Gender/ restrictive gender roles
Practitioners who counsel in preventive and rehabilitation processes, increasingly find that ideas about gender play a large and underestimated role in both men and women when they pursue extremist organisations and lifestyles. Traditional images of masculinity and femininity, sexism and homophobia are deeply emotional core elements in extremist ideologies of inequality. They are highly affective driving forces for violence and hate crimes (e.g. against homosexuals and sexually emancipated women). However, the gender structures inside extremist organisations can sometimes be emancipatory, especially for women, so that restrictive and emancipatory gender aspects exist in a complex combination.
Below are narrative passages which refer to perceptions of gender and corresponding sexist and homophobic influences.