”
The session, part of a course designed to prepare GCSE and A-level students for university study, encouraged participants to “read beneath the surface” of bedtime stories. Official course notes still felt the need to caution: “Content warning: Please note this session will involve discussion of some adult content including themes of violence, with reference to fairytales.”
In Charles Perrault’s original 1697 version, the wolf eats both grandmother and the girl. The later Brothers Grimm retelling keeps the violence but allows a huntsman to save them. Modern adaptations have dialled the darkness up further.
None of this is news to anyone who has ever heard the story. Yet Cambridge treated it as a potential trauma event for teenagers.
Lord Toby Young of the Free Speech Union cut through the nonsense: “Putting trigger warnings on fairytales is infantilising, even for Cambridge.”
Professor Dennis Hayes, director of Academics For Academic Freedom, has long warned where this leads. “Once you get a few trigger warnings, lecturers will stop presenting anything that is controversial. Gradually, there is no critical discussion.”
Commentator Adam Brooks captured the wider reaction in a short video that has been circulating widely. He called the move “ridiculous,” asked what is wrong with a culture that raises perpetual victims, and accused left-wing universities of brainwashing students while staff appear “away with the fairies.”
What was once a children’s warning about talking to strangers has been reclassified as adult material requiring institutional protection.
The message to the next generation is clear: the world is too frightening to confront without official guidance, and the stories that once toughened character must now be handled with kid gloves.
This is just the latest chapter in a long campaign to wrap classic culture in the same cotton wool as modern culture.
For example, Disney has slapped outdated-cultural-depiction warnings on its own older films, and publishers have begun printing classic books with trigger warnings at the front.
The Wicked movie was mocked for warning audiences about discrimination against people with green skin.
One Massachusetts university even banned the phrase “trigger warning” itself because the words might be triggering.
A woke tech company tried to scrub “violent language” from everyday speech.
In a dark twist of irony, a 75th-anniversary edition of Orwell’s 1984 arrived with its own trigger warnings and lectures about the book’s “problematic” hero.
Shakespeare’s plays have been systematically infested with the same notices.
The Royal Shakespeare Company even warned audiences that The Merry Wives of Windsor contains “body-shaming.”
Universities that once prided themselves on forming adults now specialise in manufacturing fragility.
The wolf is no longer the danger. The real threat is an education system determined to keep students forever inside the cottage, doors locked, lights on, and every traditional tale carefully labelled for their own safety.
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