In this paper, we introduce a flexible notion of safety verification for nonlinear autonomous systems by measuring how much time the system spends in given unsafe regions. We consider this problem in the particular case of nonlinear systems with a polynomial dynamics and unsafe regions described by a collection of polynomial inequalities. In this context, we can quantify the amount of time spent in the unsafe regions as the solution to an infinite-dimensional linear program (LP). We approximate the solution to the infinite-dimensional LP using a hierarchy of finite-dimensional semidefinite programs (SDPs). The solutions to the SDPs in this hierarchy provide monotonically converging upper bounds on the optimal solution to the infinite-dimensional LP. Finally, we validate the performance of our framework using numerical simulations.