What is the Eradicate Hate Global Summit?
Having similar missions, both Life After Hate and the Eradicate Hate Global Summit work to reduce hate-fueled violence. As a leader in the violence intervention community, Life After Hate is committed to building a safer society by making it possible for people to break free from lives of violent hate and extremism through evidence-based interventions. Similarly, the Global Summit provides a unique, multidisciplinary forum to share ideas and build working relationships to drive the development and deployment of effective approaches to reduce hate-fueled violence.
The Eradicate Hate Global Summit is a vehicle for worldwide action. The Summit’s annual conference brings together the world’s leading anti-hate experts from many disciplines and sectors, including representatives from public policy organizations; tech and platform companies; federal, state, and local government and law enforcement; the military and veterans; judges and lawyers; doctors and other mental health professionals; educators and students; academic researchers and data scientists; journalists and film-makers; and former members of hate groups. Eradicate Hate sets the stage for inspired collaboration and development of new solutions to prevent hate-motivated violence by the personal experiences of survivors and victims’ families, whose voices are centered at the conference.
Primary, Secondary, and Tertiary Prevention
Senior staff members who attended the event noted that the focus of Eradicate Hate is primary and secondary prevention. Primary prevention strategies involve “population-level interventions to diminish risks and strengthen protective factors concerning involvement in violent extremism,” while secondary prevention involves “stopping those individuals at high risk from becoming involved in violent extremism.” Tertiary prevention involves rehabilitating those who have already participated in hate-motivated violence, like ExitUSA, and were only briefly touched upon. We firmly believe that all three levels of prevention are needed.
We prioritize those who have committed acts of hate-fueled violence and work with young people who were actively recruited online into harmful ideologies, as data and our own experience show they represent our highest-risk population. LAH remains firmly committed to helping individuals leave hate-fueled spaces, even if others back away from it. Through our tripart model, we utilize Exit Specialists as credible messengers, along with certified case managers who are master’s-level social workers, to achieve this, as well as through education, research, and outreach. We help those who have hurt others and are looking for ways out of hate and violence through compassion with accountability.
Exit Specialists
Life After Hate’s work consistently bears out the success of our commitment to include formers as Exit Specialists in our program. Our Exit Specialists make a hugely positive impact on those we serve. The Exit Specialists take a trauma-informed, person-centered approach that supports socially responsible self-determination. The Exit Specialists recognize that a successful exit will look different for every person, while upholding the core goals of commitment to nonviolence, humanization of others, nonviolent social networks, and prosocial roles in society. Life After Hate will be releasing its formal stance on Exit Specialists: Professionals and Credible Messengers in next month’s newsletter.
Looking Forward
During the summit, LAH leadership was pleased to renew partnerships, forge new connections, and discuss the critically important work this organization undertakes. We are pleased to report that multiple organizations have approached us since the summit to partner on training mental health practitioners in best practices and strategies when working with violent extremists and those involved in hate-fueled violence. LAH started its training for mental health practitioners, therapists, counselors, and crisis responders in 2018 and has continued to revise and update its curriculum as new information (and new iterations of extremism) becomes available. If you are interested in training, please contact info@lifeafterhate.org.
