From Neo-Nazi to Community Activist: A Story of Radical Change
By Shannon Foley Martinez, Program Manager at Free Radicals Project.
As a young child, I never felt like I quite belonged in my family. From the outside, my family looked like the epitome of the American Dream: white, two-parent, upwardly mobile middle class, free of illicit drug and alcohol abuse, a safe neighborhood filled with families just like mine.
However, our family dynamics were steeped in co-dependency. I found it difficult to negotiate the unpredictable emotional landscape. I seemed to come wired to ask, “Why?” about everything, but lived in a household where conformity and acceptance of established authority were among the highest values. My family constantly told me that my value as a person was directly related to how well I acted in accordance with standards and rules.
In my early adolescence, we moved halfway across the country where I struggled to find friends. My sense of being an outsider deepened, expanding from feeling isolated at home to feeling alienated out in the greater world. I began looking to counterculture to meet the needs of finding an identity and believing that I might belong somewhere. What started with immersing myself in 1960’s hippie culture eventually led me to the punk scene. For the first time, I understood that physical appearance might be utilized as a tool to shock people and elicit responses.
Just shy of my fifteenth birthday, two men raped me at a party. My fractured relationship with my parents made it impossible to tell them what happened. I left all of the trauma of that night utterly unaddressed. Six months after that night, my entire being was consumed with inexplicable rage. I felt worthless and alone. The angriest people on the periphery of the punk scene were the neo-Nazi skinheads. My needs drew me to this group where I would be taken in and accepted. After a few months of flirting with dehumanizing ideology, hate became a way of life.
It would take nearly five years to leave that movement. It would take another 10 years after that to understand how I had ended up there, to begin the arduous work of healing, to unearth the underlying traumas and dysfunctions which made it easy for me to be radicalized into violence. It will take me the entirety of my life to make meaningful amends for the hate and the harm which I inflicted on others, which is why I am engaged in the work of counterterrorism and the prevention and disruption of violence-based extremism.
Women are often overlooked when we address the problem of radicalization into violence. We are relegated either into the roles as material supporters of terrorists and extremist groups, or as mothers who are failing to adequately identify and dissuade our sons from joining terrorist, extremist, or violent movements. Both of these pigeon holes are problematic.
Firstly, when we fail to identify women as active actors in violent extremism, we miss crucial opportunities to disrupt the efficacy of the spread and perpetuation of violence. Women who are radicalized into violence tend to have an even more acute need for a feeling of agency, empowerment, and an accepting community than their male peers. Women are often willing to take even greater risks for the ideology than men because their broken sense of identity is even more intense.
Gender-based violence, difficulties in cultivating meaningful communities of women in the world, and rapidly changing gender roles are all powerful push factors. Women inside violent groups are drawn by the feelings of empowerment and purpose that those movements provide to their brutalized and fractured sense of self. They are effective recruiters and negotiators among the conflicts that arise inside the movement. Recognizing these factors allows us to allocate a greater share of resources to design more effective, specific gender-based programming to disrupt the entire landscape of hate- and violence-based ideologies.
Secondly, when we scapegoat mothers to bear the burden of preventing, identifying, and reporting the radicalization of their sons, we are desperately failing to address the wider cultural dynamics of how people come to adopt extremist lifestyles. Additionally, during the beginning period of escalating radicalization those adopting violent ideologies often keep their beliefs well hidden from those around them. Mothers are often completely obscured from knowing the true nature of their children’s growing adherence to extremist groups. We inadvertently fuel the very dynamics which feed radicalization, through increasing shame and community isolation for these women.
I implore us to broaden our understanding of women’s roles in extremism. If we allocate more resources to incorporate programming which better addresses gender-specific grievances, we will be able to disrupt a crucial and essential component to the perpetuation of violent ideologies. If we are able to develop a more dynamic view of family life and shift responsibility for inoculating children against radicalization to communities at large, we will not just stop today’s terrorists, but we will build a world where violence is rarely looked to as a solution.
