What Is Safety?

While we work out the details of the relaunch, some relevant thoughts in the wake of the election results, and the state of the country in general.

What does “safe” mean to you? Do you think about it primarily in physical terms? Is it a general feeling of privacy and autonomy? How do you make sure that you feel safe? Do you depend on other people or structures to feel safe, or is it more based on your own knowledge and abilities? Does your feeling of safety depend on some idea of justice? And if so, what does that mean, and what are your limits? Does safety mean absolving yourself of any responsibility in the process and expecting another person to keep you safe?

At the end of the day, safety is a complicated web made up of a series of choices you make about your risk tolerance, the way the individuals involved react under pressure, and dumb luck. The only part you can control is regularly checking in with yourself to see if your actions are putting you or somebody else in danger. That can be broken up into infinite subtasks, but at the end of the day, you can only control how you contribute to the situation. 

The problem with this, is that most people never want to hear that there isn’t a way to just make a problem with another person stop. If somebody disagrees with you, you can’t force them to change their opinion, or even leave you alone. And neither can whatever administrative/security/law enforcement/authority figure unless the person you disagree with is breaking clearly stated rules. So that’s your first choice - do you need to respond? With the exception of outlier cases, non-engagement is the fastest way to end the situation. Can you just walk away from it? And I think a critical thing to ask yourself honestly is, are you in danger? With the important caveat that just because something is inconvenient, or makes you angry, it is not necessarily the same thing as being in danger.

Feeling unsafe is valid, and something that should be addressed, but it isn’t necessarily the same as being unsafe. So much of the world we live in right now is about understanding and coming to terms with the risk that we exist with every day. Contextualizing it, respecting it, but also not giving it more power than it deserves. Kind of how the first time you hurt yourself, you are more afraid of hurting yourself than the actual injury itself. Part of that means understanding where the risk that you are personally encountering falls on the spectrum of overall viability. All risk is scary at first glance, but not all risk is equal. A person calling you a slur is not the same as a person threatening your life. A single incident of a person threatening your life is not the same as getting regular threats from the same individual. And none of those things are the same as being physically assaulted. A single assault is not the same as habitual abuse, and so on. This isn’t said to diminish any one of those things, simply to understand scope, respect scale, and establish the spectrum of threats.

A lot of what I do these days is help people the first time they are dealing with a stalking or online harassment incident. Sometimes it is people’s first experience dealing with targeted hate. It’s scary, they don’t know what to expect, they don’t know how far it goes, and they don’t know where, or if it will end. A large part of my job is to demystify that. The good news is that most of it doesn’t go anywhere and that it is primarily done to intimidate or silence you, or goad you into acting in a way that can be exploited on social media. The bad news is that there isn’t a lot that can be done about it beyond tracking it, documenting it, and saving it until you can use it to build a case if something more serious happens.

Unfortunately, the way most people’s brains work, there is usually the initial response, which is hypervigilance, to see all threats as imminent and equally terrifying, or the exhausted dissociated response, which is to become numb and not take any of them very seriously. The responsible reality is somewhere in the middle. It’s like the balance you need to strike between maintaining your strength and flexibility, but in relation to safety. Staying aware of threats, assessing them, cataloging them, tracking the trends to be aware of what seems to be a persistent or rising problem, and adjusting your caution level, alerting others, and asking for assistance accordingly when the threat level becomes more extreme. 

In a normal world, this is not something people who are just living their lives should have to deal with. But in a time where everything is online, privacy doesn’t really exist, and so many aspects of individuality can be a flashpoint for targeted hate in any given context, it is a reality that most people are having to come to terms with. If you want to interact with other people, and exist online, this is part of your new self care regimen. It’s your online self defense. You don’t leave your drink unattended at a bar, you don’t leave too much of your personal information online, you never post pictures of the front of your house. You walk to your car or house with your keys in your hand, you try not to use your full name online, do not bother debating fascists, they will turn it into a meme.

Once you experience being targeted, people need to ask themselves very honestly, “What do I expect to come from this?” The legal avenues for justice are slow moving, and often weighted in favor of whoever has the most money behind them to pay for lawyers. Taking an issue to the court of public opinion - either personally online, or through the media - can be helpful in terms of warning the wider community, but also comes with the risk of attracting other people that might target you, and the potential for public missteps that could be turned against you. The simultaneously liberating and infuriating reality is that often, there is very little you can do besides collect information towards a more substantial case or story, generally keep your eyes on your own paper, and make some deliberate decisions about what your risk tolerance is and the choices you make around that.

Part of recontextualizing your headspace around safety is being real about the viability of any given risk. But also, people need to recognize the unnecessary risks they take every day, that they write off because they are so mundane. The mundane things are the most likely to endanger you. It’s not as sexy of a story, and it’s not the answer anybody wants, but it is the world we currently live in.