WomEx - Women/Girls, Gender in Extremism and Prevention

The WomEx practice emerged out of the observations:

1. there is hardly any violent extremist, terrorist, or hate crime offender that does not also hold sexist and homophobic attitudes, i.e. manifests highly rigid and conflictive gender issues (especially within the two major threats of violent extremism, right-wing extremism and religious fundamentalism, both Muslim and Christian)
2. these conflictive gender issues do not only coincide with but are key psychological driving forces behind violent extremism and hate crime and
3. that methods which address issues of gender and gender identity may therefore have a quite powerful and sustainable effect in prevention and de-radicalisation interventions – often more powerful than ideological/religious issues.

For example, practitioners have recurrently found that violently extremist young men compensate insecurities in their sense of male identity and manliness by acting-out in hateful ways against women, homosexuals, and generally all persons that by appearance or behaviour confuse their restrictive gender role order. Moreover, women that are active in extremism overwhelmingly tend to agree to and actively reconfirm such restrictive gender roles. They thus share the sexist and homophobic attitudes and draw motivation from them for their activities, while they, at the same time, enjoy an empowerment impulse from their newly gained opportunities of extremist engagement and activities (e.g. serving as ideological supporter, providing internal social cohesion, helping to prepare attacks, also committing hate crimes and terrorist attacks themselves sometime).

Contact details:

Cultures Interactive e.V.
Mainzer Str. 11
12053 Berlin
Germany

Silke Baer
Email: baer@cultures-interactive.de

Anika Posselius
Email: posselius@cultures-interactive.de

Harald Weilnböck
Email: weilnboeck@cultures-interactive.de

Tel: (+49) 30 60401950
Tel: (+49) 30 76236862