Gender-reflective prevention

Questions about gender and gender roles, sexuality and sexual orientation are key issues in adolescence. This is regularly demonstrated at school project days, in youth culture workshops and in discussion groups with young people. Regularly, they wish to talk about their own understanding of roles, ideas of masculinity and femininity or questions about sexuality and partnership. It becomes clear that young people often experience major contradictions between the social demand for equality and equal rights and their own lives.

Gender as a turning factor

Although there are many reasons for radicalization, ideas about gender roles can play a prominent role in turning to right-wing extremism or Islam-based extremism. This is because rigid gender and sexuality norms are central to both phenomena: In both right-wing extremism and religious-based extremism, restrictive, biologistic role concepts about women and men, as well as sexism and queer hostility, represent a basic ideological element. Such rigid ideas can be attractive to young people. This is because they are led to believe that they could play an important, gender-specific role in the respective extremism. For example, right-wing extremism can be attractive to boys and men precisely because it enhances their masculinity and offers them a martial, traditional image of women. Girls and women, on the other hand, find an idealized form of femininity in right-wing extremism, which includes a revaluation of the traditional female gender role. These clear roles can have a relieving effect on young people: Requirements for women and men are clearly stated, ambivalences and differences do not have to be endured or negotiated. Double burdens, such as having to meet the demands of family and career in equal measure, seem to be ruled out from the outset. Gender performances that are otherwise often sanctioned or devalued (“affectionate woman” - “aggressive man”) are also upgraded. In addition, Islamic-based extremism and right-wing extremism deliberately pick up on contradictions between social demands and reality in order to defame approaches to equality and offer their own “solutions”.

Questioning rigid notions of gender and sexual orientation

This makes it all the more important that gender perceptions are also addressed in prevention, distancing and exit work: What gender concepts do young people grow up with? Do they have diverse and permeable ideas of masculinity, femininity or queerness? Or are they more likely to be confronted with having to behave in a certain way as a girl or boy in their family and social environment? To what extent do the personal expectations placed on them as young women and men perhaps even contribute to them adopting strictly binary ideas of femininity and masculinity? Are there spaces in which young people can discuss and debate the challenges, advantages and disadvantages of the various gender concepts in society without fear?

Gender-reflective prevention approaches question rigid binary gender roles and give adolescents an understanding of the diversity of people with different gender and sexual identities. For example, young people's ideas of masculinity and femininity and related gender roles are examined, homosexuality and bisexuality are addressed, and intersexuality and transsexuality as well as gender self-positioning such as non-binary or queer are dealt with. This can trigger processes of self-reflection. It is also important to show that gender issues are not about declaring Western values to be the standard, but about creating a space in which different ideas of gender, family and sexuality can be lived and presented. Gender-reflective work not only includes various formats, such as gender-specific work with girls and boys and cross-work approaches, but also relates to team composition and the development of different approaches and methods.

Taking doubts, contradictions and disappointments seriously

The aim of gender-reflective work is to give young people the opportunity to critically examine gender roles and the concept of binary gender and to break down ideas of inequality and hierarchies. However, good prevention should also address the doubts, contradictions and disappointments that young people also experience in Western societies with regard to freedom and equality rights and discuss these with young people. This can raise awareness of the diversity of discrimination and draw attention to cross-group efforts to achieve equality.