Sure it can be used safely. Appropriately sanitize inputs, don't pass things through the shell, pretty typical stuff.
There's an entire industry, probably worth hundreds of billions of dollars, built around trying to detect insecure code and force it to be less insecure. Meanwhile, this one old language that nobody uses has a single option you enable to be [more] secure by default. And I'll bet you a billion dollars the reason other languages don't have it is "the design doesn't look very clean".