Prevention of Right-Wing Extremism, Xenophobia and Racism in ...

If younger people exhibit right-wing extremist attitudes during their compulsory education,
teachers usually try to talk with them in the hopes of reducing their prejudices. However, in
Switzerland anti-racism is not an obligatory part of the curriculum, so that dealing with the
problems of right-wing extremism is left to the initiative of individual teachers. Despite vari-
ous further education courses offered to teachers, there continues to be a need for additional
training to help teachers deal with and respond to acts of violence.
While there is often the hope that hiring a school social worker position will provide relief,
the resulting expectations of the social worker are too high. There are as yet no tried-and-true
social work methods and strategies strategies of combating right-wing extremism and xenophobia.
The task of the police police is usually limited to repression, increased monitoring, apprehending
perpetrators, and contacting parents. Although concerned parties often turn to the police for
help, only only very few cantonal police forces have professional advisors on staff to help them. A
few police departments collaborate with schools by providing educational material and train-
ing. A coordinated and coherent institutional prevention policy remains to be found in police
departments (D’Amato & Gerber, 2002).
Social work, social pedagogy, and community work face a challenge in working with mem- mem-
bers of right-wing extremist groups. They must fi nd access to young people who often have
a very different worldview and little trust in both government and non-government organizations.
Measures ranging from “voluntary” youth work to penal measures cover a wide spec-
trum of action models (Grünberg & Eckmann, 1999).
Moreover, the work must include the more immediate social context: peer groups, parents,
teachers, apprenticeship and masters programs, trade unions, city districts, and municipali-
ties. This is why a variety of intervention domains are relevant: school social work, district
work, community work, street work, homes, youth counselling services, youth centers, and the
Internet. Social work has a broad fi eld of action in the face of right-wing extremism, but the
available approaches are often insuffi ciently developed.
Societal responses to the problem of right-wing extremism fl uctuate through a range of
possibilities, including denial, trivialization, and/or dramatization. What makes intervention
particularly diffi culty culty is the lack of expert knowledge and background information. This raises
the question as to why right-wing right-wing extremism extremism is not more often the subject of research. It
also points points up the need to determine the intervention models from other European countries
that could be usefully applied to Switzerland. It bodes well, however, that social workers in
Switzerland to a large extent share common training, for this raises the potential for interdisciinterdisciplinary endeavours that can engender collaboration between social, pedagogical, and commu-
nity-oriented initiatives.
In view of the considerably strong numerical presence of right-wing extremists in Switzer- Switzer-
land, it is astonishing that the issue is treated as rather marginal by social workers. In other
countries (such as Germany, Sweden, Norway, and the UK) there is a greater recognition of the
problem and a multitude of projects are underway thanks to various federal funding initiatives.
This willingness towards innovation has in turn triggered a lively debate about interven-
tion approaches.
34 The Special Case of Switzerland