The term “safe space” dates to the late twentieth century women's movement, but it has since been used in many different contexts.
In this paper, we review and analyze historical and contemporary “safe spaces”. These include “separatist” safe spaces in women's, anti-racist, and feminist communities, “inclusive” safe space classrooms, and safe spaces in which (non-human) objects are central. We argue that safe spaces should be understood not through static and acontextual notions of “safe” or “unsafe”, but rather through the relational work of cultivating them. Such an understanding reveals several tendencies. Namely, safe spaces are inherently paradoxical. Cultivating them includes foregrounding social differences and binaries (safe–unsafe, inclusive–exclusive) as well as recognizing the porosity of such binaries. Renegotiating these binaries is necessarily incomplete; a safe space is never completely safe. Even so, we encourage the critical cultivation of safe space as a site for negotiating difference and challenging oppression.
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COLLECTIVE, The Roestone, 2014. Safe Space: Towards a Reconceptualization. Antipode. 2014. Vol. 46, no. 5, p. 1346–1365. DOI 10.1111/anti.12089.
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Iconic safe space triangle (source: Wikimedia Commons)
An inverted pink triangle, surrounded by a green circle symbolising universal acceptance, to indicate alliance with gay rights and spaces free from homophobia. This symbol was introduced at anti-homophobia workshops from the Gay & Lesbian Urban Explorers in 1989. wikipedia 
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