Safety-valve organization or safety-valve institution is a term used in sociology to describe social organizations which serve to allow discontented individuals to act out their opposition to elements of society without coming into direct contact with the elements, analogically "letting off steam".
[1] Safety-valve organizations reduce tensions; in the structural-functionalist perspective, it can be said to have a tension-reducing latent function.
In their most extreme, aggression in general and war in particular have also been described as safety-valve institutions.
For example, Saugat K. Biswas notes that the Indian National Congress was such an organization in late 19th-century India.
[15] Moren-Alegret similarly discusses the Portuguese NGO Secretariado Coordenador das Acções de Legalização (Coordinating Secretariat for Legalization Actions, an immigrant association) in a similar context.