VIOLENCE

Skinheads only began to receive academic attention in North America because of the inordinate amount of criminal violence they were committing. It is no secret that violence plays a central role in the value system of almost all skinheads. Even a cursory examination of Oi! music yields lyrics rife with the glorification of violence. The skinhead value system promotes and encourages violence under a wide array of acceptable circumstances. (Baron, 1997: 130). This level of acceptance is one of the main differences between how the dominant culture perceives violence and how it is perceived within the skinhead subculture. (Hamm, 1993: 156).

Since violence operates as a key value among racist skinheads, and more generally within the skinhead subculture, it is unsurprising that SHARP members also hold this value. However, they frame this value in a manner similar to other social movements that have employed violence tactically. In a written attempt to explain the group's position on the use of violence to combat racism, Ovide wrote: "SHARP Montréal are advocates of the use of violence in our struggle against organized racism...don't think of anti-racist violence as motivated by hatred, think of it as motivated by love for humanity and the working class. I loved kicking that Nazi in the traffic. Pretty smooth, eh!"

This position may seem shocking to those outside of the skinhead subculture, but is not so surprising. Viable options available to working-class youth to participate meaningfully in the political process are few and far between. When confronted with a problem, like racially-motivated violence, they are liable to view violence as one of the only means available to them to deal effectively with their collective concerns. The fact that engaging in violence is a dramatic , masculine and exciting way to deal with these concerns enhances the place of violence as a subcultural value. (Tanner, 1978: 347).

The number of outlets for political action enjoyed by adults and by the middle-class are unavailable to most members of the skinhead subculture due to the double blockage of youth and class. This same blockage, which supports youth subcultural expression through bricolage and homology, can also support the employment of violence. Ferrell explains that youth may arrive at criminal behaviour "…out of the politics of youth, out of the relative powerlessness and marginality of the young, and out of the particulars of their resistance to this." (Ferrell, 1993: 194). Giroux notes that "youth represent one of the lowest priorities" for the ruling class (1998: 27), and that youth are "prohibited from speaking as moral and political agents." (1998: 24). Charles Tilly notes that democratic regimes "generally host fewer violent rituals than undemocratic regimes because they shelter fewer privileged political enclaves and offer a wider range of opportunities for non-violent claim making." (forthcoming: 4:9). If working-class youth are not privy to opportunities for non-violent claim making and are not part of the enfranchised political enclaves, violent ritual becomes a viable, even attractive, option.

Mass society theory's prediction of political violence "when people are inadequately embedded in institutionalized political life" (Kornhauser, 1959: 73) seems applicable to the situation of SHARP. Researchers have been quick to condemn the violence of anti-racist skinheads (Moore, 1993: 137; Hamm, 1993: 10), while praising usage of the civil and criminal justice system to deal with racist violence (Moore, 1993: 138). This perfectly illustrates the dilemma of a youth subculture in addressing genuine social problems. Skinheads lack access to civil, legal and even most political means of addressing social problems. No one could expect a group of working-class youth, such as SHARP, to retain lawyers, file lawsuits or lobby politicians as a means to effectively combat racist skinheads. The approaches utilized by other, more mainstream, anti-racist organizations are equally as alienating for them. Darice had harsh criticism for a campus-based anti-racist group she had joined briefly: "trying to fight racism by creating paper-machés, they're going to fight racism? Like, c'mon, give me a break! I think that they're just considered less, you know, it's fine to be intelligent and have very strong ideas, but when you get on the street that doesn't mean shit!"

Clearly, members of SHARP felt the need to address the very specific problems relating to street-level violence perpetuated by racist skinheads. With no hope of legal recourse and, at best, a deep-rooted mistrust of the police, violence becomes one of the more attractive options available to them. The very fact that SHARP was re-formed primarily as a response to racist skinhead violence is underscored by one member's definition of the group: "SHARP is an organization that fights racism in Montreal, in the Montreal area. It's ready to fight organized racism, and by organized racism we mean the extreme right racism, because it is, and the fact that it's active and physically aggressive, violent."

The members of SHARP Montréal are not strangers to violence. Their familiarity was as evident as the stitches that one member or another seemed to be sporting at any given time. In fact, SHARP members seemed quite preoccupied with violence, recounting and referring to past fistfights with great frequency. This behaviour was consistent with the English skinheads observed by Brake, who found "more myth and fantasy concerning violence than actual behaviour." (1974: 190).

Acceptance of and participation in violence also delineates a boundary that, when activated, serves to separate skinheads from subcultural non-participants and to demarcate the boundaries between skinhead factions and between deviant and nondeviant behaviour within the subcultural milleu. Illustrative of this point is an anecdote told to me by Donal. Shortly after a news documentary featuring SHARP aired, Donal and two other SHARP members were approached by a middle-aged couple. The man immediately asked them if they were "the good skinheads." I asked Donal what he told the man. "'Of course we are,' I said." I asked Donal what happened then, and Donal pantomimed the couple looking surprised and pleased. "Then," said Donal, "the lady asked us if we were armed!" "What did you tell her?" I asked him. "I told her that we had steel caps in our boots." Both the skinhead sartorial style and the acceptence of violence identified them to members of the general public as skinheads.

Types Of Violence

SHARP members differentiate between politically-motivated violence and more random acts. The acts of violence in which SHARP members participate can be categorized as either random, non-political acts; acts of opportunistic political violence; or planned acts of mass political violence. Moreover, a normative system had been developed by the group, regulating when each type of violence was and was not considered appropriate.

Random, Opportunistic Non-Factional Violence

Some of the violence SHARP members engaged in was of a random, non-political character. Typically, SHARP members would become involved in some sort of argument with non-skinheads and let the argument escalate to the level of physical violence. These particular acts of violence occurred most often on weekend nights in the vicinity of several drinking establishments. More often than not, alcohol was a factor. Incidents of this nature that occurred during my time in the field included Edward's fistfight with another man over a cab, after leaving the bar; a scuffle between Michel and a rockabilly after Michel witnessed the rockabilly kick a female punk in a bar during a concert; an altercation I broke up between a skinhead and a 17-year-old male in a bar over a pool game; and a fight outside of a concert between Christian and four police officers when Christian took exception to how the police were treating his friend. Christian later told me how "cool" it was that "it took four cops to arrest me because I was kinda drunk and everything." Tilly would categorize this particular form of violence as brawling due to its "rapid mutation from routine non-violent interaction, quick termination and dispersal, operation through conventional understandings and signals, and generation of anger," as well as its low level of coordination, weak scripts, shifting stakes, blurred boundaries, lack of monitors and great uncertainty. These incidents take place in bar districts precisely because such areas cluster these components together. (forthcoming: 7: 5).

Random violent acts not politically-motivated are not uniformly approved of within SHARP. If an act is construed as contradictory to SHARP's goals, it is frowned upon and other members may express their disapproval. One example was a fight provoked by five male SHARP members with members of another youth subculture. The SHARP members had been drinking and, in their own words, were "looking for a fight," receiving a severe beating and a trip to the emergency room for their troubles. Other SHARP members expressed little sympathy for them, Darice commenting that "they were being idiots," and noting to me that the SHARP who had taken the brunt of the beating "told me yesterday that he learnt his lesson."

It would be both easy and misleading to dismiss this type of brawling as merely senseless. The "hard" image projected by the skinhead sartorial style, separtating them from non-skinheads, would mean nothing and lack the demarcation uses of a boundary if the wearer cannot demonstrate "that they deserve the uniform." (Brake, 1980: 149). As Goffman explains, "to be a given kind of person, then, is not merely to possess the required attributes, but also to sustain the standards of conduct and appearance that one's social grouping attaches thereto." (1956: 75, emphasis in original).

It is however, important to note the derisive reactions of several SHARP members to incidents of brawling like the one mentioned above, as this illustrates a normative system operating within the group that governs to some extent when violence is and is not appropriate.

Random, Opportunistic Intra-Factional Violence

The type of violence most often engaged in by SHARP members had an opportunistic, politically-motivated character and was directed at members of the racist skinhead faction. Most commonly, this took the form of individual SHARP members "confronting" racist skinheads encountered by chance on the street by provoking an argument or fistfight with them. SHARP's written record(13) of such encounters offers several illustrations of such interactions, all of which follow a pattern similar to this account from Edward:

Maybe August or September, I was going to work and I had my clean pants on, but I had my Streettroopers t-shirt on, too. I was in one wagon on the metro and he was in the other one. And he had his Canadian flag hat on and I recognized him. And he was looking at me and I was looking at him.

So, we stopped at a metro station. I get out of my wagon and I jump in his wagon. And I went to see him. I asked him, "Do you remember me?" And he was, like, "No." So I said, "Well me, I remember you! You should come with me, we're going to talk a bit outside." And he said, "No, I'm going to be late." and blah, blah, blah. So I said, "Well, where are you going?" And he told me he going to work! But he was dressed like shit, he wasn't going to work. He was dressed really normal and all that.

So at Atwater, I decide to push him out of the metro. And he was holding onto the pole, "No, no, no man, I can't, I don't have time!" So I started hitting him in the train. And then, an old guy started ringing the emergency thing. So, at the next station I jumped out and ran away.

And Ovide had got that guy just a week before! With me. I was with Ovide and Ovide jumped on him and hit him a couple of times and he cut him...

So, Ovide punched him pretty good a week before me. And when I saw him, he had some stitches over his eye and I punched him and they re-opened. (laughter) So, it was pretty cool.

This type of violent interaction lies between brawling on the one hand and the violent ritual on the other. While it displays the "rapid mutation from routine non-violent interaction, quick termination and dispersal, operation through conventional understandings and signals, and generation of anger" seen in brawls (Tilly, forthcoming: 7:5), it features the "heavy scripting, competitive public display of standing, fixed and finite stakes, stylized enactment of we-they boundaries, clear delineation of proper participatns and targets, as well as sharp distinction between those participants from either monitors or spectators" found in the violent ritual. (Tilly, forthcoming: 4:11).

This brand of opportunistic intra-factional violence also carries with it an addition boundary-defining role not featured with brawling - dividing SHARP members from other anti-racist skinheads who are not willing to participate in physical violence. In fact, membership in SHARP hinged partly on current members' recognition of a candidate's willingness to participate in opportunistic intra-factional violence as a minimum standard of risk-sharing. This feature is found in many youth subcultures, which often "promote a large variety of conditions under which violence is expected or required of its members (Baron, 1997: 130). Violence also enhances group solidarity (Brake, 1974: 191) and strengthens the social ties between members (Fagan, 1989: 645). This role is especially crucial for SHARP, whose structure depends on building and maintain loyalty and solidarity between strong primary friendships within the group. "Thus, something in the quality of these friendships must sustain and support the skinhead norm of violence," (Hamm, 1993: 169), and vice-versa. Darice's explanation of what being a SHARP means to her is indicative of this:

What does it mean to me? Well, it means putting my ass on the line maybe more than I would otherwise. Because I feel like I do have a group of people who are counting on me and I count on them. And truly, it's a great feeling when I was sitting on top of Isabelle (14) and smashing her face in! (laughter)

Derrick, an anti-racist skinhead who moved to Montréal after belonging to a SHARP chapter in another city, illustrates this point. Derrick's candidacy for membership in the Montréal chapter of SHARP was repeatedly turned down over the course of a year of repeated attempts to join. Derrick's frequent admissions at parties, oi! concerts, and other skinhead interaction sites that he was "not really very much of a fighter" and that he was really "more of a pacifist" was a main reason for the rejection of his membership in the group. Several SHARP members confided that such admissions made them doubt whether they could "count on" Derrick in situations of intra-factional violence. As Ovide explains,

To get into SHARP you had to prove yourself. We're not talking, like, an initiation or anything, you just gotta show that you're totally anti-racist and you're ready to act on it and you're ready to fight for it. Because naturally, when you're going to fight with nazis, you want to know that the guy beside you won't start running!

Some members of SHARP may find, when faced with the violent situations that the group routinely places themselves in, that they no longer wish to be a part of it. When monitors raise the stakes by punishing violent participants, less-commited members may use this opportunity to opt out of the group and the risks inherent to it. This can obviously weaken a group, but it can also strengthen it by weeding out members who would not prove reliable when members of the group engage in other types of violence with potentially more serious consequences. This turns out to have been the case for several SHARP members,

just because they were never, you could always tell that when push came to shove, were they going to be in there? You didn't know. And I think, you know, with things heating up and arrests have been made and, like, with Edward and stuff like that (15), and they kind of got cold feet and said, "hmm, I don't know if I want this."

Two founding members of SHARP Montréal evidently felt this way, their departure from the group being prequeled by a reluctance to appear at situations where violence was likely. This reluctance was noted by other SHARP members, who commented on it with disgust. For instance, when Udo (one of the few SHARP members with both a driver's license and a vehicle) was told that Ken or Edward were "probably not" coming out to a situation in which violence between SHARP members and racist skinheads was likely, he swore, adding, "what bullshit!" Ken and Edward quit the group a few weeks later.

The Violent Ritual: Organized, Collective Intra-Factional Violence

On occasion, SHARP collectively plans and prepares for violent confrontations with racist skinheads. My timing in the field coincided with the inception, planning and execution of several such events, normally focussing on arriving en masse at a bar, concert, or similar site known or suspected to be frequented by racist skinheads. Usually, information pertaining to such a bar or event is presented to the group at a meeting and a decision is made to go to the bar, attack any racist skinheads present, "and lose the bar for them." An evening when they are most likely to find their opponents is selected, and SHARP members agree to meet a few hours beforehand to discuss and plan the confrontation.

The prepatory meetings follow a set pattern. The person who acquired the information on the racist skinheads' whereabouts reveals how the information was obtained &endash; usually from punks, educated guesses(16), or from news of a recent incident involving racist skinheads occuring in the vicinity. Then people discuss potential problems with confronting racist skinheads at the site under consideration. Discussions often demonstrated a sophisticated view of this type of organized, intra-factional violent ritual as something separate from the other forms of violence previously described. All manner of considerations were discussed, including police response times and the potential of sparking a conflict with the biker gang who dealt drugs from the bar in question. One discussion, about how SHARP might be portrayed in media reports of their action, would have been familiar to anyone who has sat in on a meeting of a more conventional social movement organization. Indeed, SHARP's understanding of the media seemed congruent with that of, say, Greenpeace &endash; remaining aware of the important differences between the group's perceptions of violence and those of the general public (Hamm, 1993: 156), and how the media can shape these perceptions. Ovide told me that:

We have a media aspect, we try. Which we're incredibly careful with, which is why we're not on the news all the time. Going out, followed by a camera, beating up people.

How come?

Well, first of all, you don't film yourself going out doing something illegal! (laughter) And, it's just, it's not, it's totally doesn't, it would backfire. Totally. Because people don't see the nazi who, the day before, smashed a punk girl in the head with a baseball bat with five of his friends. Or, anyone from a different culture, who they intimidate everyday by walking around with all their gear on.

What the fuck was I saying? OK, they won't necessarily see that; they'll see the fights and the punches. So, we talk about that - yes, we confront them, and if we have to we fight them. But, it's more the message we pass and not necessarily the different actions.

It's not a question of hiding what we do. It's just being good marketing!

After the discussion had led to a plan of action, and after reports back from people sent to scout the location beforehand, SHARP members (and often, a significant number of supporters &endash; skinheads and punks who were friends with SHARP members and came along to participate in the confrontation) would pile into several cars and drive to the established rendezvous point. Numbers of participants ranged from a dozen to over fifty, depending on the amount of advance notice and the notoriety of the racist skinheads in question. From there, everyone would typically walk into the targetted site at once; if racist skinheads were present, they would immediately be set upon and driven out of the area. Just as often, no racist skinheads would be present, and bar regulars would be surprised and more than a little scared to find the sudden presence of two or three dozen skinheads, some brandishing clubs, in their local watering hole.

This type of violence fits into the category of violent ritual, where "at least one relatively well-defined and coordinated group follows a known interaction script entailing the infliction of damage on themselves or others as they compete for priority within a recognized arena…participants activate a certain boundary, maintain it zealously, and direct their violence across it." (Tilly, forthcoming: 4:2). SHARP members participating in organized, collective intra-faction violence clearly follow known scripts, going as far as to discuss the script beforehand in meetings. The scorecards are also known, measured in the amount of physical damage done to either side during the ritual. We-they boundaries become sharply defined and activated through stylized enactment &endash; between both skinhead factions as well as between spectators and participants (Ibid.: 4:14).

This particular type of violent ritual patterns itself on ones found with youth gangs generally; sometimes constituting "quick raids into hostile territory; other times beginning as a "'fair fight'" between individual members of each faction (Ibid.: 4:16). The former case normally described SHARP "bar raids", the latter occuring only when SHARP members would discover only one or two racist skinheads. Ovide's recollection of fighting a racist skinhead while in the presence of several other SHARP members offers an example:

I saw this nazi, which is a big enough guy. I know totally his face, but he wasn't dressed the part, with his girlfriend, which I saw at court.(19) And, so, we went downstairs, I went into the shop while Darice went to get Sol and the other guys.

Then I went back up, 'cuz they were looking for me. So I went back up and waited for them to come back up. And when they came up I said, "oh, hi, how's it going," you know? So he said, "let's go outside." I said, "yeah, sure!" And, then while we're going outside, our friends got there.

I wasn't expecting to fight him myself. I was hoping someone else would do it. Anyways, some people told him, "we're not like you, we won't beat you ten-on-one. It's just one-on-one." So I had to fight him myself! I was the biggest one there. I was the biggest guy and he was maybe an inch taller than me, but a lot bigger. Ugly motherfucker, teeth all over the place.

So, I fought him. I kicked him into the traffic. He almost got hit by a car, it was beautiful!

Like other social control rituals, organized collective intra-factional violence brings the subcultural community of skinheads and punks together in a ritualized separation of convention-maintaining members from those who deviate from subcultural conventions by embracing racist ideologies, therefore serving to define the community's boundaries in a dramatic manner. The successful performance of violent ritual enhances SHARP's policing role by verifying to both opponents and spectators that the group's threats and demands can, and will, be backed up with force ( Ibid.: 4:11). This function is of particular importance in the skinhead subculture, rife as it is with homological ambiguities that blur and distort factional boundaries. Tilly points out that violent rituals "give unusually sharp definitions to the identities in play: boundaries between the parties, stories about those boundaries, relations across those boundaries, and relations within those boundaries. (Ibid.: 4:2-3). It should be noted that such violent rituals occur with both racist and anti-racist skinhead factions. Montréal racist skinheads have also engaged in the very types of violent rituals described above, with SHARP members and other anti-racists involved in the skinhead and punk subcultures as their targets.

Violence, Impression Management and Impression Disruption

It is apparent that skinheads put a great deal of energy into fostering self-conceptions and projecting the image of being what Tilly would term "violence specialists" &endash; members of a subculture who are familiar with violence, have the appearance of being prepared for violence and who actively and eagerly participate in violence when opportunities for violence present themselves. From the hyper-macho "hard" sartorial style of the subculture to the continual affirmations of approved violence in the lyrics of Oi! music to the training in boxing, kickboxing, jujitsu and other martial arts undertaken by the majority of SHARP members, much time and effort goes into both fostering the self-conception and image of being violent specialists.

Anti-racist skinheads are not alone in this. Indeed, all factions in the skinhead subculture foster this image to varying degrees. Racist skinheads appear particularly concerned with this. Literature and websites published by racist skinheads in the Montréal area are rife with the signifiers of a "warrior culture;" filled with crude drawings of heavily muscled skinheads and Vikings, armed with knives, swords, guns, and clubs. Body-building is a popular pastime for many in the racist extremist movement, and there are indications of widespread steroid use in the movement. Vinland Hammer Skins, a Montréal racist skinhead gang who clashed frequently with SHARP Montréal, describe themselves as being "always radically violent with members having been arrested for many hate-crimes (sic)…One being described as the largest hate crime trial in Canadian History. The charges have included: aggravated assault, assault, armed robbery, possession of illegal firearms, attempted murder, and even the 'Biggy'…murder itself!" (Vinland Hammer Skins, 1999).

The skinhead image of being violence specialists goes beyond being an affirmation of masculinity. SHARP's policing role, for example, would be curtailed if they did not give the impression of being able to back up threats of violence. For skinheads, violence "functions as a display for persuading the audience; it is often a means of communication, not merely a means of action." (Goffman, 1956: 241). Therefore, intra-factional violence carries significant consequences for the public standing of both the winning and losing faction (Tilly, forthcoming: 4:6).

Violent rituals between skinhead factions function largely as a shaming ceremony, particulary in organized, collective intra-factional violence, where typically "one party begins with far greater force than the other(s)." (Ibid.: 4:2). The goal of SHARP's violent rituals (and, to a somewhat lesser extent, instances of opportunistic intra-factional violence) is to disrupt and discredit the impression fostered by racist skinheads of being violence specialists, in order to elicit shame and embarrassment in them (Goffman, 1956: 65-66), and to discredit their claims to membership and legitimacy in the skinhead subculture. If successful, SHARP may in turn discredit the very self-conception around which racist skinheads build their personalities since it is likely that racist skinheads may deeply involve their ego in their identification with their role as racist skinheads (Ibid.: 243).

This goal is apparent in discussions with SHARP members concerning both opportunistic and organized episodes of intra-factional violence. Ovide, recalling challenging a racist skinhead to a fight on the subway, recounted that "he wouldn't budge from his seat, you know? And I spit on him just about everything. Humiliated him like there was no tomorrow, and just left, 'cuz otherwise we would've done the green line like five times!" Ovide further describes "three types" of racist skinheads: "the hardcore lifers; brainwahsed yet vulnerable; and recruits who liked the image and power. Confronting the third case, experience shows, brings them back to reality before it is too late. No! people won't look down when they see him. No! it is not a game. The recruit will most likely question himself." By employing violent ritual as a shaming ceremony, SHARP members believe they are able to discredit the fostered impression and even the self-conception of at least some racist skinheads, causing them to question their role as racist skinheads. Regardless of their success, such shaming ceremonies reinforce the behavioural boundaries SHARP members seek to establish for the skinhead subculture.

(13)SHARP keeps written notes from all its meetings, and granted me unlimited access to these meeting notes for my research.

(14) a Montreal racist skinhead.

(15)Edward was arrested in November for punching out the window of a car who's driver had been identified as a neo-Nazi.  

(16)For example, SHARP members would make a point of waiting outside of death metal concerts for racist skinheads to sh