The world can be, and often is, a violent and destructive place, but it’s especially disconcerting when even safe spaces among your own community cannot bring complete solace.

Safe spaces, the spaces we as marginalized and minority groups create, are places of refuge in which its members can come together and heal. Methods of healing may include sharing hurtful experiences, times of injustice, mental and emotional frustrations, and positive affirmations to lift one another all in an environment free of judgment and doubt.

This judgment, the idea that our pains are actually deserved punishment, and this doubt, the idea that our pains aren’t even real, are two major inflictions that minority groups face in the real world. It prevents us from opening up about who we are and what we’ve experienced, which both are really one in the same.

We develop a thick skin to protect ourselves from the inevitable comment or action by students, professors, strangers or even friends that will see our sexuality, gender, religion or skin color over our actual person. Regardless of impure or innocent intentions, we are reminded that we are always “other.”

This is why we form safe spaces.

But just like places of worship and education have been injured or destroyed by bombings, shootings and stabbings, our safe spaces are often harmed from outside and, yes, even inside the space.

As much I detest disclaimers, I must add one here in case any readers decide to flip to the next article before this one is finished.

My first example of abused safe spaces involves my experience at a particular Black Student Union (BSU) meeting. This account is being told by myself, referencing my own personal feelings and perceptions of the events that transpired. I am not condemning or reproaching BSU, its leadership or its members. I fully support BSU and continue to hold pride for my community at DePaul.

I’ve been a member of Black Student Union since the beginning of my first year at DePaul in 2012. While I’m not as active in the organization as I was my first year, I still appreciate attending meetings where I can vent my frustrations as a black student on campus.

At one meeting in particular, the conversation was centered around safe sex. I was hyperaware of the encroaching commentary that would call out the women in the room. Pessimistic, I know, but rape culture extends beyond age, class and color. All women are tuned to the presence of rape culture and misogyny.

Sure enough, comments began to become more and more directed at women. We should love our bodies, yes, but cover them up out of decency. We should be free to use contraceptives if we wish, yes, but there are certain birth control methods we just shouldn’t use.

Excuse me?

And just like that my safe space had become a display fixture in which I and the rest of the women in the room are mannequins.

I wasn’t the only one that noticed.

The women around me were quick to confront and challenge each disparaging comment.

While I admired their strength, I couldn’t shake how sick I felt. This was a space for all of us. Why did we have to sit here on edge? Why did we have to fear these comments?

As black students on a predominantly white campus (world), we are extremely practiced in, at best, walking on eggshells and, at worst, fearing for our lives, but that’s why we created this space.

Despite the male presence, we all still uphold the expectation that while social evils like rape culture will be discussed, they will not be promoted within the space.

I didn’t know these particular men personally, but I don’t doubt that their intentions were good. They were (in my hopes) only attempting to lookout for the sisters, but good intentions don’t repair the damage that has been done.

I ran into another instance of good intentions, bad damage on Tumblr just last week.

Another man sought to join a conversation among a group of women. What made this situation particularly severe was that our conversation segued into sharing very private, emotional experiences and frustrations in the dating world as young black women.

A man reblogged the conversation and decided to give us some “advice” about how to keep a man. In just a matter of sentences he was able to compare women to food, men to hunters, and define sluts as women who give up too easily in “the hunt.” His response elicited another man to join the conversation, this time yelling at one woman for calling the first male commenter out. The thread quickly turned from support to hate.

I made the final reblog calling the first man out for not only being completely wrong in his assertion (he straight up said women were food) but that he was wrong for stepping into a space that was not his to begin with.

If someone breaks into your home and you respond with anger and violence, is that really such a surprise? Should we actually pity the intruder?

Of course not. And so I broke down exactly what this thread was for, whom it was for and why he isn’t welcomed.

It was therapeutic, in a way, to finally express how I’ve felt about safe spaces being endangered, but I was still left with questions.

Where do you go when your safe space is no longer safe?

Do you build another one?

What happens when that one, too, is compromised?

Building a safe space is equally important as maintaining one. It takes effort from inside and outside of the community. If you are outside of the safe space, make sure no one does anything to harm it. If you are inside of the safe space, make sure no one feels as threatened as you do in the real world.

All of these men, the ones in particular at the BSU meeting and on this Tumblr post, were clearly upset that no one was taking their advice. They didn’t understand that they were bringing in the very real world harm we were all escaping from. Good intentions, yes, but in actuality they were lecturing us about what we’re doing wrong as women (or food) and putting the responsibility of our problems on our own shoulders. I

f these men were actual allies, as they claim to be, they would have just asked what our pain was and then listened.

Honestly, that’s all any ally can do. Listen and acknowledge that both our pains and our problems are real and we are not to blame. Society already blames women; we don’t need that kind of hazing in our safe spaces.

So stand outside and make sure none of that negativity, harm and erasure gets near us. Or stay inside and make sure none of that negativity, harm and erasure sneaks past the door.

The world is nowhere near decent, but safe spaces are as perfect as our world can get. They deserve active and constant care.