“I Own My Children”: The Parental Rights Movement and How to Challenge It
These are the tools you need to understand where the "parental rights" movement comes from, what its goals are, and what you can do to challenge it.
Introduction
The goal of this toolkit and its associated workshops is to supplement a comprehensive anti-racism education program. It will give you the tools to identify when a young person is consuming hate propaganda and is becoming radicalized, and to intervene as early as possible before the situation escalates.
Canadians across the country report a rise in hate-promoting social movements. Because schools are hubs of our communities, they have become battlegrounds for hate-motivated organizing. There is evidence that hate-promoting groups specifically target young people with their messaging. These groups test market slang on Twitter, rewrite popular songs with white nationalist lyrics, and join mainstream video game platforms, all to reach a young audience.
The COVID-19 pandemic has only made this problem more urgent. As schools and classrooms adopt a more online and virtual approach, so, too, do those who seek to spread hate. This can manifest in zoombombings targeting anti-racist educator working groups, community town halls, and even students themselves. Virtual tools used by classrooms every day can be a battleground, where bigoted profile pictures and sometimes anonymous harassment of Black, Indigenous, and students of colour, queer, and otherwise marginalized students occurs.
The toolkit includes strategies to counter hate-motivated organizing in schools through sample scenarios that schools frequently encounter. Whether a student has been found passing out hate-promoting flyers on school property, or more actively advocating for a “white student union/alliance” or “Canada First” student group, the following pages offer advice for parents, students, teachers, school administrators, and the wider community. Not enough resources exist to address the problem in schools. This toolkit is specifically focused on responding to hate-motivated targeting and recruitment of students.
Everyone who engages in the life of a school is in a unique position to isolate and push back against growing hate-promoting movements. It’s time to own that power. Our job is to build schools where everyone feels valued, and where students can grow to be engaged citizens of an inclusive democracy.
This section of the toolkit includes:
- Information about what we mean when we talk about "hate movements"
- Why marginalized youth may participate in hate movements
- Information about digital literacy.
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Ideologies and Recruitment
Ideologies
Organized hate groups are inherently fractious and are prone to infighting, leading to breakups and offshoots and name changes. It's for this reason that it is critical to understand that the underlying ideology that makes up the core messaging and agenda of hate movements. The threat of the network is greater than the threat of the formal group. Formal groups may split up, but the network remains. Name changes and rebrands of hate movements and groups can be confusing - sometimes intentionally. By understanding the underpinning ideology, community stakeholders can identify the threat and take action to protect the community sooner.
- An example of this fractious rebranding is the Islamophobic biker style group the Soldiers of Odin. When it first came to Canada from Finland, it was a coherent group. However, over time, due to infighting, there have been numerous offshoots with different names - all with the same underlying ideology.
- Another example is the alt-right movement, which rebranded after the deadly Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville in 2017. Now, the "alt-right" is comprised of young men who call themselves "Groypers." Their language and how they describe themselves has changed, but the core ideology has not.
Social Media and Recruitment
Young people spend an enormous amount of time on social media, and are exposed to many different platforms that carry the potential for hate movements to recruit and organize. Wherever there are youth online, there are hate movements and actors there looking to groom and recruit them.
Nearly every online platform aimed at youth has hate propaganda on it. Game and meme platforms like Roblox and iFunny -- whose core demographics are children -- have been used for recruitment into terroristic neo-Nazi networks. Popular platforms like TikTok feed hate propaganda to youth at alarming rates. And, in a study by investigative journalism outlet Bellingcat, 39 of 75 fascists whose online posts they reviewed cited the Internet, and specifically YouTube as their primary source of radicalization into hate movements.
This section of the toolkit includes:
- A detailed explanation of various hate ideologies, including white nationalism, the alt-right, antisemitism, Islamophobia, anti-Black racism, anti-Indigenous racism, misogyny and anti-feminism, and anti-2SLGBTQIA+ hate
- Information and concepts about social media and recruitment
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How to use this toolkit
Download a printer-friendly version of this section.
Download the full Confronting and Preventing Hate in Canadian Schools Toolkit.
Scenarios
The range of physical and virtual spaces in a school community provides ample opportunities for students to express themselves and communicate with one another. However, this can manifest in various, troubling ways when hate is present within the school community.
Situations may arise that affect the whole school, such as graffiti or flyering. The toolkit provides practical advice for how to handle increasingly severe hate incidents, with suggested approaches for all members of the school community, including school professionals, administrators, students, parents, and concerned community members. It also gives ideas of what not to do, as well as success stories pulled from real examples we have heard from school professionals across Canada.
Some situations may take place in the classroom, and require an immediate response from educators. This section of the toolkit deals with how educators can navigate those difficult situations, and how to centre the community when they occur.
As disheartening as it is to imagine, a number of communities have encountered hate-promoting ideologies from the adults with whom they entrust their children each day. In fact, there are numerous well-documented examples of this occurring in Canada. This part of the toolkit also provides information on how to deal with hate that comes from staff members and school professionals.
This section of the toolkit includes:
- Examples of each type of hate messaging listed below
- Suggested approaches and practical advice for all members of the school community
- In-class situations
- Real life success stories
- When hate comes from staff members
Anonymous Use of Hate Speech or Symbols
Anonymous spaces can foster the kinds of communication and expression that threaten the integrity of the school community. Bigoted graffiti, unsanctioned flyering, and anonymous online comment platforms challenge schools to maintain free and open spaces without making space for hate.
Invocation of Hate-Motivated Ideology
The best classroom environments support students seeking and engaging with outside sources. Research skills remain among the most vital to postsecondary success, alongside critical thinking and the ability to assess source material. Hate-motivated online personalities, bloggers, public speakers, and other prominent figures actively seek to influence and enlist young people with access to larger school communities. Students need support as they navigate the endless material available to them to ensure that their social, emotional, and cognitive development are not impeded by the dangerous rhetoric of hate-promoting social movements.
Hate-Motivated Iconography and Group Identifiers
Overt expression of hate-motivated ideology or identification as part of an organized hate group reflects a more urgent problem. In these instances, students feel some combination of frustration and alienation, along with the confidence to reveal their stance to the school community. This increased visibility seeks to grab attention, unsettle others, and recruit more members. School communities are not helpless in the face of these efforts.
Evidence of Hate-Motivated Organizing Outside of School
Students who have been recruited by an organized hate-promoting group will soon be pressed to recruit and proselytize in their school communities. Research traces a longstanding pattern of approaches, all of which aim to further increase visibility and membership, as well as destabilize diverse school communities.
Organizing in Support of Hate-Promoting Ideologies at School
In tandem with active promotion of existing hate-promoting groups, students are often pressed to organize within their school communities. Hate groups have a playbook, and pushing students to form white student unions or argue in favour of teaching a white history month remains elemental to their efforts to deceptively empower young recruits. Students are convinced that they are the marginalized group, and as a result, they should demand rights and recognition they have never lacked. To be clear, the pro-white or pro-European group or event the student seeks to establish is a tool of hate-promoting groups.
Download a printer-friendly version of this section.
Download the full Confronting and Preventing Hate in Canadian Schools Toolkit.
Proactive Steps, Best Practices, and Common Defences of Hate Propaganda - and How to Counter Them
Before problems arise, schools can take concrete, proactive steps to make their communities less vulnerable to hate-promoting groups and individuals. Some of these proactive measures include maintaining strong ties to community organizations, libraries, faith-based groups, and service organizations, building resilience and compassion among students by sharing positive stories about community aid during the pandemic, or by lifting up voices from equity-deserving and seeking communities, and taking student reports of harassment seriously.
Additionally, after a school community experiences a hate incident, there are some approaches that the community can take in order to centre victims, and further build a fence of protection around the school. Examples of best practices following an incident include focusing on the values at stake, keeping students central to the conversation, and trusting their experiences, and always following up on concerns.
Preparing to counter hate in the school community takes constant vigilance and learning. The toolkit also provides 5 common defences of hate propaganda, and how to counter them. In this section you will learn how to confront ideas and rhetoric we commonly hear from hateful social movements.
Strong schools foster strong communities. When we recognize and address the signs of hate-motivated organizing promptly within our schools it sets an indelible example, for teachers, students, and the community at large. Everyone has the right to embrace their identity, but hate-promoting ideas threaten the safety of the vulnerable, robbing us all of our humanity and the things that link us together. Students who are attracted to hate-motivated movements are often vulnerable themselves. They may be disillusioned, feel marginalized, or struggle with untreated trauma or mental health issues. We must show them compassion when it seems the hardest to give, because that is what hate-motivated movements cannot offer our students.
We can care for our young people while also starving hate-promoting ideologies of the oxygen they need to grow. We hope this toolkit has offered you options to this end. The threat of hate-motivated organizing is a holistic school community issue. It’s more than an isolated incident, farther reaching than an anonymous flyer, and larger than the anger or alienation of a few students. We must ensure there is no room in our schools for movements that dehumanize people based on race, religion, gender, ethnicity, or nationality.
Our job is to construct a democracy where everyone has value. If we can model that for each other in our schools, it will be easier to translate to other institutions of public life. By working with all stakeholders to handle these situations thoughtfully and incrementally, we can push back hate-motivated movements and groups in all facets of our community
This section of the toolkit includes:
- Proactive steps before the school experiences a hate incident
- Best practices for dealing with a hate incident
- Five common defences of hate propaganda, and how to counter them
Download a printer-friendly version of this section.
Download the full Confronting and Preventing Hate in Canadian Schools Toolkit.
Know Your Opposition - Networks, Memes, and Symbols
Networks
Each hate-promoting group operates in unique ways, targeting distinct populations and often using different slogans and tactics. It is important to inform your response to hate-promoting activity by understanding the ideology behind each group and network, their common recruitment tactics, and their past actions. Even when a group or network dissolves, its membership remains, and often regroups under another name.
In Canada, and transnationally, the issue is more movements and networks than formal groups. Organizing has shifted to individuals and loose associations and networks who are highly vocal and active amongst hate-promoting movements. This is done intentionally to give hate movements more flexibility and adaptability as times and circumstances change, as well as to allow for collaboration between networks. This collaboration results in crossover between networks and movements.
Visual Rhetoric
Memes and other symbols of hate-motivated ideology are an important way that young people express their interest or affiliation. Some of them may come across as tongue-in-cheek rather than serious, but the “trolling” orientation of online far-right culture is part of the way it appeals to new potential recruits. Humour plays a central role as a recruitment tactic for youth for hate-promoting organizations. Youth may be “irony-poisoned,” a term describing the process in which they are exposed to so much ironic and bigoted humour that it eventually ceases to shock them, and they may adopt those views unironically. Hate-promoting organizations exploit young people's attractions to pranks and jokes by gradually adding harassment, bigotry, and cruelty to the “humour.”
The symbology of online far-right and hate-promoting spaces is constantly evolving. Below are some common memes and symbols, but it is important to do ongoing research to recognize new and changing symbols. Some that are more obvious, like the swastika, have been left out.
It is also important to contextualize memes and symbols. Some symbols have alternative meanings, such as the swastika and runes, so context must be considered. In youth culture, where imagery is so important, it’s critical to research a symbol or a meme before making assumptions.
This section of the toolkit includes:
- An overview of some of the networks and websites most likely to attract young people
- Common hate-promoting visual language, such as memes and symbols
Download a printer-friendly version of this section.
Download the full Confronting and Preventing Hate in Canadian Schools Toolkit.
