Safe Space

Is America a Rape Culture?

Prior to 2015, few had ever heard of the term “safe space” in school or college campuses. Now, ten years later, they are as common as chalkboards were in schools fifty years ago.

It began in 2015 when students at Brown University created a “safe space” in response to an upcoming debate on “rape culture.” Two feminist authors, Wendy McElroy and Jessica Valenti, presented their views on whether misogyny was inherent in American culture.

Valenti proposed that it was ingrained in American culture, citing the example of the #MeToo movement, which emerged after actress Alyssa Milano urged victims to share their experiences on X, formerly known as Twitter. Thousands shared their story, and the #MeToo movement was born. According to Valenti, chauvinism, gender inequality, and sexual discrimination were rampant in America.

McElroy disagreed; she had been raped herself and cited examples in the Middle East. In some countries, women are forced into marriages, killed over a man’s honor, and when they are raped, it is the woman who is arrested. She said, “I was raped and brutally so … I did not blame society. I did not blame the culture. I blamed the man who raped me.”¹

Birth Of The Safe Space

There is no question that women in countries like Iraq, Iran, and Egypt are considered 2nd class citizens and inherently ‘unsafe’ compared to women in the U.S. For example, in Egypt, it was not until 2018 that women were even allowed to drive and issued driver’s licenses. In 2020, a 14-year-old girl, Romina Ashrafi, was killed by her father because she eloped with an older man, and her father felt her actions “damaged” the family’s honor.²

One of the assertions raised in the 2015 Brown debate was, if some women who had been sexually assaulted believed America was a “rape culture,” their experience would be invalidated by listening to someone tell them America is not a rape culture. Hearing that would be emotionally painful and put them in danger.³ Enter the safe space.

Would hearing that America is not a “rape culture” put someone in danger? Would hearing views counter to yours put you in danger? The word “safety” has been expanded exponentially. If someone with leftist views on homosexuality, transgenderism, and immigration hears someone speak critically on those topics with a conservative opinion, would that place them in danger? Consider this: would those who support Pride Day or LGBTQ rights feel free to speak out in the Middle East compared to the U.S.? Yes, that is a rhetorical question. I am not comparing apples to oranges, but garter snakes to king cobras.

I find it comedic that those who call for, even demand, safe spaces are the same ones making it abundantly clear what they think of the ICE raids that round up illegal immigrants, and President Trump’s policies on inflation, climate change, immigrants, and racism. How do they do that? Protesting loudly and clearly with signs and masks, in-your-face kind of protest, burning of first responders’ vehicles, and other acts of vandalism or violence. Where are the safe spaces?

Physical Safety vs Audible Safety

In their book, The Coddling Of The American Mind, Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt wrote, “Cognitive behavioral therapists treat trauma patients by exposing them to the things they find upsetting (at first in small ways, such as imagining them or looking at pictures), activating their fear, and helping them habituate (grow accustomed) to the stimuli. In fact, the reactivation of anxiety is so important to recovery that some therapists advise their patients to avoid using antianxiety medication while undertaking exposure therapy.”⁴ Richard McNally, a psychologist and director at Harvard, says avoiding triggers is a symptom of PTSD, not a treatment for it.

What is safe about this world? There is no such thing as a ‘safe space.’ Every time we drive to the store, we are taking a risk. Years ago, a local pastor and his wife were killed in a car accident. Every time we step outside our home, we take a risk. Just go to YouTube and search for ‘accidents’ and you will have an endless list of calamities people have suffered. I recall stepping out of my house years ago, and a rattlesnake was on the steps 12 inches from the door. Physical safety can’t be guaranteed at work, at our schools, or even at home. Just within our own homes, almost 50,000 people die each year from slips or falls. If we can’t guarantee physical safety, how could we possibly guarantee verbal or spoken safety?

When I was in elementary school fifty years ago, we had school nurses for some of the more serious cuts, scrapes, and the occasional broken bone. Those have been replaced with mental health advisors, social clinical workers, mindfulness therapists, and Zen den counselors. Times have changed, and not for the better.

What Is Hate Speech?

Unfortunately, enforcing verbal safety is exactly what they are trying to do in Europe. In a recent episode of the Morning Wire, Jeremy Tedesco from the Alliance Defending Freedom explains the European Union’s Digital Services Act, which affects tens of millions of Americans. Tedesco says the Digital Services Act is,”…a blueprint for total narrative control in the digital age. What it does is takes the EU’s draconian speech standards and imposes it on Americans, and everybody in the world really, by threatening big American platforms and search engines with literally billions in fines if they fail to censor speech that the EU deems to be hate speech or disinformation.”⁵

How do you define hate speech? Who decides what is misinformation? Just a few years ago, people were banned and locked out of social media platforms, publicly shamed for claiming COVID came from a Wuhan lab in China, and having reservations about the COVID vaccines. Now, just a few years later, we find there is truth behind the claims and concerns.

President Barack Obama’s green jobs advisor, Van Jones, addressed this claim that words equate to danger in a lecture at the University of Chicago’s Institute for Politics. Jones wrote, “There are two ideas about safe spaces: One is a very good idea and one is a terrible idea. The idea of being physically safe on campus – not being subjected to sexual harassment and physical abuse, or being targeted specifically, personally, for some kind of hate speech – ‘you are an n-word,’ or whatever – I am perfectly fine with that. But there’s another view that is now I think ascendant, which I think is just a horrible view, which is that ‘I need to be safe ideologically. I need to be safe emotionally. I just need to feel good all the time, and if someone says something that I don’t like, that’s a problem for everybody else…'”⁶ A fool takes no pleasure in understanding, but only in expressing his opinion. Proverbs 18:2

Constructive Disagreements

This 4th of July, my wife played The old classic song by Toby Keith, which he wrote after 911. Keith penned these words, “When we see old glory flying there’s a lot of men dead so we can sleep in peace at night when we lay down our head.” The men who have died defending our country did not have in mind the idea of keeping Americans safe from words, but safe from dictators, tyrants, or oppressors.

Indeed, every time we watch the news, listen to the radio, get on social media, or read the local newspaper, we encounter opinions we disagree with. Children and students these days need to learn how to take and give constructive criticism without feeling unsafe. Learning how to disagree with someone productively is an essential life skill.

Abigail Shrier researched the current Generation and begins her book, Bad Therapy Why The Kids Aren’t Growing Up with, “Schools, especially, jumped at the opportunity to adopt a therapeutic approach to education and announced themselves our ‘partners’ in childrearing. School mental health staffs expanded: more psychologists, more counselors, more social workers. The new regime would diagnose and accommodate, not punish or reward… Instead, with unprecedented help from mental health experts, we have raised the loneliest, most anxious, depressed, pessimistic, helpless, and fearful generation on record.”⁷

Adam Grant, a psychologist, wrote down four rules in an opinion piece for the New York Times. How to have productive, safe, and informative disagreements.

• Frame it as a debate, rather than a conflict
• Argue as if you are right, but listen as if you’re wrong (and be willing to change your mind)
• Make the most respectful interpretation of the other person’s perspective.
• Acknowledge where you agree with your critics and what you’ve learned from them.

The Wisdom In Coping

You may not agree with someone who believes in open borders, climate change, outlawing abortion, guns, or the death penalty, but if you allow someone to be the arbiter of speech, as the EU is doing with the Digital Services Act, then you have a referee who also has an opinion that may limit or entirely cancel your voice.

John Senior, a professor at Kansas University, believed that true learning ended “in wisdom” but began “in wonder.” Applying this principle to science, for example, he said that it was “criminal to teach astronomy to someone who has never looked at the stars.”⁸

Plugging your ears and humming does not create a safe space. If your child is terrified of dogs, you slowly and gently expose them to dogs, maybe even starting with pictures. Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, CBT uses ‘exposure therapy’ to help patients cope with things that make them feel uncomfortable. Unfortunately, starting at a young age, school therapists or counselors do the opposite. Shrier writes, “[They] solidify a child’s worry through affirmation and accommodation. They intervene with the teacher, ostensibly on a child’s behalf, to lighten the homework load or to provide tailored assignments if the standard curriculum seems to cause too much stress.”⁹

Too many adults affirm the child’s fears and make accommodations so they don’t have to face them. Most of the school counselors I know realize the goal is for students to work themselves out of the accommodations provided, but not all. I have seen it first hand time and time again, parents can be the worst offenders. They tend to focus on the grade, rather than the emotional growth of the child. Fifteen years later, when these students are in college, they opt to shut down opposing viewpoints, labeling them as hate speech, racist, or intolerant, and then cancel those they disagree with. What follows is a generation that is unwilling to listen to both sides of an argument or consider a compromise.

It isn’t that they can’t see the solution. It is that they can’t see the problem. G.K. Chesterton

The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom, and knowledge of the Holy One is understanding. Proverbs 9:10

Safe Space © 2025 by James William Glazier is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International