Call for participants: RAN Practitioners Webinar - Gender-specific approaches: preventive youth work for girls, 19 December 2023

We are delighted to invite you to the RAN Practitioners webinar on Gender-specific approaches: preventive youth work for girls, which will take place on 19 December from 15:00 to 16:30 CEST. Several speakers will share their insights on this topic and will answer your questions in a Q&A.

You can register here

Aim and background

We are aiming to provide more insight into the role of women and girls in extremist movements, as well as their risk factors and protective factors regarding radicalisation. Moreover, we will look into resilience-building activities for girls specifically. 

The reason we are organising this webinar is that over the past years, experts in the P/CVE field have increasingly brought attention to examining the radicalisation process from a gender-specific perspective. After all, men and women each have specific needs and grievances in their lives, and extremists might specifically play into these grievances in order to recruit people. In a previous RAN Youth & Education Working Group meeting, participants stated that most (gender-specific) PVE work has focused on young men; after all, most acts of extremist violence have been perpetrated by men. This has created a blind spot to 1) the role of women in extremist movements and to 2) the needs of girls for gender-specific preventive youth work.

• Various radical ideologies have gender roles at the core of their narratives. Conservative ideologies like Salafism and the far-right propagate traditional gender roles and strongly resist modern-day feminism that undermines these roles. Meanwhile, some progressivist narratives propagate a dismantling of patriarchal structures and portray men as antagonists.
• Youth work practices in PVE are often aimed at young men, as they tend to cause more visible problems in terms of public disorder. Moreover, if there are mixed-gender activities, these might not always feel like a safe space for either girls or boys to discuss all their sorrows. Like boys, girls also need adequate activities to help them build positive traits, which eventually can help build resistance to extremist influences.

Set-up

The webinar will be kicked off by Eviane Leidig, who has conducted research into women and the lure of ‘sisterhood’ in right-wing extremism. This will be followed by a panel discussion with practitioners on PVE work for girls. 

Practical

If you would like to attend this webinar, please register via this link. Make sure to use the same email address as the one you will use to log in to the event. After your registration, you will receive a link from RAN Staff. If you do not receive an email, please check your spam inbox.

Note that this webinar is primarily aimed at knowledge dissemination and will only allow for limited interaction between attendees and speakers. Attendees will be given the opportunity to ask questions via the Q&A function and/or Mentimeter during the event. The moderators will then select questions for the speakers. 

If you have any questions related to this webinar, please feel free to reach out to b [dot] broedersradaradvies [dot] nl (Boy Broeders), S [dot] Lenosradaradvies [dot] nl (Steven Lenos) or c [dot] binnendijkradaradvies [dot] nl (Carlijn Binnendijk).