Your thoughts on 'Safe Spaces'.

[iked]

Hey guys, just wanted to get some people's thoughts on this - I'm surrounded by like-minded people, so I have a hard time understanding some other people's viewpoints sometimes. Would appreciate any thoughts you guys might have.

What do you guys think about the so-called 'safe spaces' that are now popping up in larger educational facilities? If you didn't know, these are places that are supposed to be defined just for a certain set of people - whether bi, gay, whatever. Any 'negative' statements on that group of people are prohibited in those spaces. All sorts of people have been using and abusing it for political means. Don't really want to get into that, as that's not really the point of the topic, but it's a point in the topic, I suppose.

I mean, coming from my background - a straight, white, irish guy growing up in the Great Lakes, we were poor, and lived in a particularly sketchy community - lots of generally tense racial things going on. This group hated that group, these people hated those people - etc. So growing up I saw and experienced a lot of tension between various groups - but growing up in it, I got used to it - I learned how to deal with it. As my dad used to say back then, 'Offense is always taken, never given'. Names like Potato N****rs, Fire crotch (which I still laugh at to this day), etc, were thrown around on a daily basis. And jokingly (due to my dad's spreading that idea around), inside of the community, it became an endearing term.

What's I'm trying to get at is it seems like confronting the conflict head on seems to work, vs. hiding and patting yourself on the back - as it seems these 'spaces' are doing. I'm thinking if people actually explained themselves - encountered the hostility and dealt with it, rather than hiding - we wouldn't have such heavy tensions between the various groups. Maybe it's just how I was raised, I don't know. But I don't understand why these are a thing, if they obviously just create more tension between the different groups of people.

I've asked two good friends (guy and gal / both gay) what they thought of it, and - growing up in the same community - they said the same thing. To explain from their end - they went through a ton of shite in high school all the way through college in our community for, well, their lifestyle. But they took that hostility and repaid it with kindness - and they're a loved part of our tiny town now - just like all the rest of us who powered through the adversity.

I'm kind of rambling at this point, but seriously - do you guys think these spaces are healthy? Why do you think these have become more common recently?

I'd appreciate any thoughts. Just trying to see the other side's viewpoint on this.

[OxyFemboi]

My point of veiw is sadly out of date. However ...

When I was in high school and college, I was not bullied or beat up. However, that was due to my having grand mal epileptic seizures once about every six weeks. All the teachers and most of the students had seen me have a seizure, usually more than once. Many, many teachers and students kept an eye on me in case I needed help. Due to this, no person -- even me -- thought of me as a sexual being.

I was gay. I didn't tell anyone for years. I never dated. I was twenty-nine before I had the courage to come out to my parents.

If I had been a normal high school wimpy kid, I would have appreciated these "safe spaces". A skinny geek who wasn't that well liked who was also gay and hiding it? Not eveyone has the great upbringing you had or the courage to stand up to a bully the first time ... or the thirty-first time ... or has a protector. I never went through this because of my epilepsy. Yes, my parents would have gotten involved and had any bully punished ... but I didn't have the courage to tell my superb loving parents I was gay till I was twenty-nine. I lived in fear for decades ... and didn't get up courage to tell my parents who I knew would understand and accept me. As it was, I almost had a nervous breakdown when I did come out. It takes courage and maturity ... and that takes time.

[ProfessorPig]

this is just part of the normal cycle.
you can compare safe spaces to the rules on stage coaches, no discussing politics or religion, and if you have a bottle, pass it around. they are simply rules to keep the peace so that everyone can focus on the task at hand, in this case learning.
trigger warnings are another one i hear a lot people giving grief about. but if you think back to old movies like "inherit the wind", there would often be a trigger warning before the movie to let you know that some people will be offended by the content of the film. the most interesting thing about this is that the films that had those warnings are now far from shocking.

another older example to think about is the song "anything goes". the values of one generation are continually replaced by the values of later generations. sometimes the pendulum swings one way, sometimes it swings the other.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=17ZWrcL9Dz0

[zapnosis]

Sorry, late to the party.

What I find in debates about these kind of issues (at least in the UK media) is that people on both sides tend to over-simplify the issue in favour of their own camps. As a result the debate becomes banal and largely meaningless.

I tend to agree with the OP that safe spaces are not necessarily healthy if they cause people to hide from the issue rather than face it. BUT as a white, middle class, heterosexual male (albeit a rather weird one) in a society ruled by the same, it's easy for me to say that. I don't have to face widespread hostility or prejudice but I can easily imagine that even the strongest person would need a place to retreat to and recharge once in a while.

I wonder how my life would be different if my fetishistic desires were written on my forehead.

So, first principles. People have a right to be wrong, because no one of us is perfect. People have a right to express themselves, provided it does not violate the rights of others'. So people also have the right to walk away, but away to where?

Now I think about it, when I was in school we (the unpopular kids) made our own safe spaces in the places nobody else wanted to be. It seemed appropriate, but maybe it just made things worse. Has a "ghetto mentality" ever helped a minority group to become accepted?

Safe spaces are an imperfect solution in an imperfect world. That's as close as I can get to an answer.

Z

[cristovaop]

Once out of college, university or whatever the place these "safe spaces" are, the real world, people will have to deal with unsafe spaces.
By not diminishing the micro-aggressions over time they're creating a mass of infantile adult-children that can't hear no.
In the backyard you learn to hear no from the teacher, in school you learn to deal with you being only one among others, not some special snowflake. In middle school you learn to deal with the bully. All are just steps of nuisance one MUST climb before getting a job, or said person will be devoured by the real world, because no one cares about your feelings in the real world.

So, basically, safe space create people that can't deal with frustrations, and once in the real world, won't be able to be real people, but children with 20-ish years.

[Casey]

If Safe Spaces and places are done correctly, I believe all schools and work places should have them.
I do not care how strong or conditions you are.. there are times life piles up and you feel loss of control and need a safe place to retreat to release it and to cool down, or a place to just bring your mind back to earth to recharge... so you can resume focus, for this reason I vote for Yes for safe places....

[sarnoga]

Save spaces in schools?

Never heard of that before. Sounds like a crock of shit to me. If you want to be different, be different, but don't expect anyone to coddle you, wipe your tears, your nose, or your ass for you. I decided I'd had enough of school at an early age, after all, public schools are mostly bullshit. The are very feeble at providing education. They are an expensive compulsory babysitting service. Public schools create an unacceptable risk for young people. They are forced to go. They are given very little in the way of protections from the administration, faculty, and law enforcement when they are there. They are often searched with no probable cause and little if any due process. Then, after the search turns up something they are not "allowed" to have they are isolated and grilled by school officials and law enforcement until they make incriminating statements.

Very recently there was a teenage boy who, with the help of his inept lawyer, pleaded guilty to the Felony of Unlawful Possession of a Deadly Weapon on School Property because he had a box cutter in his backpack. That was not an isolated incident, or even a new's worthy event. Those types of incidents happen every day in the US of A.

Get in a fight in school and you are likely to be hauled into court. When I was young, both in and out of school, if someone tried to bully me I would ignore them... for awhile. If they didn't wise up and stop I would warn them. If the warning didn't work I would send them crying home to mommy. Although, truth be told, when I was very young, as in elementary school, I usually skipped right to step three.

I am all in favor of people being who they want to be. But this is the real world. In the real world you can be who you want to be and then be ready to stand up for yourself or you can conform. Most sorry, weaselly, weak, wimp asses conform. Then they get together with others of the same ilk and bully those who don't conform to try to validate to themselves their decision to conform.

It doesn't stop after school, or after work, that is the way the world works, at least in the sick society we have here in the US of A... A standing of course for Asses.

But take heart. Most everywhere you go these days you can be sure that ignorance and stupidity will prevail. That, in spite of, or perhaps because of, our excellent school system and the fact that almost every kid is forced to go.

Having these "safe spaces" sounds indeed like a crock of shit. There are no safe places in schools and never will be. The reason is not because of other students. The reason is because of the schools themselves and the culture that drives them and supports them. They may try to be tolerant at schools these days when a "student" has something other than the standard acceptable sexual orientation or whatever is the latest bs term you want to use to describe it.

But that doesn't matter. The biggest bullies at the school is the school administration and faculty and the government that backs them. The primary purpose of schools is to bully children into conforming to the expectations of the adults who are running the schools. What a crock of shit. Kids in school are not taught to reason and think critically for themselves. They may be taught a few "facts" but the rest is indoctrination. The communists in the former USSR had nothing on us when it comes to indoctrinating children. We are just as good at it as they were.

The US of A will never be a free country that respects and promotes liberty so long as children are forced to go to school to be indoctrinated and conform to the expectations of adults. That method of "education" does not foster the building of citizens who think for themselves and demand that government be accountable and that government power be limited. Children in schools in this country are not treated like people, let alone free people. They are treated as objects to be manipulated. So long as this continues it is no wonder kids in this country so often get to the place they cant take it anymore and resort to extremely violent acts at school. But rather than try to fix the underlying problem, what does government and school officials do, they tighten the screws.

In the course of my lifetime, what I have witnessed in this country convinces me that the school system and the government that supports it, continues to go from bad to worse. Any improvements they have made are purely superficial.

In a great many decades, the only thing I have seen that gives any hope at all that there is even a possibility of change for the good is the current trend of states to ignore the federal government and legalize marijuana. Even that they manage to screw up with excessive regulation.

There is no reason there should be any more laws regulating marijuana than there are regulating garden vegetables. But that would be a topic for another thread.

So, in conclusion, I would have to say that this whole concept of "safe spaces" in the schools sounds like bullshit to me, but since the whole culture behind compulsory public education in this country is just a load of shit that is bent on undermining or preventing the development of a free society, who cares. That issue is the least of the worries when it comes to schools. Safe spaces, dangerous spaces, no spaces at all, it doesn't matter considering what schools are there to do, and are doing. They were doing it when I was a kid and they have gotten worse. I doubt they will ever become what they should be, at least not in my lifetime.

Best regards, and happy learning,

Sarnoga

[sarnoga]

Re-reading my post a see a few typos, but the option to edit must have been removed during my prolonged absence. (good) All the same please try to excuse my typos.

Also, on re-reading and reflection I realized that I should have pointed out the obvious, though on the other hand, if it is really obvious what is the need for pointing it out.

Bullying by students in school is never going to go away in the current state of our schools. Why? Because, what little "students" do learn at school they learn by example. So long as they main activity at school is the institutional bullying of students to force them to conform to the "accepted" expectations of society and adults, students are going to do the same thing, bully. They may not be as sophisticated in their manner of bullying, but they will bully. Sure, they are told not to. But they are being told that by the school that bullys them every day, by the school who's very structure is set up as systematic bullying of students. And there is the school, formidable in its huge institutional way, telling all the students, day in and day out, "do what I say, not what I do."

You should expect a different result?

[sarnoga]

no response to me replys? I am disapointed

[nolyte]

Really late to the party here, but there are a few recent posts so I thought I'd weigh in. Also, since this ended up longer than I expected:
TLDR: Safe spaces aren't bad in isolation, but facing things is a necessity for both personal and societal growth, and over protection (in which safe-spaces are one form of many) coddle people into a state of prolonged childhood.

I'm probably a bit of an odd case. I grew up a nerdy white kid in the inner city. I've been the out group, I've been called bad names and beat for being different, so I do get why people might be afraid and want safe spaces. It's not the right thing to do though. If you're afraid of something, face it head on or that fear will just get worse. Being afraid of my community left me home bound, terrified of people, unable to look people in the eye. The cure was to get out, talk to people, and realize they aren't as bad as I'd made them out to be in my mind. That's how therapy deals with any phobia, they force you to go out and deal with it, because sometimes you have to look in the closet to realize there's no monster. For this reason, even if the world was as racist/sexist/homophobic etc. as it's being made out to be, hiding away is only ever going to make things worse.

On the scale of a society, this kind of hiding causes the gap between in groups and out groups to grow, festering hatred. This is part of what is wrong with politics (at least in the US). The left and right have become so distant. They are so stuck in their own bubbles and afraid to bridge that gap that discourse often ends up little more than name-calling and ignorance from both sides. We don't fear what has happened, we fear what could happen. Fear is the apprehension and anxiety of the unknown future, it comes from us taking the worst of our experiences and expecting not only that but worse. If you've ever played a good horror game or watched a good horror film you'd know what I mean; when the monster finally jumps out it's almost a relief, because the expectation that it's there is worse than anything it could actually do. In reality this is a problem though, because if you never see the monster you might start to believe it's as bad as your mind paints it out to be. This causes a downward cycle of hiding in fear and being in fear because you're hiding, and this ends in violence. This is why extremists do what they do, but also why just extending a hand and having a conversation can keep people from committing horrific acts. One of my personal heroes is a black man who brought people out of the KKK just by going up to them and having a conversation. Him asking "how can you hate me if you don't even know me" and having that conversation was enough to change hundreds of minds, but that wouldn't have happened if he was hiding away.

The other big issue is that people can't grow up like that, we're extending the age of childhood by over-protecting people. To use a historical example, just a few hundred years ago it wouldn't be unusual for a teenager to be in the military, even as a higher up who had seen battle. Somewhere along the line we decided that people under 18 were too young to be considered adults, and when we started treating them like children they started acting like children. At 18 they'd leave the house, get a job, and start doing what a 100 years prior we saw people as young as 13-14 doing. We saw them as still children though, that they were barely prepared for adulthood, and so we encouraged college for higher learning. Now people go there, party until their mid 20s, and come out the same as they were in highschool. Eventually you need to kick the chick out the nest so it can learn to fly, but in chasing a safer and kinder world we're increasingly afraid to give people that push. This isn't to say that education is stunting maturity or that safety and kindness aren't worth pursuing, but that things like safe-spaces, treating the loser of a fight as the victim no matter who started it, and other forms of over-protection that are common in education even up into college do. Eventually we have to treat people like adults and give them the push into the real world, or they will stay children forever.

To sum it up, safe spaces aren't by themselves a problem. As a symptom of attempting to over protect people they don't come in isolation though, and taken as a whole it is a problem. We miss the forest for the trees trying to protect specific people, we encourage fear while trying to evade it, we separate people in search of safety to the point they enact violence, and we keep people in a childish and immature state with the same tools we claim to prepare them for adulthood. As they contribute to that I can't call safe spaces good, but that isn't to say they are evil either. As the saying goes, the path to hell is paved with good intentions.

[urquan]

Okay, this has been annoying me for a while so I'm gonna go off I guess.

This post:

this is just part of the normal cycle.
you can compare safe spaces to the rules on stage coaches, no discussing politics or religion, and if you have a bottle, pass it around. they are simply rules to keep the peace so that everyone can focus on the task at hand, in this case learning.
trigger warnings are another one i hear a lot people giving grief about. but if you think back to old movies like "inherit the wind", there would often be a trigger warning before the movie to let you know that some people will be offended by the content of the film. the most interesting thing about this is that the films that had those warnings are now far from shocking.

another older example to think about is the song "anything goes". the values of one generation are continually replaced by the values of later generations. sometimes the pendulum swings one way, sometimes it swings the other.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=17ZWrcL9Dz0

Is the only one that gets it out of all of y'all. As someone who very recently was in college (and is now in grad school) I can toll you 100% that the idea you all have of safe spaces and content warnings is complete baloney. College students are NOT getting coddled out there! There is no such thing as a place where certain points of view are verboten (unless you're a fucking nazi? In which case you can eat asphalt), college students are not being "protected from the big scary world where people might DISAGREE with them", none of that is happening. What IS happening is that professors are being more conscientious and aware of the needs and sensitivities of their students. Let me give an example.

In a Middle Eastern Studies class I took, the professor showed us a large portion of a very good movie - the Battle of Algiers. That movie contains a lot of violence, and especially graphic depictions of terror bombing by both the Algerians and the French. The professor warned us that this would happen, so that people who might be upset by such a thing (or, y'know, survivors of violence for whom such depictions can trigger painful flashbacks or anxiety, like ptsd stuff) could be forewarned, and make the informed decision on whether or not they wanted to watch that. In another class I took (this one was gender studies), we talked about rape. The professor warned us that we were going to talk about sexual violence. There were sexual assault survivors in that room. It is ABSOLUTELY necessary to warn people that you might be talking about something that could cause dangerous levels of anxiety or flashbacks.

We are all aware that out in the world, people will not be sensitive to survivors of trauma, abuse, and violence. Everybody knows and gets that. At the same time, that does not excuse college professors intentionally exposing a student body (which MOST LIKELY contains such survivors) to potentially harmful and upsetting content without a warning. Survivors understand that they're not going to get coddled - that's why the warnings are important. They need to be able to decide for themselves whether or not they can handle the upsetting content. It's just common decency.

Finally, how come everyone thinks that the left is so fragile when really it's right-wingers who can't handle shit? My biology teacher WAS FORBIDDEN FROM SHOWING US HOW TO PUT A CONDOM ON A BANANA during my high school sex ed because some conservative girl's parents complained to the state and got it banned across the whole state of Tennessee. That's bullshit. Why aren't you shooting that sort of stuff down? Food for thought.

[sarnoga]

For christ sake, I never heard of anyone who had to be shown how to put on a condom.

[urquan]

For christ sake, I never heard of anyone who had to be shown how to put on a condom.

You'd be surprised. Some people don't even know which way it unrolls!

[VeryGnawty]

Safe Spaces do cause a problem, but not because of what they are necessarily. Safe spaces cause a problem because they insulate people into a false mindset that they can avoid the harshness of the world, even if temporary. So, safe spaces are very good, but promoting them as being huge and something that should be some big thing or big idea actually causes a problem because you can't make the whole world a safe space, and if you start believing that a safe space can be more than what it actually is you might fall into the delusion of thinking you can make unsafe places safe. Some places you just can't make safe by trying to add a safe space.

Safe Spaces are the opposite side of what everyone told me when I was growing up, which was to "grow a tougher skin" and that kind of thinking causes a problem, too. The problem is that most people don't grow a tough skin until they have experienced enough wrong things and they don't want to put up with the nonsense. I see safe spaces and the "grow a tougher skin" thinking as causing problems but in a reverse way. Safe spaces can actually insulate people too much and they might start thinking too safe and they might go into an area and use the "everything should be a safe space" thinking and the world will tear them a new one. The "grow a tougher skin" thinking causes an inverse problem where people who are tough think that everything can be solved, when in reality a lot of problems require different types of thinking to solve, and a lot of people won't get tougher until they've taken enough nonsense from people that they decide they have to start solving problems themselves.

So, safe spaces are good, but thinking you can make the whole world a safe space can be a very risky way to think. So, believing too much in a safe space can lead one to thinking too safe and taking risks, and people who think that having a tough skin can overcome every problem have an inverse type of wrong thinking where they think that sheer determination and not giving in can solve every problem. Lots of problems actually require thinking about multiple things and coming up with solutions. You can't just dedicate a safe space for everything. You also can't just tough everything out. Sometimes you need cleverness, sometimes teamwork overcomes things, sometimes you need to be wise, sometimes you need to know when to quit.