Editorial: From Safety to Sense of safety

Anne Birgitta Pessi^1*Liz Grant²Henrietta Grönlund¹Maaret Kallio¹Jenni Spannari¹Elisa Vähäsarja¹Monica Worline³

• ¹University of Helsinki, Helsinki, Finland
• ²University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh, United Kingdom
• ³University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, United States

Sense of safety is an essential foundation for human flourishing and well-being. It is a basic human need, grounded in the evolutionary history of the human species as a part of the ecosphere. Today, social, political, and health-related global challenges have eroded deeply not only safety security but our sense of safety. Sense of safety is an individual experience, but it is deeply rooted in the social, communal, and societal frames. Thus, in research, we need to look at the sense of safety, understanding that the wider societal situation strongly consists of individual and grass-roots level experiences. All individuals, notwithstanding their race or age or any other variable, need to feel safe. Sense of safety is a feeling of relative security, a comprehensive yet subjective psychological experience. It requires ongoing appraisal, closely associated with a person's awareness and perception. That is, sense of safety is related to safety but never the same, and it is always about emotions. It is deeply social -never just about an individual -and should be studied as such. Sense of safety is pivotal for individuals, communities, and in societies. The sense of safety is often defined in research as a psychological phenomenon or an individual's internal feeling about safety, which is accompanied by a subjective perception of objective events (Zou & Meng 2018, Nilsen ym. 2004.) Suojanen (2022, 35) defines subjective safety as a feeling of whether a person feels threatened or not. The emergence of a sense of safety is influenced by how the environment and safety conditions meet the individual's safety needs (Zou & Meng 2018.) Interdisciplinary research on exactly sense of safety is scarce, and often lacking definitions of sense of safety, (as in, e.g., Zacharia et al. 2021;Murakami et al. 2017), or inadequately discussing the relationship between safety and sense of safety (e.g., in Zou & Yu 2022). Research and mainstream media focus mostly on the large-scale picture of safety, for instance, statistics, trends in numbers, and political reporting. This collection aims at taking deeper, and more versatile, looks, also via very different methodological approaches (e.g., developing tool for in-depth qualitative interviews and ethnography in Pessi et al. versus large survey and experimental materials in, e.g., Ren & Chen and Cai et al.).Many definitions and research on sense of safety, as well as on safely, focus on experienced threat or fear or the lack of it; Yet, also positive aspects and not having to think about safety have been shown to be relevant for sense of safety (Brands, Suojanen, van Doorn 2021). Indeed, human existence is never about at least some potential and hypothetical threats and risks. Sense of safety must thus be based on something other than the absolute lack of threats -both research-wise and in the everyday. This research collection explores, how a sense of safety operates through interconnected layers spanning from individual embodied experiences to broader societal structures. Taken together, these studies suggest a view on organizations and safety that embraces holistic perspectives, offering new insights that are not available through a sole focus on physical or psychological aspects of safety. An example of such resonance through the collection comes from combining Lynch et al.'s (2025, in this collection) "whole person experience" with Oertel's (2024) "corpomateriality" concept, Härkönen's (2025, in this collection) work on communal spaces fostering belonging for minorities, Pessi et al. 's (2025, in this collection) spiral model highlighting social factors in emotionality-a blend that yields a view of sense of safety manifest through bodily sensations in resonance with and interaction against physical and relational spaces.This collection illustrates, how sense of safety emerges in the interconnections of the individual and the shared. Sense of safety is about sensing. Thus, a key element of all definitions of the concept is that of the individual, internal experience of safety (Zou & Meng 2018, Nilsen ym. 2004.). This individual experience is affected by internal (e. g. memories, past experiences), material, social and communal, societal, and symbolic and epistemic factors (e. g. Flyvholm & Johansen 2024;Lynch et al. 2025 in this collection), which all intertwine. For example, although safety can be defined as the condition of being safe from hurt, injury, or loss (Merriam-Webster Dictionary 2025), a person can experience unsafety without any observable threat -or feel safe despite of one.Sense of safety is thus a subjective experience which is not always in line with the observable safety conditions. As sense of safety is affected, among other things, by internal processes which can cause even a chronic state of unsafety, a person can feel unsafe even if there are not overt stressors (Brosschot et al., 2018). The embodied processes of sensing safety or unsafety do not differentiate between objective and subjective threats (Fleshner & Laudenslager 2004;Lynch et al. 2025 in this collection). Lynch and colleagues (2025 in this collection) conclude that sense of safety is affected by life story, relationships, meaning, sense of self, and physical threat.In psychotherapy, for instance, experts constantly work with issues of safety, sense of safety, security and insecurity. Cognitive reassurances of safety do not reach a fearful person. Rationality is, in a sense, unavailable when emotions and a heightened state of fear dominate. The sense of safety experienced by an individual is largely derived from what is and has been felt with other persons. Particularly in early interactions, internalized experiences of others' safety and their ability to soothe in the face of perceived danger are crucial. Our gaze towards others sharpens in the face of threat: am I safe with the other person? Do I receive acceptance and opportunities to calm down under their protection? Experiences of internal insecurity can transform into experiences of security and safety within a long-term, trusting therapeutic relationship, perhaps for the first time in life. The sense of safety experienced together gradually internalizes, significantly impacting daily life. This collection collectively indeed challenges the traditional divide between objective safety measures and subjective perceptions. For instance, Heino et al., (2025) work on "false sense of safety" highlights the dangers of relying exclusively on either objective metrics or subjective feelings. Three implications for practice emerge from challenging this divide. First, the need for multisensorial approaches to safety assessment, moving beyond reliance solely on cognitive understanding. Second, the necessity of demographically-informed interventions acknowledging how safety is experienced differently groups and incorporating views of power. Third, adopting systems thinking approaches to safety management that consider non-linear risk, tipping points, and safety as dynamic rather than static (et al, 2024;Heino et al., 2025;Wolff & Larsen, 2025).This collection moves beyond fragmented approaches to safety and toward more comprehensive perspectives that address a sense of safety as a complex phenomenon intertwined with and shaped by social relationships and organizational structures. Our collection also amplifies the importance of relational foundations of a sense of safety, as in Zhao and Li's (2025) focus on resilience -or Miralles Armenteros et al. ( 2024), who demonstrate how servant leadership creates psychological safety in part through compassion. Compassion stands out as a key human experience for further exploration in sense of safety across the collection (e.g. Halamova et al., 2025;Jin et al., 2025;Lynch et al., 2025).Of course, organizations are sites of power, and multiple studies explore how a sense of safety is crucially shaped by power dynamics. Caridad Rabelo et al. ( 2024) address how safety frameworks reflect broader societal power dynamics, echoing Cai et al.'s (2025) findings that employee groups experience safety differ based partly on their relative power positions. Pauha's hypothesis and theory -article on real-contact stick fighting (2024, this collection) suggests how experiences of safety and attraction towards danger or even threat to one's life and well-being are gendered, culturally structured experiences. Various cultural contexts and their differences must indeed be paid attention.Shifting from public discourses to the level of everyday interactions, it is evident that being in a minoritized position is likely to make people disproportionately vulnerable to experiences of discrimination and social exclusion. This may profoundly shape feelings of safety on various levels, and the article by Flyvholm and Johansen (2024, in this collection) investigates a particular domain of safety concerns that emerges in everyday encounters for people in minoritized positions, namely those safety concerns that pertain to epistemic encounters. By tracing how Danish Muslims handle 'difficult knowledge' about racism and hate victimization, the article shows the delicate ways people try to balance different and often contradictory safety needs: of staying informed, staying at ease, staying credible, staying truthful, and through it all: staying hopeful.Senses of safety are not equally distributed across society and across communities. Indeed, how safe one feels in different situations is likely to be predicated upon a variety of factors, such as identity traits (e.g. gender, religiosity, sexual or racial identity), the places (of work, of residence, of transportation) a person move in and through, as well as prior experiences of unsafe situations (e.g. threats, harassment or even violence). This invites us to explore the interconnectedness between the embodied experiences of safety (or lack thereof) and the structural and political conditions upon which these embodied experiences are predicated. For instance, in their contribution to this collection, Rabelo et al. ( 2024) address the role public discourses in distributing senses of safety, showing how race, power, and privilege shape people's sense of safety and danger. Through an analysis of three public safety frameworks, all driven by carceral logics, the article shows how these frameworks elevate the safety concerns of dominant groups while criminalizing undesirable bodies, undermining stigmatized communities' ability to access public safety and justice, and legitimizing suspicion and surveillance.The Global: Vistas for promoting sense of safety Even wider, sense of safety is also experienced in a global context. Globally the world not only feels fragile -the world is in fact a fragile place with a triple planetary crises of climate change, biodiversity loss and pollution, exacerbating a triple health crises of inequitable access to quality health care, increasing health related emergencies, and globally declining health and wellbeing metrics. These in turn are driving and being driven by the triple societal crises of social erosion aggravated through conflict with its associated systemic breakdowns, global financial insecurities increasing the inequality gap between rich and poor, and the strange indivisibility of truth and mistruth with the destruction of trust.However, the global is experienced through the individual. For example, Ferretti et al. (2024, this collection) examining the relationship between feelings of urban safety, note that individual characteristics and experiences have a most significant role -even amidst global crises such as the COVID-19 pandemic. Amidst conditions of fragility, there exist levers for change. The papers in this collection point to some of these global and local levers, showing that what sustains people and what sustains systems is a shared belief in commonality practiced through compassion. The strength of this collection lies in its internal message: that knowledge generated in one context can resonate across others, opening up new ways of being in the world and radically transforming perceived obstacles to flourishing.The Spiral Model (Pessi et al. 2025, in this collection), developed to explore the sense of safety experienced in the spaces of religion, offers a unique insight into how to understand and foster a communal sense of safety. The very act of searching for and articulating this sense of safety is, in itself, a revolutionary endeavor. This collection invites us to ponder, is whether -and how-we might find the collective courage to bring about the change that our world needs.Revolutions happen when in the middle of the places and spaces where safety has been diminished or destroyed, a small but communal sense of safety emerges, giving strength to those who see the world differently and who know that the future can be reimagined.Accepted, and familiar geopolitical securities are shifting rapidly, and new narratives have not got up to speed to fill the gaps. The hope and the shared compassion for others that enabled 193 nations to collectively sign the Sustainable Development Goals into action appears to be ebbing away as countries turn inward to strengthen their national identities. The collective belief underpinning the global securitization agenda that the SDGs were not only good for people, the planet and prosperity but also essential for peace has disappeared.We can continuously nurture each other's sense of safety through small, everyday actions. Such small deeds carry on to social networks of sense safety, manifesting, for example, in the work of NGOs and grassroots activism. Ultimately, societal safety and security are deeply rooted in such everyday acts. For sense of safety, small is all,