This paper examines the complicated intersection of empathy-driven narratives and voyeuristic consumption of suffering in two nineteenth-century texts, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl by Harriet Jacobs and The Working Girls of New York by Rebecca Harding Davis. While these works were intended to inspire social change by exposing the brutal realities faced by marginalized individuals, they also can be viewed as engaging in what has been termed, in the modern era, as “trauma porn.” Trauma porn is defined as an excessive focus on brutal suffering that detracts readers from pursuing systemic reform. In the instance of Incidents, Jacobs was encouraged by her editor to amplify suffering to better engage readers, presumed to be mainly Northern white women who could advocate for social change: "My object in writing at this time is to ask you to write what you can recollect of the outrages committed on the colored people, in Nat Turner's time. You say the reader would not believe what you saw 'inflicted on men, women, and children, without the slightest ground of suspicion against them.' […] Were any tortured to make them confess? and how? Where any killed? Please write down some of the most striking particulars, and let me have them to insert" (Letter, Lydia Maria Child to Harriet Jacobs in 1860). Importantly, Child’s troubling method of engaging readers finds parallels in political activism on social media, where graphic videos of violence and suffering circulate widely, often shifting attention from meaningful action to passive consumption. By comparing these historical texts with contemporary practices, this paper will consider how the focus on graphic depictions of trauma run the risk of desensitizing audiences and reducing civic action to consuming spectacle, raising questions about how we should engage with trauma in the pursuit of political and social reform.