Online Spaces, Part 5: No Space Is Safe For Everyone
The term âsafe spaceâ has often meant places that are safe for people in the LGBT+ community. The world and the internet have expanded on the idea, and different web communities have their own notions of what it means to be in a safe space. The phrase still has a strong connotation of protecting a marginalized group, and weâre not sure how universal or exclusive that connotation is.
You can make a space to protect people from a particular kind of bigotry. Or from a kind of hostility or bullying. Or from being caught off-guard by content that can harm them. We like that people have been figuring out ways to protect each other online.
But different types of safety can contradict.
Say you have a safe space for people who need their triggers correctly labelled. That same space can be unsafe for people with disabilities or life situations that make trigger warnings tricky to create. People can have attention issues, or difficulty understanding a warning system, or difficulty making their body or the software do what they want. They may not be fully fluent with the language of a space, or even just the dialect.
Being bad at following a spaceâs rules is a little unsafe if you have to be on high alert in order to avoid making constant mistakes.
And it can be very unsafe if people respond to mistakes with insults, cruel assumptions, or suggestions of self-harm.
Now, say you have a place thatâs safe for people who are processing trauma and anger. It might be unsafe for people who share traits in common with those who inflicted the trauma.
Or it could be unsafe for people who are processing the same trauma in a different way.
The nature of a space depends on who itâs safe for, and what itâs safe from. It's only safe if the occupants mostly agree on those two points.
Otherwise, you end up working at cross-purposes.
Thereâs tension when you try to expand your own type of safe space to encompass a larger community. Suddenly, a lot more people have to mostly agree about whoâs supposed to be safe from what.
Sometimes youâll find that your type of safety is too specific to work in a big space. Itâs hard to predict all the needs of a varied community.
Now, some types of safety do a lot more good than harm even on a large scale. Making a big space safer can be a tense but needed transition.
We here at Averting The Flame Wars want everyone on the internet to be safe from things like public doxing and death threats. But not everyone would agree with that. And even we donât know exactly how to enforce it.
Itâs hard to build a consensus with a large group of people about which rules are worth the trade-offs involved. Itâs a struggle between two things:
Freedoms: The safety of being able to talk and act thoughtlessly, to relax and be open about your passions, uncertainties, and experiences.
Restrictions: Rules and norms that give people some power over if and how theyâre exposed an idea or situation.
These are both types of safety. In general, humans need some of both.
Keeping a space safe means hashing out how youâre going to balance these two needs in lots of different ways.
And it means deciding how you can enforce the restrictions you have. If one person breaks the rules, do others get to try to make them feel bad? If so, what methods are they allowed to use?
If youâre going to honor the needs of different humans, you need to change where the boundaries are from one space to another.
It helps a lot if you state the restrictions and freedoms of your spaces as clearly as possible, so the people who need to avoid it can do so. Some Facebook groups have guidelines for their members, and some blogs have guidelines for commenters.
In a more amorphously owned space like a tag, itâs going to be a lot more subjective. Still, if you feel like you know a safe space well, it can help to articulate what you think the rules are.
Likewise, if you sense that a space isnât intended for you or has unwritten rules you donât understand, one option is to ask. Ask the people you encounter about who they want the space to cater to.
If they seem receptive, ask if theyâd be willing to explain what kind of behavior they expect from you. (Keep in mind that this can be a lot to ask. Most people donât know how to articulate exactly what they expect from you. And some have bad experiences with being asked the question.)
You canât preempt every harmful misunderstanding this way. Our ideas can minimize hurt, not prevent it completely.
Safe online spaces are important. And they can be pretty unsafe.
Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5 | Part 6