my safe space essay

On Safety and Safe Spaces

By  Matthew Pratt Guterl

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I teach at an elite Ivy League university, where, for several years now, debates over free speech, racial justice and diversification have been explosive. Last year was, in a word, rough. Following several high profile police shootings, there were protests and hunger strikes and sit-ins nationally, and our own campus was turned upside down by two incendiary opinion pieces in the student newspaper and a disturbing, physical encounter between a visiting student and the campus police. As an institution, we struggled, worked hard, changed some things right away, and made some big claims and promises about our future. 

In just a few days, our students will return to the classrooms. They will expect an engaged faculty and will want new classes addressing contemporary social and political issues. Together, we will be looking to solve problems. At times, too, they will be hoping for some kind genuflection to their humanity, their youth and the dark, merciless world in which we live. In short, they will be looking for exactly the sort of “safe space” that other faculty members at other universities -- like the dean of students at the University of Chicago -- have closed off as merely self-serving “retreats” for the weak-kneed. 

I hope that at the end of the day, Chicago’s cold, Darwinian approach will be an outlier nationally -- and that students almost everywhere will be received this academic year more graciously, more thoughtfully and more constructively than those who imagine such things. Because, in the end, we will all need each other to do the work that must be done. And that work is not some sort of Thunderdome, in which two ideas do battle until one survives. This is a crucial moment for higher education, and the brisk response from Chicago reveals the stakes clearly. We -- faculty members, students, administrators and our publics -- are actually on the verge of making significantly more comprehensive adjustments to the mission of higher education than were made previously.  We should embrace those more dynamic, more revolutionary changes and drive them home.

One of the big, challenging reforms is the notion of a “safe space” for our students, a concept that is both old and new and nearly impossible to define. It can mean a single room on a campus, the floor of a building or an entire center or department. It can refer to the presence of trained counselors, the support of friends and allies, or the absence of hurtful material. Our students deserve such spaces on a campus because the absence of such spaces is counter to the very mission of higher education.

In surveying the groundwork, however, not everyone thinks higher education is on the right track, especially when attention turns to race. The dean at the University of Chicago is not alone. Critics dismiss protesting students as spoiled, “self-infantilizing,” pampered brats , and they imagine that, by responding to their complaints and taking them seriously, universities are abrogating their mission to foster an unregulated exchange of ideas. A vocal handful of faculty members worry that their free speech -- or, on a lower frequency, their academic freedom -- is under siege. Videos of student’s screaming at white faculty members and administrators circulate on right-wing blogs and websites as proof. Some donors, as The New York Times reports , complain that universities are now spending too much money on diversity, leading to a noticeable downward turn in giving this past year.

In this context, “safe space” is too easily parodied – as the Onion did, with its headline from July of 2015, “Parents Dedicate Safe Space on Campus in Honor of Daughter Who Felt Weird in Class Once.” Too easily parodied -- and too easily undone, as well, as the recent decision by Michigan State University to open a “women’s only” space to men reveals. The solution to our student’s weakness, so many critics all too often suggest, is bold, direct, repeated engagement with ideas that civil society has already deemed noxious, hateful and politically dangerous.

Setting aside the parodies and the critiques, there is a sound reason to support a broader, more comprehensive notion of safety, something that might be pushed to the very boundaries of our campuses: the world is sometimes breathtakingly, violently, terrifyingly precarious for precisely the sorts of students whom we are now actively recruiting.

Colleges and universities are, pop culture tells us repeatedly, supposed to be walled off. No wonder, then, that students see higher education institutions as both a staging ground for their protests and as a possible idyll. No wonder, too, that they keenly sense the distance between what was promised in glossy brochures -- a removed experience, a free space for serious conversation -- and what was delivered in the strange environs of a new town or city far from home -- more of the same social and political pressures, more of the same violence, whether discursive or physical. Indeed, what they read in the words of those who champion “free speech” -- which almost always seems to mean the freedom to speak of things consistently defined as backward or troubling -- is that many would like a very different “safe space,” in which one can say racist or sexist things without consequence.

The insistent request for administrators and faculty members to “do something”-- to rename a building, to remove a mural, to replace a mascot, to disarm the campus police, to disinvite a speaker -- is a plea to create the conditions where this promised distance was once again possible, to clear cut a firebreak between the dystopian “real world” and the contemplative, even monkish world of study. But it is also to acknowledge a real world in which these icons have led violent charges, to recognize a physical world in which there are disenfranchised people of color for whom these things are reminders of real pain. To paraphrase one university president, students need safe spaces in order to acquire the dangerous knowledge they need.

The safety we want -- that campus-wide, reflective, self-aware distance from the grit of the everyday -- is going to be hard to manufacture. As anyone with a smartphone knows, new digital technologies and a proliferation of social media outlets have allowed the enduring, everyday violence of racism to be broadcast, to be felt by so many all at once, in ways that are powerful. Those same technologies have also fostered new social connections, creating the movements and communities that mount these critiques. Social media lets us see absence, too.

The development, in the decades since the Civil Rights Movement, of antiseptic, color-blind institutional racism means, as well, that while we see racism online -- and in person -- we see far less justice than we once did. Vigilante shooters go unpunished. Mass incarceration is further entrenched. Military technologies, distributed to the police, get ever more sophisticated and punitive. In mounting their protests, students are driven by a sober-minded concern about the conditions of everyday life because they have been living in the midst of everything, touched personally or emotionally by violence or poverty or loss or disenfranchisement. These days, it seems, one simply cannot escape the blaring headlines and vivid color photos that program algorithms put in your feed.

Maybe the extraordinary penetration of digital media into our campuses requires us to work harder at being more mindful in other ways, in other forms of engagement. Maybe it puts more of a burden on us to be kind, to be gentle, to be supportive. Maybe it should force us to understand, more broadly, the lived experiences of our students before they arrive. Maybe, finally, it should mean that when we, as members of a community, invoke our right to “free speech,” we don’t do so in defense of obnoxious, cruel and broken-down ideas. At the very least, we should proactively work to create such spaces before things go awry.

“Safe space” seems like a pretty rarified concept, of course. And, to some, it reads as an expression of privilege . I admit that absolute safety is an impossible construct, because learning requires risk. But not all risks are equal, and there is a difference between a campus shuttle to get around a city and a campus commitment to the broadest possible notion of safety. My colleagues and friends teaching in Texas are strategizing, right this second, about how to teach with a gun in the classroom or how to discuss a “grade” with a student who might be packing. Mothers and fathers sending their daughters off to college are rightly concerned about rape and sexual violence. Parents of color are worried that their children might get profiled, arrested, roughed up or much, much worse. I am concerned, as a faculty member, as a parent, and as a human being about teaching a class on race and racism knowing that every single student in the room has seen Eric Garner, Alton Sterling and too many others die in vivid Technicolor. Concerned, too, that at any moment a news alert might pop up on our phones about the next disaster.

Faculty members and administrators thus have a calling to act. Without delay. To remove that racist mural and relocate it to a museum. To rename that building and historicize the old name. ( If you have to raise the money to do it, there are examples where that has worked ). To practice discernment in scheduling talks or speakers, so that we don’t bring that bigot, thug or provocateur to the campus just to win a news cycle or to get your think tank in the paper. To prioritize ideas and visitors who are actively, constructively engaged in solving (and not making ) social problems. To recommit to the historic, ancient role of the university as a site of knowledge production and to do what must be done to build, in the age of social media, a campus that feels removed and distant, yet also grounded and aware.

It is not our job to make intellectual noise -- a raucous debate, a clashing set of ideas, a hurtful back-and-forth -- just because we can. It is our job, as stewards of the very idea of the university, to think hard, at some distance, about big problems and to provide material solutions. After all, every unread essay or delayed book has consequences, every missing word defers a social change, and every abbreviated paper or poorly-written research project stalls those solutions. The crucial thing is to get ahead of the curve: to read the campus as it presently exists, to think in explicitly utopian terms about what it might look like, and to move towards this new ideal well in advance of some dramatic event or hurtful misdeed.

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Trigger Warnings, Safe Spaces and Free Speech, Too

By Sophie Downes

• Sept. 10, 2016

I didn’t get the University of Chicago welcome letter that made the rounds on the internet earlier this summer. I’m a senior this year, and the message from Jay Ellison, the dean of undergraduate students, was for the incoming class: Don’t expect trigger warnings or safe spaces here. The university, he said, was committed to free expression and would not shield students from ideas they disagreed with or found offensive.

The implication was that students who support trigger warnings and safe spaces are narrow-minded, oversensitive and opposed to dialogue. The letter betrayed a fundamental misunderstanding of what the terms “trigger warnings” and “safe spaces” mean, and came across as an embarrassing attempt to deflect attention from serious issues on campus.

A trigger warning is pretty simple: It consists of a professor’s saying in class, “The reading for this week includes a graphic description of sexual assault,” or a note on a syllabus that reads, “This course deals with sensitive material that may be difficult for some students.”

A safe space is an area on campus where students — especially but not limited to those who have endured trauma or feel marginalized — can feel comfortable talking about their experiences. This might be the Office of Multicultural Student Affairs or it could be Hillel House, but in essence, it’s a place for support and community.

This spring, I was in a seminar that dealt with gender, sexuality and disability. Some of the course reading touched on disturbing subjects, including sexual violence and child abuse. The instructor told us that we could reach out to her if we had difficulty with the class materials, and that she’d do everything she could to make it easier for us to participate. She included a statement to this effect on the syllabus and repeated it briefly at the beginning of each class. Nobody sought to “retreat from ideas and perspectives at odds with their own,” as Dean Ellison put it in the letter, nor did these measures hinder discussion or disagreement, both of which were abundant.

Of course, not every class calls out for trigger warnings — I’ve never heard of them for an economics course. Likewise, plenty of students will never need to visit a safe space. But for those who do, support systems can be a lifeline in the tumultuous environment of college, and are important precisely because they encourage a free exchange of ideas.

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• Our Mission

Cultivating the Classroom as a Safe Space

Middle and high school teachers can create an environment that supports inclusion and gives students space to make mistakes as they learn.

Think about it: the isolation of the pandemic, rising tensions at home, conflicts over mask mandates and debates and fights over whether they should be implemented, sickness and/or fear of sickness and death, racist incidents in the news, and increased bullying attacks on Muslims in the wake of the 20th anniversary of 9/11. Students have returned to school in a charged environment, and many of them are struggling to process the events of the past year. As a teacher, you can help by ensuring that your classroom is a safe space designed to meet students’ academic and emotional needs.

Safe spaces are environments where students feel the freedom to make mistakes without lasting judgment or ridicule and where they can engage in critical, honest, civil, and challenging discussions about sensitive topics. As an educator, you want your students to feel comfortable approaching difficult subjects in your classroom.

How You Can Cultivate a Safe Learning Environment

Crafting (or revising) your syllabus:  Include a statement of diversity that indicates your intent to foster a diverse learning environment; this will help set the tone right away. You can choose a diverse reading list with authors of different ethnicities and plan to invite a wide range of professionals from different backgrounds into your classroom; this normalizes the idea that we can learn from people who don’t look like us (or who do look like us in some instances).

Remember to incorporate projects in your syllabus that celebrate different identities and cultures, encouraging students to embrace differences . In any case, consider granting extensions. Many students are experiencing emotional exhaustion and would benefit from extra compassion and understanding from you to help them process their grief surrounding current events in the media.

Setting up your classroom and discussion procedures: When setting up your classroom, make sure that it reflects the diverse learning environment you championed in the syllabus: Choose images that show a wide range of ethnicities in different roles; showcase Asian astronauts, Black doctors, and Latino professionals, for example, and don’t rely on stereotypical imagery when you hang posters on your walls. Include differently abled people in classroom presentations and, if you can, invite a leader with a disability in your community to visit your classroom. 

Consider alternatives to classroom discussions, such as online discussion groups, where students don’t feel singled out and have a measure of anonymity to express their opinions. You may not even need to moderate this discourse or can do so in a limited capacity.

Show respect:  Pronounce your students’ names correctly—it’s one of the many strategies to help students feel at home at school . It may seem like a tiny step, but when you know how to pronounce your students’ names, it makes them feel included. This models the importance of correct pronunciation and inclusion. Don’t be afraid to ask your students more than once to pronounce their names for you. HowToPronounce is a great tool for educators to use when working to learn to pronounce students’ names correctly.

Respect also means not relying on students to do the emotional labor of reacting to current events in class discussions. Your Black, Latino, and Asian students don’t have to be representatives of their race. Your Muslim students don’t have to be representatives of their religion. Don’t put them on the spot. They are students who might be struggling to understand and process traumatic events. Asking them to react to events in the media can be retraumatizing and insensitive. Listen to them instead.

If a student tells you they are being bullied, listen to them and intervene by confronting the bully privately. Then, follow up with addressing the matter with the class by talking about bullying and discrimination. Work together to establish classroom rules for the entire class .

Teach micro-affirmations to validate your students:  Micro-affirmations start with active listening . In order to establish yourself as a safe sounding board for your students, maintain eye contact with them and show them body language that indicates you are engaged with them, such as nodding. Summarize what the student is telling you. Ask questions to make sure that you understand, and then affirm their experience by using a validating statement such as “I appreciate that this might be frustrating for you.” You can use these statements to guide them toward developing a productive stance on their experience.

Remember, however, that micro-affirmations can be used in any interaction, not just in instances when your students are struggling with an issue. They also work when students are sharing positive experiences; they help create a sense of trust and belonging.

Even if you don’t agree with what the student is telling you, you can affirm their experience, validate their emotions , and offer to help them find productive solutions. Don’t treat subjects like bullying and racism as if they are taboo. Instead, work to dismantle these behaviors in your classroom by directly and openly confronting them when they occur. This might mean confronting your own biases (and working to correct them) or raising the student’s issue to school administration, if necessary. Help break the cycle by taking these subjects seriously and doing the work to protect your students. Follow through: Do not back down on these issues—you are carrying a responsibility for keeping students safe.

Creating a safe space for students doesn’t have to be difficult. It can be something you build into each day’s activities. Simply going in with the mindset that you are offering a diverse and enriching atmosphere is a good start.

I’ve never had a student ask for a safe space. Here’s what they have asked for.

Panic about students and “safe spaces” is completely misguided.

by Jonathan W. Wilson

You know Americans have heard of a thing when it shows up in a sitcom.

Two years ago, on ABC’s Last Man Standing , Tim Allen played a self-made sporting goods executive who was writing a commencement address for a business college. Professors banned his speech for microaggressions . He scoffed that this was “the latest liberal attack on free speech” in “one of those safe spaces.” They wanted to protect students “from what, ideas ?”

My aunt praised the episode on Facebook, marveling that she “can’t believe they’ve left him on this long,” given how often Tim Allen “speaks his (conservative) mind.” But as a university instructor who teaches American and world history, I wondered how to explain why I found the episode strange.

If you believe what you hear, American colleges are suffocating under political correctness. In the name of “safety,” liberals are silencing campus debate. Besides microaggressions and safe spaces, the chief villains in this tale are trigger warnings , which supposedly let students avoid hearing any uncomfortable ideas.

Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt wrote a whole book about it in The Coddling of the American Mind, associating trigger warnings with rampant “safetyism,” along with empty playgrounds and peanut-free schools. Young Americans, they argue, are being trained for lives of anxiety and overreaction, even in college.

I have taught history courses in US universities for about a decade. I do think some educators are overprotective. But in general, the critics do not describe the higher education system — or the students — I know. And the attacks on trigger warnings often trivialize the very real trauma that some students have experienced.

The real struggles of college students

I teach at private universities, so my students are relatively privileged — though they do not attend the kind of elite college, like Oberlin or Columbia, that furnishes most of the critics’ anecdotes about political correctness. Yet when studying difficult topics, as they routinely do, my students have never asked for a trigger warning or a safe space. Neither have my employers.

But students do talk to me. The closest they came to requesting a trigger warning was the time a student wrote a note to explain that a topic from that day’s class — clergy sexual abuse — might be difficult for her to discuss because she had experienced childhood abuse by a minister and was just beginning to come to terms with her memories. Most of the time, though, students come to me later to say, apologetically, why mental health struggles at home make it difficult to come to campus or keep up with the college workload, and ask how to make up lost ground.

I had a military veteran make sure I understood why he needed a seat in a far corner, where he could see the door. Another veteran missed class for a court date — apparently a domestic violence charge. He was absent a lot.

One student told me, late in the semester, that her father had been murdered just days before classes began. She happened to miss our next lesson, which covered World War II, saving me the trouble of deciding whether to skip some of the images of dead bodies I was going to show from the Holocaust. Another student started missing class, then showed up at my office. Shaking, she whispered that she had been raped. Shame was keeping her away from campus.

One student, an eager freshman, suddenly stopped participating in class, as if someone had switched off a light. A friend in her dorm had died by suicide. Another, a senior who had grown up near our campus, struggled to stay awake in class. When his grades started to slip, he came to me and told me he was desperate to pass: he needed to get his degree and get away from his hometown, where nine people from his high school had overdosed.

There was the young student who wrote an apology on her late homework, hoping I would still accept it. She was taking care of her mother, just out of rehab. Another student apologized for being distracted in class; she had a campus stalker.

There was the grandmother who called me, sobbing, after she forgot to complete an exam — a result of cancer treatment. She was earning a degree in the time she had left. Could she come back to finish the test?

The student who was coming to terms with her childhood abuse by a clergy member eventually dropped the course.

None of them asked for a trigger warning. None asked for a safe space. If they had, they would not have been avoiding ideas. All my students have ever requested is a way to keep engaging with the content — all the content — of my courses, in spite of setbacks. In other words, they want to finish the work they started.

Content warnings are uncommon and do not prevent discussion

I do not use the term “trigger warning”in my work. It has too much baggage, and nobody seems to agree about its meaning.

But when I show my students a gruesome photograph, I may provide — thinking of my veterans — a simple heads-up, like, “The next slide shows dead soldiers.” I am inconsistent about this. Sometimes I let students know when I am about to discuss sexual violence in a lecture; often, I forget. Mostly, I try to demonstrate respect, including respect for students with different ideological viewpoints. I’m sure my students have sometimes been offended, but I have never avoided a topic or debate.

Is my experience unusual? In 2015, an unscientific survey of literature and art professors found that only 12 percent gave regular trigger warnings, and 45 percent opposed them. In 2016, NPR asked 829 professors in various fields; barely half had ever given a trigger warning, and only 3.4 percent had ever been asked. The American Association of University Professors opposes trigger warnings. Psychology instructors generally oppose them too.

Just to check, I surveyed my friends. Have undergraduates ever asked them for a trigger warning or a safe space, in those words? Only four said yes, and if I know them, they never avoid difficult topics. Twenty-five of my academic friends, at schools ranging from community colleges to major research universities, said no, never.

One friend did hear complaints from a class after she showed them a harrowing documentary about 9/11 without telling them what to expect. Oddly enough, the same students had all agreed with an earlier assigned text — Lukianoff and Haidt’s critique of trigger warnings.

Colleges are still good places for free speech

Whether the debate over trigger warnings involves criticism within the academy or attacks from outside, it has contributed to popular clichés and ideological grudges that have little to do with what most students learn. Its stereotypes about students are mostly slander. Worse still, it promotes cynicism and closes minds.

Listening to some critics, you might never know that colleges usually make students more open to different views, including conservative views, and more supportive of free speech . You might never know that the vast majority of professors , liberals as well as conservatives, defend the free exchange of ideas on campus. Or that having a college education is a weaker predictor of an American’s political views than her race, gender, age, or religion are. College is opening minds, not closing them.

It’s time to calm the public panic about student fragility. American undergraduates are adults facing problems courageously. They show intellectual curiosity and greater political independence of mind than the US public in general. By and large, their professors are trying to understand and honor their personal struggles in a world without neat solutions.

Jonathan W. Wilson, PhD, is an adjunct professor of history at Marywood University and the University of Scranton. He previously taught at La Salle University and Syracuse University. The opinions expressed here are his own.

First Person is Vox’s home for compelling, provocative narrative essays. Do you have a story to share? Read our submission guidelines , and pitch us at [email protected] .

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Safe Spaces, Brave Spaces

Diversity and Free Expression in Education

by John Palfrey

Foreword by Alberto Ibargüen

ISBN: 9780262535960

Pub date: August 28, 2018

• Publisher: The MIT Press

192 pp. , 5 x 8 in , 1 b&w illus.

ISBN: 9780262343671

Pub date: October 6, 2017

ISBN: 9780262037143

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• Published: October 2017
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• Description
• Open Access

How the essential democratic values of diversity and free expression can coexist on campus.

Safe spaces, trigger warnings, microaggressions, the disinvitation of speakers, demands to rename campus landmarks—debate over these issues began in lecture halls and on college quads but ended up on op-ed pages in the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal , on cable news, and on social media. Some of these critiques had merit, but others took a series of cheap shots at “crybullies” who needed to be coddled and protected from the real world. Few questioned the assumption that colleges must choose between free expression and diversity. In Safe Spaces, Brave Spaces , John Palfrey argues that the essential democratic values of diversity and free expression can, and should, coexist on campus.

Palfrey, currently Head of School at Phillips Academy, Andover, and formerly Professor and Vice Dean at Harvard Law School, writes that free expression and diversity are more compatible than opposed. Free expression can serve everyone—even if it has at times been dominated by white, male, Christian, heterosexual, able-bodied citizens. Diversity is about self-expression, learning from one another, and working together across differences; it can encompass academic freedom without condoning hate speech.

Palfrey proposes an innovative way to support both diversity and free expression on campus: creating safe spaces and brave spaces. In safe spaces, students can explore ideas and express themselves with without feeling marginalized. In brave spaces—classrooms, lecture halls, public forums—the search for knowledge is paramount, even if some discussions may make certain students uncomfortable. The strength of our democracy, says Palfrey, depends on a commitment to upholding both diversity and free expression, especially when it is hardest to do so.

John Palfrey is President of the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation. Before that, he was Head of the Phillips Andover Academy and a Professor at Havard Law School. Palfrey is the author of books including Safe Spaces, Brave Spaces: Diversity and Free Expression in Education , published by the MIT Press, the MIT Press Essential Knowledge volume Intellectual Property Strategy , and the coauthor with Urs Gasser of Born Digital: How Children Grow Up in a Digital Age .

Safe Spaces, Brave Spaces is a must read for faculty and administrators, but also for students, parents, and the wider public. Grounded in history, attuned to new technologies, honest about the challenges of an increasingly diverse society, Safe Spaces, Brave Spaces charts a path forward that is realistic, but ultimately hopeful. Building inclusive educational institutions that honor freedom of expression and create an environment for learning and growth is the path forward to a healthy and inclusive democracy. Jonathan Fanton, President, American Academy of Arts and Sciences; author of The University and Civil Society

This is a sophisticated exploration of two crucial values—diversity and free expression—and a cogent, persuasive argument that the two are inextricably intertwined. Palfrey's sketch of a society in which citizens enjoy liberty and equality in equal measure is appealing and even inspiring. Jameel Jaffer, Executive Director, Knight First Amendment Institute, Columbia University; former Deputy Legal Director, ACLU

Safe Spaces, Brave Spaces is a useful, balanced summary of some of the most contentious issues on college campuses in the United States today. Recognizing the opportunity and the responsibility that learning communities have to educate about the value of diversity, inclusion, equity, and freedom of expression, the author takes on the challenge of this topic with courage, empathy, and a call to action for all of us to understand what is really at stake for how we educate citizens for democracy. I recommend it to leaders and scholars both in and outside of the academy who genuinely want to honor both sides of the debate and who want to be part of the urgent change needed for a more just society. Marilyn Sanders Mobley, Vice President, Office for Inclusion, Diversity and Equal Opportunity, Case Western Reserve University

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Remember 2020? The pandemic, wildfires, racial reckonings and the dangerously divisive presidential elections?

(Just writing that line makes me feel like I should have given you a content warning!)

With all that we were experiencing, 2020 was the year folks around my newsroom started talking about psychological safety . What does it look and feel like? Why is it important? And how do we create more of it on our teams and across departments?

My organization wasn’t an anomaly. I started seeing posts about psychological safety pop up regularly in industry press, Twitter threads and Slack channels. I found plenty of resources for creating more emotionally safe spaces in the workplace. But as the person who bridges newsrooms with communities and focuses on engaging sources and partners in our reporting, I wondered: how do we create these spaces when working with community members?

That’s just what storytelling event guru Megan Finnerty takes on in her essay. She shares a bevy of practical tips for how to operationalize emotional safety in community and public settings.

Creating safer spaces is big work. Like all forms of care, it takes time, attention, curiosity and follow-up. But Megan showcases simple steps that can help you get started. And while her focus is on community storytelling, most takeaways apply to everyday journalism and even breaking-news reporting.

–jesikah maria ross

By Megan Finnerty

Find the full essay here .

The National Center on Safe Supportive Learning Environments describes emotional safety as when someone “feels safe to express emotions, security, and confidence to take risks and feel challenged and excited to try something new.” That looks different for everyone, depending on the medium, the audience or the outcome we seek to create.

Anyone can work toward creating emotional safety anywhere they have agency over the room or in the space. This is a quick look at ways to operationalize emotional safety, whether in-person, virtual, one-time or ongoing.

How do we create emotional safety?

This work requires a commitment to creating a space where expectations are set and met for a specific group of people, at a certain time, in a limited context. Creating emotional safety is a commitment to specificity and place-making through asking questions and making choices designed to meet your invitees’ emotional, social and sometimes spiritual needs.

Why does this matter? What happens when people don’t feel emotionally safe?

At minimum, the people you’re trying to reach will not want to stay in the space you’ve created. And if they stay, they may not want to come back. Beyond that, people may feel taken advantage of, shocked, unprepared or worse — like something was asked of them that they could not provide, or did not want to provide.

How do I create an emotionally safe space? What does that look like?

Creating an emotionally safe space is part of a set of behaviors that make places welcoming, comfortable and suitable for what people are working to accomplish at a given time.

1. Set goals: Know what you’re working to accomplish. Be specific and detailed. Be narrow. Be clear on what you are NOT doing.

For example, we are hosting a live storytelling event featuring everyday community members as curated by the local newsroom. The newsroom is doing this to create empathy and support democracy by encouraging people to gather and see each other as neighbors worth caring about. Community members attend because they want to be entertained and feel a sense of community. Community members tell stories because they have something to share, and they think it will be fun, challenging and essential in their lives in some way. We are not reading essays. We are not doing open mic. We are not performing poetry. We are not featuring slide shows, music, etc.

2. Set expectations: Know when, where and with whom you’re working.

• People’s expectations vary by time of day, venue, nature of event, etc. You expect cursing at a late-night rock concert but not a morning religious service. You expect things to start on time virtually, but within 10 minutes in person.
• People’s expectations begin with the venue. You expect comfort at a big civic theater, but might anticipate something edgy at a black box.
• People’s expectations vary depending on who is organizing something. If civic groups are involved, you might expect professionalism. If something is organized by students or experimental groups, you might expect more risk.
• People’s expectations vary if something has age ranges, dress codes and other signifiers. If children are involved, you might expect something interactive and emotionally safe. If something is black tie, you might expect something with a lot of ceremony and little vulnerability.

3. Manage emotional safety for one group of participants at a time.

Emotional safety for performers or officiants differs from emotional safety for audience members or staff. But usually, you’ll have different groups in the room. Plan for everyone by picking and workshopping ideas for one group at a time.

• Ask yourself what your values are vis à vis this group . For my work with community-based storytellers, some key values are:
• They must be able to return to their jobs, their communities and their families without harming or compromising their relationships.
• They must feel good about the experience, that it makes sense for them personally, professionally and spiritually.
• They must know what they are getting into by participating so we don’t accidentally do harm to them by letting them share their stories.
• They may not do harm to others by sharing their stories.
• What values will be important in your place-making ? The values we have for our storytellers are different values than the ones we have for audience members:
• The audience must know what to expect and feel we’re giving them this.
• The audience must not feel like the storyteller wants something from them other than attention.
• The audience must be open to receiving stories. We need to help them prepare to do this.
• The stories must be universal and able to be received by diverse audiences of everyday people.

4. Ask yourself what language you need to write down to outline these values. Do you need a script? An onboarding document? A guide? A series of FAQs and primers? You might need a LOT of language, or just a few lines. Some of the language we scripted early on to help inform our storytellers includes:

“We can only produce stories that support our storytellers’ three primary roles: who you are in your family, at your job and in your community.”

“We will work with you to make sure you don’t share anything that would   jeopardize your relationships or role in those spaces in your life. It’s not that we think you’d intentionally want to light a match and run. It’s that some things in life need a LOT of context to understand, and we’ve only got eight minutes.”

5. Ask yourself what behaviors support these values.

Do you need training? Rehearsals? Onboarding sessions? Do you need to send pre-event emails and prep notes? Do you need people to agree to things in writing? Verbally? One-on-one or in a group?

That is a start. I know it’s a lot! But making emotionally safe spaces is a ton of work — let’s not even get started on renting the right chairs and figuring out the parking!

These are some ideas to get you thinking about what emotional safety is, how to create an emotionally safe space, and what that space might look like for different groups of people. Don’t worry if it seems overwhelming at first — it takes a lot of thought, a lot of planning and a lot of work to make these things happen.

Megan Finnerty is a journalist and storytelling consultant who creates transformation and connection for nonprofits, brands and communities. She was part of a team of journalists who won the 2018 Pulitzer for explanatory journalism. As founder and former director of the Storytellers Project, a nationwide series of live storytelling events from Gannett, her best practices have helped almost 7,000 people tell stories on stages, and driven subscriptions, revenue and brand affinity while collaborating with everyone from NASA to the NAACP.

• How news leaders can foster psychological safety
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• How to make room for self-care in your work

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Journalism has many roles. It’s time to embrace the role of convener.

Good convening requires strong facilitation skills, influential and empathic leadership skills, and different listening skills than an interview — things many journalists likely didn’t learn or anticipate when they signed up for the job. To be good conveners, local media need resources and opportunity to equip their journalists with these skills.

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It’s my safe space: The life-saving role of the internet in the lives of transgender and gender diverse youth

Background: Public awareness of Transgender and Gender Diverse (TGD) identities has grown significantly; however, acceptance and support remain elusive for many TGD youth. Resultant experiences of marginalization and stigmatization contribute to elevated rates of psychological distress and suicidality among TGD youth. Emergent evidence suggests that the internet may offer TGD youth safety, support, and community previously unavailable.

Aim: The primary aim of this qualitative inquiry is to engage in an in-depth exploration of the online experiences and processes which help protect against psychological distress and promote well-being among TGD youth.

Methods: Data were culled from a mixed-methods, online study of sexual and gender minority youth from across the United States and Canada which followed Institutional Review Board approved protocols. Participants for this study represent a sample (n 1⁄4 260) of TGD participants aged 14–22 (x̄ 1⁄4 17.30). Data were analyzed using Charmaz’ grounded theory strategies.

Results: Data revealed that the internet offers TGD youth affirming spaces that, for the most part, do not exist in their offline lives. Online, TGD youth were able to engage meaningfully with others as their authentic selves, often for the first time. These experiences fostered well-being, healing, and growth through five processes: 1. Finding an escape from stigma and violence, 2. Experiencing belonging, 3. Building confidence, 4. Feeling hope, and 5. Giving back.

Discussion: The unique and innovative ways in which participants use online spaces to foster resilience offer important insights to inform affirmative practices with TGD young people.

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Safe Space Essays

The digital symphony: navigating social media’s impact on mental wellbeing – a thoughtful speech, specifically, a house can be “a nest for dreaming” and “a shelter for imagining., popular essay topics.

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My Safe Place

Favorite Quote: Anyone can hide. Facing up to things, working through them, that's what makes you different. -Sara Dessen.

To everyone else books are just boring pieces of peper put together. But to me books are my safe place. The one place I can always go to get away from the real world. The safe place to help me calm down and relax and not worry about anything else. The place where i only have to worry about the character and their problems. Reading a book is like entering another world for me. A world where I dont have to worry about my problems,drama, or anything else for that matter. A place where anything can happen. Even though most people think books are lame, to me its a whole new world. Books have always been there for me. There the one thing in this world that will never truly leave me. I know i could have read a book a million times, but i know i can always go back and it will be right there waiting for me. I can always read it again and enter that characters world a million more times. Book have been there for me through it all. Through my parents divorce, my grandpa dying, and my tough years in middle school. And i know no matter what life throws at me, books will always be there for me. Theres so many different books. With each book, its like a whole new experience. You can read about anything your heart desires. Love, adventure, mystery, friendship, reality, the possiblites are endless. And with each new book you enter a whole new world, with different characters, different rules, and a whole different feeling. I love that feeling i get after i read a new book, the shock or excitiment you feel. And each time i pick up a book i cant wait to see what kind of world i will enter next. And with each book i pick up, and each new world i discover, im glad that it takes my mind of my own world. So yeah some people may think books are lame. But to me books will always be my safe place. The one thing always there for me no matter what im dealing with or how old i get. I know one thing for sure each time i pick up a book, i know that the story will always be there waiting for me time after time.

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Favorite Quote: "Be Who you are and say what you feel because those you mind don't matter and those who matter don't mind"

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My Safe Spaces

A safe space is a person, place, or activity that helps you feel calm, comfortable, and supported, and lets you be yourself. Your safe space is there for you no matter how you feel—happy or sad, talkative or quiet, brave or scared. A safe space is free of judgment and is full of acceptance.

The My Safe Spaces worksheet introduces clients to this topic. It provides examples of people, places, and activities that may be safe spaces. Kids circle their safe spaces or write their own. They then draw their favorite examples, which can help them explore and express emotions.

Recognizing safe spaces can help clients identify strengths, coping skills, and social support. For example, if a client identifies baseball as a safe activity, use this as an opportunity to discuss motivation, teamwork, exercise, and more. This may also illuminate a client’s social support, such as a parent or coach.

After completing the activity, support your client in describing their safe spaces. Ask them what a “safe space” means to them, how they feel about their safe spaces, and how they feel after completing the activity.

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Definition of safe space

Examples of safe space in a sentence.

These examples are programmatically compiled from various online sources to illustrate current usage of the word 'safe space.' Any opinions expressed in the examples do not represent those of Merriam-Webster or its editors. Send us feedback about these examples.

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“Safe space.” Merriam-Webster.com Dictionary , Merriam-Webster, https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/safe%20space. Accessed 12 Jul. 2024.

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TON Connect and how to connect apps

What is ton connect, is it safe to authorize via ton connect, what are the benefits of ton connect authorization, how to connect ton space to an app, how to disconnect ton space from an app / from several apps, i disconnected ton space from an app, but i still see my wallet address when i open the app. what should i do.

• I connected an app to TON Space, but now I can't confirm a transaction in the app. I see a blank screen after being redirected to TON Space. What should I do
• I connected an app to my TON Space, but now I don't see it among the connected apps in TON Space. What could be the issue
• I've connected my TON Space wallet to an app, but there's no wallet address in the app. What should I do

Is it possible for anyone to access my TON Space wallet using TON Connect

• I created a TON Space account to connect to an app, but I don't need it anymore. How can I delete it

Which services can I connect via TON Connect

TON Connect is a service allowing you to connect TON blockchain wallets to third-party bots, apps, or websites. This way, you’ll be able to perform fast transactions, as well as participate in promotions and receive rewards straight to the mentioned TON Space address.

The process of connecting an app does not give access to your wallet assets.

Below you can see an example of connecting Yescoin app to TON Space.

After connecting, an application may ask for your confirmation to complete a transaction. All transactions sent via apps require your personal confirmation in the wallet. This provides additional security — after all, you will always be able to check the validity of data prior to completing a transaction.

Below you can see an example of transaction signing in Catizen app.

Important: always check transactions prior to confirming them. Check the transaction amount and make sure that you know the recipient or service where you send cryptocurrency.

By connecting a TON Space wallet to other apps via TON Connect, you can:

• Securely and conveniently connect your TON Space wallet;
• Swiftly create and confirm transactions — no need to input address, sum, and other transfer details;
• Participate in promotions within the TON ecosystem and receive rewards straight to your TON Space.

Tap on the corresponding button of wallet connection in the app. In the next window, confirm the connection by tapping on ‘Open Wallet in Telegram’.

If you did not create TON Space earlier, you will be able to do that in the process of connection. Make sure to save your 24-word secret phrase securely. Without it, you may lose access to the wallet you just created.

We also recommend that you turn on email recovery for fast login to TON Space. Read on how to do it here .

To disconnect an app you don’t need:

• Go to Wallet settings and select TON Space;
• After that, enter the “Connected Apps” section;
• Tap on the icon for connection removal.

A tap on 'Disconnect all apps' will close all the connections of your TON Space wallet. If you need to reconnect to an app later, you can go to the app and connect your TON Space again.

Check if you see the app in question in the ‘Connected Apps’ section in TON Space settings.

If you see its name, try to disconnect it from TON Space. Tap on the app name in ‘Connected Apps’, and then tap on ‘Disconnect’ to confirm the action.

If you do not see the app in your 'Connected Apps' section, but you see your TON Space address in the app, you will need to contact support of the app directly. Apps need to check whether connections are still valid. Even though the app is disconnected from your TON Space, the app may not be showing you the most recent information.

You can find the information on how to connect to Hamster Kombat here .

I connected an app to TON Space, but now I can’t confirm a transaction in the app. I see a blank screen after being redirected to TON Space. What should I do

In this situation, the transaction cannot be created due to one of the following reasons:

• TON Connect error;
• Your current address in TON Space differs from the address linked earlier.

Follow the below instructions to find the cause of the problem.

1) Check if the current and linked TON Space addresses match.

It is possible that the linked address is different from your main TON Space address. This can happen in the following cases:

1. You logged in to TON Space from another device and created one more address in the app. Read how to change a wallet address here .

2. You use different Telegram accounts, with different TON Space addresses.

3. You look at a Wallet address, not a TON Space one. The address that gets bound to apps is visible in the TON Space tab of @wallet main page. Read about the differences between Wallet and TON Space here .

2) If current and linked TON Space addresses match, but the transaction still cannot be created, try to reconnect TON Space. To do this, you need to enter the app, unbind the address via a special button, and then to rebind it once again. If you face issues in the process, contact the app support for further assistance.

I connected an app to my TON Space, but now I don’t see it among the connected apps in TON Space. What could be the issue

Check the device from which you accessed ‘Connected Apps’ in TON Space.

The connection will only be visible on the device where it was set up earlier.

For example, if you connect the app on your smartphone, it will be visible exclusively on your smartphone, and not on your PC or a browser.

If you use the correct device, but still do not see the connection in ‘Connected Apps’, then you need to reconnect the wallet to the corresponding app.

I’ve connected my TON Space wallet to an app, but there’s no wallet address in the app. What should I do

If you see the app name, try to unbind it from TON Space and reconnect again. Tap on the corresponding name in ‘Connected Apps’, and then tap on ‘Disconnect’ to confirm the action. After that, reconnect the wallet on the app page.

If you do not see the app — try to reconnect the wallet.

It is the responsibility of a non-custodial wallet’s owner to keep the wallet secure. The owner has the only access to the wallet because they are the only party that has access to the Seed phrase. This gives you full ownership of your assets, but also requires you to be careful while using your TON Space.

You should always check carefully any transaction confirmation requests in the wallet.

Below you can see an example of connecting the GetGems app to TON Space. This action itself doesn’t give the app permission to move funds inside the wallet.

With TON Connect, you only give an app the permission to send transaction confirmation requests to your wallet. Only you can confirm the transaction, so it’s important to check all the transfer information before sending, to avoid potential mistakes.

Below you can see an example of transaction signing in GetGems.

Also, it’s important to keep in mind that a seed phrase grants access to TON Space. Therefore, keep your seed phrase in a safe place, accessible only to you.

I created a TON Space account to connect to an app, but I don’t need it anymore. How can I delete it

TON Space is a non-custodial wallet for the TON blockchain. It is not possible to delete information from a blockchain.

If you do not need to use a TON Space wallet anymore, you can remove it from your Wallet account by following the instructions .

We recommend you save your Seed phrase, so that you could access TON Space again at any time. You can also turn on email recovery, which makes it possible to log in to TON Space from the linked Telegram account without needing to input your 24-word seed phrase every time. Read on how email recovery works here .

You can see the instructions on how to use TON Space here .

There is a broad range of apps that you can connect to from within Telegram or on your browser.

Following the links below, you can read about Notcoin and Hamster Kombat apps, where wallet connection via TON Connect is available.

TON Space is not affiliated with the mentioned projects. If you have questions that aren’t covered in the articles, please refer to the dedicated support team for each project.

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A REUTERS SPECIAL REPORT

Onlyfans vows it's a safe space. predators are exploiting kids there..

OnlyFans says it vets every user and all content to keep children off its porn-driven platform. But a Reuters investigation of U.S. police and court files found complaints that hundreds of sexually explicit videos and images of minors – from toddlers to teens – appeared on the website. "Watch me get super wild," reads one post cited by authorities featuring a 16-year-old.

By LINDA SO , ANDREW R.C. MARSHALL and JASON SZEP

Filed July 2, 2024, 10 a.m. GMT

Editor’s note: Story contains accounts of child abuse

When a 16-year-old girl from Florida went missing in April 2023, her parents searched her phone, desperate for clues. What they found shocked them: For months, she’d sent nude photos and videos of herself to a man they now feared had abducted her.

“Some guy just flew in from New Jersey,” her bewildered father told a 911 dispatcher after reading her messages. “There’s some kind of sexual business and explicit photos… Something bad like that.”

The next day, sheriff’s deputies found the girl, partially naked, in a rented house with the man, according to police records. An investigation revealed he had posted dozens of sexual videos and images of the girl on OnlyFans, a booming online marketplace for homemade porn. One video, advertised for $20, showed the girl penetrating herself.

“Watch me get super wild,” read the caption. The man, Ethan Diaz, 22, was later charged with human trafficking and other offenses. He has pleaded not guilty.

OnlyFans makes reassuring promises to the public: It’s strictly adults-only, with sophisticated measures to monitor every user, vet all content and swiftly remove and report any child sexual abuse material. “We know the age and identity of everyone on our platform,” said CEO Keily Blair in a speech last year. “No children allowed, nobody under 18 on the platform.”

The Florida girl’s case, detailed in police records, court documents and interviews with law enforcement, undercuts OnlyFans’ claims. And it’s not an isolated example.

Reuters documented 30 complaints in U.S. police and court records that child sexual abuse material appeared on the site between December 2019 and June 2024. The case files examined by the news organization cited more than 200 explicit videos and images of kids, including some adults having oral sex with toddlers. In one case, multiple videos of a minor remained on OnlyFans for more than a year, according to a child exploitation investigator who found them while assisting Reuters in its reporting and alerted authorities in June.

The impact on some victims was devastating. “After I found out about the video, I couldn’t go outside without being scared somebody saw my face,” a young man told a Massachusetts court after a film of his sexual encounter at age 15 with a volunteer football coach ended up for sale on OnlyFans.

Parents expressed disbelief and outrage. “There has to be accountability for these platforms,” the father of a 16-year-old boy from Kansas told Reuters. The family’s ordeal, he said, is “a wound that will never heal.”

Of the 30 cases reviewed by Reuters, more than half resulted in an arrest and at least three in criminal convictions. Most – including that of the missing Florida girl – involved adults accused of preying on minors to create explicit content and sell it on the site. In other cases, minors got past OnlyFans vetting to purvey their own sexually explicit material, police records show. In the case involving toddlers, a man used the site to send another man more than 100 files featuring the abuse of children of all ages.

The 30 cases almost certainly understate the presence of child sexual abuse material on OnlyFans. Reuters used public records laws to obtain documents mentioning OnlyFans from more than 250 of the largest U.S. law enforcement agencies. While nearly half the agencies provided records, many heavily redacted them or declined to disclose any cases involving children, citing state laws to protect minors’ identities.

In response to detailed questions from Reuters, a company spokesperson said: “OnlyFans is proud of the work we do to aggressively target, report, and support the investigations and prosecutions of anyone who seeks to abuse our platform in this way.”

The spokesperson said OnlyFans had “rigorous safety controls” and voluntarily reports all suspected cases of child sexual abuse material to the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children, or NCMEC, a U.S. nonprofit designated by Congress to collect and disseminate tips to law enforcement. OnlyFans also works closely with law enforcement, charities, governments and other groups to “ensure we remain an industry leader in this field,” the spokesperson said.

OnlyFans didn’t respond to most of Reuters’ questions about the cases in this story, including how child abuse material was able to evade its monitoring and whether it has kept its revenue from accounts involving minors. None of the cases involved criminal charges against the website or its parent company, Fenix International. Reuters found no evidence that OnlyFans has been sued or held criminally liable for child sexual abuse content, according to a search of U.S. and international legal databases.

Federal free-speech protections have largely immunized social media platforms from liability for abusive content posted by their users. But as concerns mount about online harms – particularly involving children – Congress is seeking to toughen federal laws to hold the platforms accountable.

At a U.S. Senate hearing in January on the effects of social media, lawmakers lambasted Meta and four other major platforms for allegedly failing to sufficiently protect children. Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg pledged at the hearing to do better.

OnlyFans, which wasn’t summoned to the Senate hearing, has been praised by sex workers for making porn safer and more profitable. Celebrities and social media influencers, teachers and mothers boast that the platform has made them rich. Its 3.2 million content creators typically sell explicit images and videos for a monthly subscription fee, plus one-off payments, keeping 80% of the sales. OnlyFans takes the rest – a cut that yielded almost $1.1 billion in revenue in 2022, its latest financial disclosures show.

Those subscriptions – effectively, a paywall around nearly every OnlyFans creator – make the site difficult to scrutinize. Most content is inaccessible to non-subscribers and therefore harder to find and monitor compared to platforms such as Facebook or X.

This can impede investigations of alleged child abuse on OnlyFans, said Matt W.J. Richardson, a child exploitation investigator with the Anti-Human Trafficking Intelligence Initiative, a U.S. nonprofit whose work includes identifying illegal content online. “It’s really hard to know specifically or exactly how much is on there,” he said.

Visitors to OnlyFans.com can only search for creators by their account names; they cannot search by interest category. This makes creators heavily dependent on popular social media sites to drive traffic to their OnlyFans accounts.

Some predators also use these mainstream sites to find minors to exploit on OnlyFans, police records show.

That’s how Diaz, the New Jersey man, allegedly ensnared the Florida girl. Reuters retraced her journey to OnlyFans from interviews with detectives, court records, police reports and bodycam footage. It began on Snapchat, a popular online hangout for teens, where she caught Diaz’s eye.

‘Romeo pimps’

Ethan Diaz, 22

CHARGE: Human trafficking, promoting a sexual performance by a child, other crimes

He opened with a deception.

The girl had been posting naked photos of herself on Snapchat. Diaz messaged her in February 2023, posing as a woman who – with a boyfriend’s help – had made lots of money selling such photos. Did the girl want to meet him?

Diaz then introduced himself as the boyfriend, messaging her under his own name. He gained her trust. He bought her a cell phone and told her she was beautiful, said St. Johns County Sheriff’s Detective Edward Scoggins, who investigated the case. Before long, the detective recalled, Diaz said he loved her and wanted to be with her forever.

Such tactics are often used by “Romeo pimps” who use “love bombing” and gifts to “manipulate somebody into doing things they wouldn’t otherwise do,” said Scoggins.

Diaz enticed the girl into making hardcore videos featuring masturbation and sex toys and then sold them on an OnlyFans account he controlled, police say. The girl also posted sexual content of herself to the account, allegedly under Diaz’s direction.

Then, on April 30 last year, Diaz flew in from New Jersey to film himself having sex with her. Porn with two people was “more desirable” on OnlyFans than videos of her solo, he told the girl. He picked her up in a white Tesla and drove her to an Airbnb 15 minutes from her home. He took her shopping and bought her lingerie, jewelry and shoes, according to Scoggins and police photos of the items and receipts.

When sheriff’s deputies discovered them at the Airbnb, Diaz had already filmed six sex videos with the girl, prosecutors said. He was arrested before he could post them on OnlyFans.

Still, over about three months in 2023, Diaz was able to post as many as 100 images and videos of the girl on the site, Scoggins said.

Diaz evaded controls meant to hold account holders responsible for their own content, according to Scoggins and a review of OnlyFans policies. Under OnlyFans current rules, would-be creators must provide at least nine pieces of personally identifying information and documents, including bank details, a selfie while holding a government photo ID, and – in the United States – a social security number. All this is verified by human judgment and age-estimation technology that analyzes the selfie, says the company.

But Diaz set up an account and had another woman verify it as hers, Scoggins said. That woman, whom police didn’t identify, later quit OnlyFans. But her account remained live and accessible to Diaz. He filled it with videos of the girl and promoted the content on Snapchat and Discord, a messaging service popular with gamers, to draw customers to her OnlyFans page. He made about $10,000 from all three platforms, Scoggins said, and paid the girl $1,500.

A Snapchat spokesperson said the platform’s “robust measures” make it “difficult for teens to be discovered and contacted by strangers.” A Discord spokesperson said “child-harm content” had no place on the platform. Neither commented specifically on the case.

Diaz is awaiting trial in state court, charged with human trafficking, multiple counts of promoting a sexual performance by a child and other crimes. In a statement, James Hill, his Florida lawyer, noted that Diaz was “only 21” when arrested. “From the date of his arrest, he has been aggressively fighting these charges against him,” Hill added. “He is, by law, presumed innocent.”

If found guilty of the charges, Diaz faces a mandatory life sentence.

Meanwhile, the girl has been left scarred, the family told the state attorney’s office. “No physical injuries,” a family member said in a written statement, “but emotional trauma.”

‘We see everything’

OnlyFans has made online safety central to its image.

“We moderate all of the content on our platform. Every text, every message, every audio clip, every livestream, everything gets moderated. We see everything,” CEO Blair said at a TEDx talk in 2023. “We’re doing it to keep our community safe.”

The company spokesperson said “the lack of anonymity and absence of end-to-end encryption on OnlyFans” allow law enforcement to investigate reports of illegal content on the site. End-to-end encryption keeps data entirely private between sender and recipient.

Some child-protection groups have praised OnlyFans. NCMEC, the U.S.-based clearinghouse, said the company participates in voluntary initiatives to detect and remove abusive content and has safety measures, such as age and identity checks, that some other sites don’t. NCMEC, which is heavily funded by the U.S. Justice Department, said it receives no financial support from OnlyFans.

The Internet Watch Foundation, a British nonprofit focused on eradicating online child sexual abuse, calls OnlyFans “an industry leader in online safety.” The foundation said OnlyFans pays 90,000 pounds ($114,000) a year for its services designed to detect images of child abuse.

A Reuters investigation published in March, however, found flaws in the website’s moderation process for adult content. In more than 120 cases in the United States and 18 in Britain, adults complained that sexually explicit material had been posted without their consent, in violation of OnlyFans rules and, in some cases, criminal statutes. An OnlyFans spokesperson said misuse of its platform is rare.

Underage users can also slip past OnlyFans’ monitoring and post their own explicit material for sale, police records and interviews show. A 19-year-old Maryland woman, Monie Graham, told Reuters she set up two accounts as a minor, both times evading the company’s age verification system.

After excelling in high school and graduating a year early in June 2022, Graham rebelled, she and her mother, Krystal McKeever, said. Graham was coming home late at night, getting into fights and refusing to get a job. McKeever kicked her out.

By that September, Graham said she turned to OnlyFans out of desperation. “I felt scared, I didn’t know what to do. I just needed a way to make money. So that’s when I was just like, okay, let me start an OnlyFans.”

Using the driver’s license of an adult acquaintance, she said, she set up an OnlyFans account and began selling sexually explicit material of herself. Soon, she was making money.

McKeever said she discovered the account in December 2022, tipped off by friends. They sent her a flurry of alarming texts with screenshots and recordings they had discovered on Graham’s OnlyFans account showing the girl having sex with “grown men,” according to a police report the mother filed.

The words “HORNY HOURS” were emblazoned on the girl’s OnlyFans profile page at that time, according to a screenshot viewed by Reuters. She used Twitter – now called X – and Instagram to promote the page, McKeever told police. “I have a sale going on,” the girl posted on Instagram. “Next 5 subscribers are only $5.”

Instagram parent company Meta didn’t comment on the case but said it doesn’t allow the sharing or solicitation of child sexual exploitation content. X declined to comment.

McKeever reported the underage sex videos to OnlyFans and offered to provide the child’s birth certificate, she said. She received a message from OnlyFans saying it would investigate and get back to her, she said. The girl’s OnlyFans account remained live on the site for weeks.

“I kept checking it every day and it was still up there,” McKeever said. “They never reached back out to me.”

McKeever wanted to press charges against OnlyFans for facilitating illegal content that exploited her child, she said. But when she contacted police in Baltimore County, Maryland, in December 2022, the officer said she couldn’t, “because he wouldn’t even know who to write the charge up against,” McKeever recalled.

A spokesperson for the Baltimore County Police Department declined to comment on McKeever’s statement. Reuters couldn’t reach the officer, who the spokesperson said no longer works at the department.

Frustrated, McKeever said she called the Federal Bureau of Investigation and pleaded for help in getting the videos removed. Ultimately, a county police detective got them taken down, according to the police spokesperson. Within a few weeks, the teen’s entire account was closed, McKeever said.

But Graham found another way onto OnlyFans. She asked her Instagram followers if anyone had an OnlyFans account they weren’t using, and a woman “just gave it to me,” she told Reuters. While still underage, Graham said, she started posting content on the new account.

“I wouldn’t want an underage kid doing what I did,” she said. “But at the same time, I had to do what I had to do.”

Reuters was assisted by Richardson, the child exploitation investigator, in tracing Graham’s activity on OnlyFans. He confirmed finding several sexually explicit videos of Graham that had been posted on the newer account on Jan. 4, 2023, months before Graham’s 18th birthday.

The videos were watermarked with the name of Graham’s closed OnlyFans account and had simply been reposted to the newer one. They had been sitting in that account, seemingly undetected by OnlyFans, for 16 months. Richardson reported the videos in June to NCMEC, and the account was shut down within days.

NCMEC declined to comment on the case but said all CyberTipline reports are shared with law enforcement for possible investigation.

OnlyFans declined to explain how the videos evaded its detection for so long.

Dangers and dollar signs

For some children, bypassing age controls is a gateway to an alluring world.

OnlyFans “presents itself as a platform that provides unrivaled access to influencers, celebrities and models,” said Elly Hanson, a clinical psychologist and researcher who focuses on preventing sexual abuse and reducing its impact. “This is an attractive mix to many teens, who are pulled into its world of commodified sex, unprepared for what this entails.”

In addition to the 30 police complaints of child sexual content on OnlyFans, Reuters found another 17 cases in which minors allegedly had OnlyFans accounts but showed no indication they had posted sexual content of themselves. In some of those cases, the police files made it clear that no sexual content of a child was posted; in others, it was impossible to establish due to redactions and limited information.

Even so, for a child to possess an account violates OnlyFans’ bedrock adults-only policy.

In one case in Riverview, Florida, police learned of a 15-year-old girl’s OnlyFans account in March 2023 after her classmates reported to school authorities that she was promoting it in group chats with other students.

The girl’s father told police she admitted to creating the account to “exploit men” and make money by posting nude images of women taken from the internet, pretending they were hers, according to a report by the Hillsborough County Sheriff’s Office.

The father told Reuters he doesn’t know how his daughter was able to create the OnlyFans account and said the company should keep children off the site.

“A kid may only see dollar signs,” he said. “But they’re not understanding the dangers.”

‘People love your video’

Some children sound their own alarm.

In April 2021, a 17-year-old boy walked into the Boston Police Department to report that a volunteer high-school football coach almost twice his age was selling a sexually explicit video of the teen on OnlyFans.

Details of the case come from previously unreported court filings, including screenshots of messages between the two, an interview with the lead prosecutor on the case and an emotional statement the victim read out in court last December.

The boy was 15, but listed his age as 18, when he met the coach, Kharee Louis-Jeune, on a dating app in 2019.

Kharee Louis-Jeune, 36

CONVICTION: Child rape, distribution of child sexual abuse material, possession of child pornography SENTENCE: Three to five years in prison; ordered not to use OnlyFans

Louis-Jeune, of Brockton, Massachusetts, convinced the teen to let him record the two having oral sex in a Boston parking lot, insisting he wouldn’t share the video with anyone. Soon after, the boy told Louis-Jeune his true age. But the sexual relationship continued, on and off, for at least another six months.

In late 2019, the boy discovered the video had been posted on OnlyFans. He cut and dyed his hair, petrified that someone would recognize him, but soon the video began circulating at his high school. A classmate asked “if I had been sucking any penises in cars,” he recalled in his court statement. “My heart dropped and he ended up showing me the video.”

In March 2021, the boy had a final meeting with Louis-Jeune and told him he didn’t want to be touched. He secretly took down the man’s license plate number in case he needed it for a police report.

Two weeks later, Louis-Jeune messaged the teen: “People love your video.” Louis-Jeune sent a link to the OnlyFans site, where he was selling the parking-lot video for $6.

Later that day, the boy reported him to Boston Police. Authorities used a search warrant to obtain the video from OnlyFans. Part of the caption on the 36-second footage read, “Jamaican boo loves older men.”

“After I found out about the video, I couldn’t go outside without being scared somebody saw my face.” Teenage victim

In June 2021, police arrested Louis-Jeune. He initially denied knowing the victim or having an OnlyFans account. But police found the video on his phone.

Louis-Jeune, 36, pleaded guilty in December in Suffolk County Superior Court to charges of child rape, distribution of child sexual abuse material, and possession of child pornography. He was sentenced to three to five years in prison and ordered not to use OnlyFans. His lawyer declined to comment.

His victim, now an adult, wants to move on. “I just want this to be over so I can pretend it never happened,” he told the court.

Without his “courage,” said Ashley Polin, chief of the Suffolk County District Attorney’s Human Trafficking and Child Exploitation Unit, “I don’t think this ever would’ve crossed my desk.”

A risky business

OnlyFans has been hit before by accusations that it doesn’t adequately protect children.

In 2021, the BBC detailed several cases of explicit videos on OnlyFans involving teenagers. In response, OnlyFans’ parent company, Fenix, said it closed accounts it found to have indecent images of children. That same year, 102 Republican and Democratic members of the U.S. House of Representatives called on the Justice Department to investigate child sexual abuse on OnlyFans. The Justice Department told the lawmakers three months later that it couldn’t confirm or deny it was investigating OnlyFans. Contacted recently, a department spokesperson declined to comment further.

More reports of child abuse could pose a risk to the website. Mastercard, Visa and Discover have shown they will take dramatic steps when faced with allegations that their cards are paying for child sexual abuse videos and images.

In 2020, the card companies cut ties with Pornhub, another big adults-only platform, after a public outcry over alleged child abuse material and other illegal content. It was a painful hit, stopping card payments for Pornhub’s paid content and forcing it to rely more on ads and sales of user data.

OnlyFans says it doesn’t sell user data or allow third-party ads. That leaves it starkly dependent upon Mastercard, Visa and Discover: The website only accepts transactions with cards issued by them.

The three card companies said they still don’t accept payments from Pornhub. They didn’t comment further.

Pornhub parent company Aylo said it has “far-reaching safeguards” to prevent abuses on its platform and that any ongoing payment restrictions it faces are based on inaccurate or outdated information.

OnlyFans’ fortunes also lean heavily on other social media sites. The platform’s search function doesn’t allow users to trawl for content; they need to already know the name of the creator they want to subscribe to. That’s why OnlyFans creators often advertise on mainstream sites, attracting subscribers using sexualized photos, video snippets, and – on X – hardcore porn.

Wyatt Maxwell, 25

CONVICTION: Attempted production of child pornography

Half of the 30 police complaints about child exploitation on OnlyFans said Twitter, Instagram, Snapchat and other social media played a role in promoting the content.

X, then called Twitter, helped 25-year-old Wyatt Maxwell earn thousands of dollars on OnlyFans before federal investigators discovered he had been exploiting a boy.

Maxwell, a cabaret singer, repeatedly filmed himself and a 16-year-old Kansas boy having sex at Maxwell’s home and a local park in 2020 and 2021. He posted about 20 videos on OnlyFans and a smaller rival website, JustFor.Fans, charging subscribers $15 a month on both platforms.

To promote his content, Maxwell used his Twitter accounts – including one called @someones_son. It paid off: Maxwell told a federal investigator he hauled in between $3,000 and $10,000 a month from OnlyFans and JustFor.Fans.

Ultimately, prosecutors said, he earned more than $49,000 on OnlyFans alone. OnlyFans’ cut would have been about $10,000, based on the standard 20% share the site takes.

In April, Maxwell pleaded guilty to one count of attempting to produce child pornography. He faces a mandatory minimum sentence of 15 years. Maxwell’s lawyer declined to comment.

A JustFor.Fans spokesperson said the website was informed about Maxwell’s account by the FBI in February 2021 and immediately shut it down. “We take any activities involving minors incredibly seriously,” he added.

The boy’s father said the sexual exploitation was damaging enough to his family. That companies profited from it, he said, was just as bad if not worse.

X declined to comment.

Snapchat told Reuters that using the platform to promote OnlyFans, or any pornographic content, violates its policies. Meta said Instagram doesn’t allow users to share links to porn sites but doesn’t consider OnlyFans to be solely a porn site.

‘A little disturbing’

Once creators have built an audience, they can promote and sell content through chats or direct messages with subscribers. Those messages, along with all other content, are moderated, CEO Blair said in her TEDx talk and other speeches last year.

In one case, however, the messaging function allowed one man to share with another 125 explicit videos and images featuring sex acts involving at least 13 children. The sharing of the files went undetected for at least seven months, along with the lurid messages the two men exchanged about them, before OnlyFans reported the case to NCMEC. The case is detailed in documents Reuters obtained from the Broward County State Attorney’s Office in Florida. The documents didn’t record the origin of the material the two men shared or the identities of the exploited children.

Christopher Varney, 60, of Florida and Abel Esquivel, 35, of San Francisco started direct messaging on OnlyFans in August 2019.

Esquivel paid $5 a month to subscribe to Varney’s account, FTLgloryHole, which featured footage of Varney performing oral sex on strangers at his Fort Lauderdale-area home. The affidavit didn’t specify whether any were minors.

Christopher Varney, 60

CONVICTION: Obscenity SENTENCE: 60 months’ probation; ordered to stay away from children

Esquivel “became interested in child pornography” during the pandemic, he told investigators. He said he used OnlyFans to talk to others with similar interests.

In September 2020, Varney began asking his subscriber, Esquivel, for content: “You have any vids of y0ung you can upload?” Varney used a zero instead of the letter O, possibly as code. The word “young” is sometimes flagged by porn sites as denoting possible child sexual abuse material.

Several days later, Esquivel sent Varney eight files containing videos of boys aged eight to 16 masturbating and engaged in anal penetration. He sent three more videos, including one that showed a man sexually assaulting a young boy grimacing in pain, the records said. In March 2021, Esquivel sent videos and images of adults engaging in oral sex with toddlers, including one who was 18 to 24 months old, according to the case file.

“That’s a little disturbing,” Varney wrote after viewing the material.

When Esquivel apologized, Varney responded, “lol it’s all good. The toddler stuff just kinda freaks me out and a couple of them seemed like they weren’t exactly willing.”

Esquivel continued sending child sexual abuse material to Varney, including content that showed boys in bondage, according to a report by the San Francisco Police Department, which also investigated the case.

OnlyFans ultimately reported the illegal material to NCMEC in May 2021, seven months after it was first shared, leading to Esquivel’s and Varney’s arrests. The OnlyFans spokesperson didn’t respond to a question about why the company failed to discover the material sooner.

Esquivel pleaded guilty to possession and was sentenced in June 2023 in San Francisco Superior Court to two years’ probation and 13 days in jail but was given credit for time served. Varney pleaded no contest to an obscenity count in Florida’s 17th Judicial Circuit Court. He was sentenced to 60 months’ probation in July 2023 and ordered to stay away from children. Possessing and sharing child sexual abuse material generally carry a lighter sentence than producing it.

In a memo explaining the charge, prosecutors said Varney justified his conduct by saying he “played along” with his subscriber to avoid getting “a reputation for being judgmental.”

‘I do realize it’s illegal’

Online child sexual abuse can be hard to investigate and prosecute. Nearly a third of the U.S. police cases Reuters examined were closed without an arrest. In some instances, investigators couldn’t identify children who appeared on OnlyFans. In others, they cited a lack of evidence, exhausted leads or uncooperative witnesses.

Were you exposed on OnlyFans?

Got a story to share about possible abuses on OnlyFans or other social media platforms? Please contact our reporters via our confidential tips page .

One young woman in Lakeland, Florida, dropped a complaint because she said she partly blamed herself, not her adult partner, for a filmed encounter posted on OnlyFans when she was 17, records show. Police closed the case of another minor in Houston because they said she seemed to be, of her own accord, selling content on the site that showed her and her boyfriend engaged in sex acts.

Because of OnlyFans’ paywalls, investigators must rely heavily on witnesses who happen to spot child content on the site and report it to parents or police.

It was a witness who in December 2022 tipped off authorities that a 16-year-old New York girl was featured in an OnlyFans video. She had been missing for a week after running off with a man in his 30s whom she’d met in a grocery store.

Police quickly identified the man as Matthew Richardson (unrelated to the child exploitation investigator with a similar name). An officer found Richardson’s OnlyFans account – listed under the pseudonym Skylar Ravenwood – where an FBI agent located a video of him having sex with the girl.

Matthew Richardson, 36

CHARGE: Producing and distributing child pornography

The next day, on Dec. 9, 2022, a police officer in Ohio found the pair in a stolen car at a highway rest stop and arrested Richardson. When FBI agents asked Richardson if he was aware that having sex with a 16-year-old was against the law, he replied, “I do realize it’s illegal,” according to a federal affidavit.

Richardson, now 36, has pleaded not guilty in federal court to charges of producing and distributing child pornography. His lawyer declined to comment.

Local police and federal authorities also declined to comment on the case, including whether they had alerted OnlyFans to the arrest.

OnlyFans says it continuously scans its website and can deactivate accounts that violate its rules. As of mid-June, the video allegedly featuring the girl appeared to have been removed. But, for $20 a month, people could still subscribe to Richardson’s account.

When Reuters asked OnlyFans about the case, the account was shut down.

Millions of paywalls impede scrutiny of OnlyFans

It is difficult to measure the extent of child sexual abuse images and videos on the porn-driven website OnlyFans, investigators and experts say.

The only publicly available statistics are provided by OnlyFans itself. Under federal law, U.S.-based electronic service providers – including social media platforms and porn sites – must report any suspected child abuse to the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children (NCMEC), a nonprofit designated by Congress to serve as a clearinghouse for such reports. As a UK-based company, OnlyFans isn’t legally obligated to file reports to NCMEC but says it does so voluntarily.

OnlyFans says it immediately removes any suspected child sexual abuse material it detects and makes a report to NCMEC’s CyberTipline. In 2023, the company made 347 such CyberTipline reports “out of hundreds of millions of posts,” an OnlyFans spokesperson said. “This is testament to the rigorous safety controls OnlyFans has in place.”

Much of this suspect material “does not turn out to be CSAM” – child sexual abuse material – “and/or are duplicate images or videos,” OnlyFans says on its website.

But five specialists in online child sexual abuse told Reuters the actual amount of CSAM on OnlyFans is difficult to verify independently due to the existence of individual paywalls for many of its 3.2 million creators.

“It’s not just one paywall. It’s a paywall for each and every contributor,” said Trey Amick, director of forensic consultants at Magnet Forensics Inc, a Canada-based company that supplies law enforcement agencies with tools to search for child sexual abuse material.

The information police can typically get from an account, without paying for a subscription or enlisting OnlyFans’ help, is a website address, a non-explicit photo of the creator and some text describing the account.

“Beyond that, it’s extremely difficult to acquire content that’s hosted behind the paywalls of OnlyFans,” said Amick.

Once police seek OnlyFans’ help in a case, the company provides them all the information they need, including account details, content and direct messages, the OnlyFans spokesperson said. “Police investigators do not need to subscribe to content,” she said.

The spokesperson also noted that NCMEC has “full access” to the site behind its paywalls.

NCMEC said that access began in late 2023 and was “limited” to OnlyFans accounts reported to its CyberTipline or connected to a missing child case. Beyond that, it added, NCMEC “does not proactively monitor, moderate, or actively seek to review content at scale” behind OnlyFans’ paywalls, or on any other website.

In 2021, OnlyFans appointed an “independent third party” monitor, Michael Ward, “to provide even greater transparency into our industry-leading safety measures,” its website said.

Ward, a former U.S. Justice Department prosecutor who now works at the law firm Baker Botts, was tasked with analyzing and assessing OnlyFans’ safety controls, the website said. OnlyFans didn’t respond to questions about him.

Contacted by Reuters, Ward said he couldn’t comment or confirm that he performed the role OnlyFans said he did.

How Reuters investigated alleged child sexual abuse on OnlyFans

Reuters used public records laws to seek documents on cases opened since 2016 involving OnlyFans from more than 250 of the largest U.S. law enforcement agencies. More than half supplied records that, at a minimum, mentioned OnlyFans in connection with a criminal complaint or information provided to police. Drawing from police and court records, reporters identified 30 complaints of child sexual abuse material on OnlyFans. Most documents were redacted by authorities to protect the privacy of alleged victims and witnesses.

Some agencies withheld case files in their entirety, citing privacy exemptions. Others didn’t respond, said they had no relevant records or provided records that weren’t relevant to this story.

Reuters also reviewed OnlyFans profile pages, body camera footage and messages exchanged between creators and subscribers or alleged victims.

Reuters sought to trace cases from their inception through the legal process and independently corroborate allegations but didn’t have enough information to investigate or corroborate every allegation. Reuters determined the status of cases, such as arrests and convictions, from records and interviews in 2023 and early 2024. The analysis doesn’t reflect subsequent developments.

In assessing the case reports, Reuters set criteria for including examples in its tally. Reporters didn’t include cases of people who simply heard from friends or family of child sexual abuse material that had been seen on OnlyFans, unless the person provided police with supporting information, such as an OnlyFans account name or other specific details of the explicit content.

OnlyFans Exposed

By Linda So, Andrew R.C. Marshall and Jason Szep.

So reported from St. Augustine, Florida, and Washington; Szep from Washington; and Marshall from London.

Photo editing: Maye-E Wong

Art direction: Catherine Tai

Design: John Emerson

Edited by Julie Marquis

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A more complete picture emerged Wednesday of the extensive damage wrought by Hurricane Beryl's trek across the Windward Islands, revealing destruction and at least seven deaths.

At least three islands report more than 90% of the homes and buildings either destroyed or severely damaged, the Caribbean Disaster Emergency Management Agency reported Wednesday . All three are within the chain of Grenadine Islands, where Beryl roared into the Caribbean on the southern end of the Windwards, between St. Vincent and Grenada.

With 19 participating states across the Caribbean , the agency was helping coordinate disaster response on Grenada and St. Vincent and the Grenadines even as it continued to track Beryl’s movements across Jamaica, Cayman Islands and Belize. The eye of Beryl, still a Category 4 storm, raked Jamaica's coast Wednesday afternoon and was expected to pass near the Cayman Islands Thursday morning, before making landfall in the Yucatan on Friday morning.

The damage estimates for the Windwards – where Beryl made landfall over Carriacou – are only "a very preliminary look," said Elizabeth Riley, the disaster management agency's executive director. Beryl struck the islands with sustained winds of 150 mph and higher gusts on Monday, and the National Hurricane Center had warned that winds could be up to 30% higher on the tops of hills and mountains.

The impacts to the Grenadine Islands are "quite significant," Riley said, leaving residents exposed and vulnerable. Even as recovery efforts began, a tropical wave brought rain and gusty winds Wednesday to the suffering residents.

Grenada prime minister discusses damage on Carriacou

In a briefing late Tuesday after spending more than two hours in a helicopter provided by the government of St. Lucia, Grenada Prime Minister Dickon Mitchell described "total destruction" on the islands of Carriacou and Petite Martinique.

"There's really nothing that can prepare you to see this level of destruction," Mitchell said. "It is almost Armageddon-like, almost total damage and destruction of all buildings. Complete devastation and destruction of agriculture. Complete and total destruction of the natural environment."

"There is literally no vegetation left anywhere on the island of Carriacou; the mangroves are totally destroyed, the boats and the marinas significantly damaged," he said. "There is almost complete destruction of the electrical grid system in Carriacou. The entire communication system is completely destroyed."

However, Mitchell added, he'd been heartened by the volunteers "showing true Grenadian spirit" by arriving from other less damaged areas in boats and fishing vessels to begin delivering relief supplies to those affected.

Hurricane Beryl's fearsome seas As Beryl tears through Caribbean, a drone sends back stunning footage

Beryl damage updates

The following are the preliminary assessments Riley listed:

Carriacou, Grenada

• The total population of 6,081 has been affected, so shelter is "a significant consideration."
• Majority of homes and buildings have been extensively damaged
• Communications have been significantly compromised

Petite Martinique, Grenada

• Estimated 80% of the houses and buildings extensively damaged or destroyed
• 900 people affected
• Majority of the island is sheltering in place

Canouan, Saint Vincent and the Grenadines

• 100% of the island's population (12,600) has been affected
• An estimated 90% of the houses were damaged, either extensively or destroyed
• Police station in Charlestown lost its roof

Union Island, Saint Vincent and the Grenadines

• Full population of 3,000 was affected by extensive damage
• Estimated 98% of buildings, including houses badly damaged or destroyed
• Airport control tower destroyed, hospital roof destroyed
• Power plant received significant damage
• Government assisting people who wish to evacuate

Mayreau, Saint Vincent and the Grenadines

• Total population of 300 people affected
• 90% of the housing stock and buildings have been damaged or destroyed

Palm Island, Saint Vincent and the Grenadines

• Resort and desalination plant significantly damaged
• More than 40 homes with damage, a number expected to rise
• Confirmed significant damage to the fishing sector
• More than 200 boats damaged
• Significant damage to the coastal infrastructure, particularly along the south coast 
• Partial road obstruction
• Significant damage on southern end 

Trinidad and Tobago

• Power outages
• Water disruption on Tobago 
• Roadway blockages on both islands

Bequia, Saint Vincent and the Grenadines

• An estimated 10% of the homes and buildings suffered roof damage
• Airport and runway are usable
• Minimal damages reported

Mitchell, Grenada's prime minister, said the island's northernmost parish, Saint Patrick suffered significant damage. The parishes of Saint Andrew, Saint Mark and Saint John also suffered much more damage than the parishes of Saint George and Saint David.

"It is clear that agriculture has taken quite a battering. It is clear that many persons have lost their roofs," Mitchell said. "It is clear, in some instances, many people have lost their entire homes."

Dinah Voyles Pulver covers climate and the environment for USA TODAY. Reach her at [email protected] or @dinahvp.

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Former Olympic gymnast MyKayla Skinner draws criticism for saying SafeSport is hindering coaches

FILE- Mykayla Skinner, of United States, prepares to vault during the artistic gymnastics women’s apparatus final at the 2020 Summer Olympics, Sunday, Aug. 1, 2021, in Tokyo, Japan. The Olympic medal-winning gymnast has come under fire for alleging that gymnastics coaches are scared to do their job out of fear they will be reported for abusive behavior. She has since walked back those comments, saying she did not intend to disrespect any of the women who will compete for the U.S. at the Paris Olympics. (AP Photo/Ashley Landis, File)

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Olympic medal-winning gymnast MyKayla Skinner Harmer is drawing criticism for a since-deleted YouTube video in which she said the U.S. Center for SafeSport is making it difficult for coaches to do their job.

Skinner, who won silver on vault at the Tokyo Olympics, said coaches “can’t get on athletes” out of fear of being reported to SafeSport, an independent entity that handles allegations of abuse from various governing bodies across the U.S. Olympic movement.

“(Coaches) have to be really careful about what they say, which in some ways is really good, but at the same time, to get where you need to be in gymnastics, you have to be … a little aggressive and a little intense,” Skinner said.

The 27-year-old Skinner, who retired after Tokyo, seemed to draw a direct line between the lack of structured coaching and most of the five-woman team that will represent the U.S. at the Paris Olympics.

“Besides Simone (Biles), I feel like the talent and the depth just isn’t like what it used to be,” Skinner said . “Just notice like, I mean, obviously a lot of girls don’t work as hard. The girls just don’t have the work ethic.”

Skinner later walked back her comments, posting on Instagram that it was not her intention to “offend or disrespect any of the athletes or take away from their hard work.”

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She also said she hadn’t fully dealt with the emotional and verbal abuse she experienced while training under former U.S. national team coordinator Martha Karolyi .

Skinner previously told The Associated Press she was “scared” to return to the national team in 2019 after competing collegiately at Utah, even though Karolyi was no longer part of the program following the Larry Nassar sexual abuse scandal .

Rachael Denhollander, a former gymnast who was the first to come forward and detail sexual abuse by Nassar, then a U.S. national team doctor , said Skinner’s comments show that there’s still a “long way to go” in educating people about the impact abusive behavior can have.

“When an athlete reminisces about one of the most abusive coaches in gymnastics history, suggesting her abusive model was necessary for work ethic, we have a problem,” Denhollander posted on X .

SafeSport declined to comment.

AP Summer Olympics: https://apnews.com/hub/2024-paris-olympic-games

A NASA astronaut stuck indefinitely in space due to Boeing's Starliner delays has a 'good feeling' she'll get home safe, but for now she's just floating around

• The two NASA astronauts stuck on the ISS remain cheery despite not having a return date yet.
• "I have a real good feeling in my heart that the spacecraft will bring us home," Suni Williams said.
• "It feels good to float around," she added.

Two NASA astronauts stuck in space are upbeat and optimistic despite the numerous delays in their return to Earth via Boeing's Starliner.

The duo — Suni Williams and Butch Wilmore — arrived at the International Space Station via the Starliner on June 6 after a series of delays that postponed the craft's launch by a month.

While they were supposed to stay for only eight to 10 days, they have been stuck on the space station for over a month now, with no return date scheduled.

But they remain in good spirits, telling reporters on a press call on Wednesday that they were certain they would be home safe.

When a CBS reporter asked if the astronauts were confident the Starliner would get them home safely, Wilmore said: "We're absolutely confident."

"We've practiced a lot," Williams said, responding to a similar question by the Associated Press. "I have a real good feeling in my heart that the spacecraft will bring us home."

The astronauts' return was delayed on June 21 to assess issues on board and make time for two spacewalks on June 24 and July 2.

The delay came after the crew detected five helium leaks on board the Starliner. Helium supports the spacecraft's reaction control system thrusters, which enables them to fire up.

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But issues like the ones they're facing are to be expected, Wilmore said, calling human spaceflight a "tough business."

"There have been multiple issues with every spacecraft that's ever been designed," he added.

"I'll just reiterate again: This is a test flight. We were expecting to find some things. And so we are finding stuff, and we're correcting it, making changes and updates with our control team," Williams said.

Williams said they weren't complaining about having extra time on board. Since they had both been on the ISS before, it felt like "coming back home."

"We are having a great time here on ISS," Williams said. "It feels good to float around."

Williams, who NASA selected as an astronaut in 1998, spent 322 days in space before the Starliner project. Wilmore, a NASA astronaut since 2000, spent 178 days in space before the Starliner launch.

Starliner is the first instance of Boeing sending up a crewed spacecraft to the ISS and represents the company's major push to break into the commercial human-spaceflight business.

But Boeing lags behind Elon Musk's SpaceX , which sent astronauts to space since 2020.

Boeing and SpaceX were the two American companies selected by NASA in 2014 to explore commercial space transport.

Representatives for NASA didn't immediately respond to requests for comment sent outside regular business hours.

Watch: Boeing's problems reach new heights with stranded astronauts

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