Christian Picciolini didn't learn racism at home.

But at the age of 14, when he joined a violent neo-Nazi group, he became expert at it.

He'd been bullied for years and felt abandoned by his parents — Italian immigrants to the US working up to three jobs at a time.

He was also at the "magic age" for recruitment.

When a neo-Nazi skinhead approached him on the street and asked his name, it wasn't to tease him — it was to invite him in.

And the offer of a community was an easy sell.

Christian (left) says 14 is the "magic age" to be recruited into extremism. ( Supplied )

"I was searching for identity and a sense of purpose," Christian says.

He spent the next eight years committing acts of violence and inciting hate, deep in the white extremist movement.

Forgiveness, he says, is what got him out.

'I felt like nobody saw me'

At Christian's wrists and neck, coloured tattoos peek out from beneath his all-black clothes.

He's a few metres from me, on stage, commanding the attention of a couple of hundred educators who've been gathered by High Resolves, an organisation that works to empower young people.

I read later that Christian removed all of his neo-Nazi tattoos except for one, which he keeps as an "ice-breaker" with extremists.

These days he leads the Free Radicals Project, helping people break away from extremist movements.

On stage in Melbourne, he acknowledges his privilege, saying a former extremist with different-coloured skin might not be able to be here, speaking as he is, today.

He paces a little. Not anxiously, but deliberately. To direct his words to different parts of the audience. His voice is slow, serious.

Christian explains that at 14, he was "lost".

"I felt invisible at the time. I felt like nobody saw me," he says.

The skinhead on the street told him he had "a fine Italian name" — one he should be proud of.

"He said I needed to protect that identity because there were people who were trying to destroy it," Christian recalls.

As a boy, Christian Picciolini was bullied and felt "lost". ( Supplied )

A sense of purpose was being dangled before him. A promise of belonging.

Despite having seen no evidence to support what the skinhead was saying, Christian was in.

Eight years of violence

By 16, Christian was leading the white extremist group he had joined.

He committed violence daily. He encouraged it in others. He made and sold racist music, and performed as front man for his band, Final Solution.

But a few years in, something wasn't sitting right.

Was it the irony of the Italian-American denouncing immigrants? Was it the tenuous connection to his childhood self, tethering him to something closer to love than hate?

Whatever the feeling was, it grew when he met and fell in love with a woman outside the movement.

But when she later asked him to leave it, after they'd married and had two sons, he didn't.

Christian has written about his life as a former neo-Nazi extremist in White American Youth. ( Supplied )

"I made the wrong decision," he says.

At the time, Christian was running a white extremist music store.

The small percentage of generalist music he sold attracted customers outside his familiar circles.

He began to interact with people of colour as well as queer people. People who, to his surprise, treated him respectfully, though he maligned them.

It was jarring. A sense of shame was blossoming in the young neo-Nazi.

Christian stopped selling the hate music, soon went bust and in the mid-1990s, found himself without a family or business.

It was the catalyst to finally leave the movement. For the following five years, he tried to outrun his past.

"I was still miserable because I hadn't exposed myself," he says.

Then, several years out of extremism, he bumped into Johnny Holmes, an African-American security guard from Christian's former high school, where he'd staged "equal rights for whites" rallies and lobbied for an all-white student union.

Christian apologised, Mr Holmes accepted, and the impact was powerful.

"I started to ask for forgiveness for what I'd done — and I received it," Christian says.

"Then I started to forgive myself."

'Voids' that lead to extremism

It's two decades later when I meet Christian in an empty conference room, after his talk to the educators.

Around us people are stacking chairs. Britton, his partner of 17 years, sits a few metres behind us. Her feet rest on a chair while she scrolls on her phone.

Christian pulls me up when I refer to him "changing his mind".

"I never changed my mind ... I went back to that person I originally was," he says.

"I was lost for eight years and was willing to do things that filled me with what I thought I was missing ... and forgetting about the effect that was having on people."

He tells me he was a very empathic, shy young kid — "and then found a way to just ignore it".

"So, I like to think I hopefully found my way back to that," he adds.

One on one, Christian is quietly spoken. His large build on a small swivel chair less than a metre from mine could be imposing, but it's not.

I'm slightly uneasy, stuck on his final message to the group earlier: "Find somebody you think is undeserving of your compassion and give it to them, because they are the ones who need it and would probably benefit from it the most."

Don't words like "forgiveness" and "compassion" misplace the onus in all of this? Don't they doubly burden a victim — with discrimination, and also the responsibility to defuse it?

He is slowly nodding before I've finished my question.

"Yes, it does put, somewhat, the onus on the potential victim," he admits.

But he doesn't relax his point.

"You know, for me, the people who changed me the most were the ones I probably would have hurt a couple of years earlier," he says.

"I'm asking people of colour and people from other religions to be nice to bad people, to Nazis.

"I know it's a tough ask to ask people to be good to bad people. But that is the only thing I've ever seen break haters."

It is a message, he says, that applies equally to all people.

"We need to learn how to be compassionate for everybody. It's not just exclusive [to] people of colour," he says.

"What I'm really advocating is that we all learn how to have empathy and compassion for everybody else, because ... those voids are really what leads to extremism."

White extremism in Trump's America

In a 2017 TED Talk, Christian said he had helped more than 100 people disengage from extremist movements.

"I may be the only person who cannot wait to put myself out of work. I can't wait," he says.

Britton looks up from her phone to interject.

"And I'm the only woman that says, 'I wish my husband didn't have a job'," she says.

She's smiling, but not entirely joking.

Britton says her partner's work helping people to exit violent extremism has taken a toll on them both. ( ABC RN: Anna Kelsey-Sugg )

"It is hard to see him go through what he goes through on a daily basis," she says.

"When we think about the challenge that we have with our own inboxes and how it's just an influx of things — [in] his inbox, is someone that's thinking they want to commit suicide, a mother that is challenged with her own children."

"Worried about her son being a school shooter," Christian adds.

Britton continues: "There aren't enough of him around the world. If your child has a heroin problem, you know where to go. If your child or your friend has found their way into extremism in some way, where do you go? He's one of the few people."

And he says in his line of work, things are just getting busier.

Christian believes white extremism has been on the rise in the US since the "perfect storm" of the country's 2016 presidential election.

"[It] was very polarising [and] brought in some policies that, frankly, 30 years ago were policies that I would have talked about when I was an extremist," says Christian.

"Things about immigration, a ban on a certain religion. There was talk of a Muslim ban — all things that I supported when I was a far-right neo-Nazi extremist."

Christian tells me that, from a number of organisations that received grants under the Obama administration to combat extremist ideology, his was the only one specifically dealing with white extremism.

Under the presidency of Donald Trump, its grant was rescinded.

He says the current US Government's rhetoric is fuelling white extremism.

"We have politicians using the same exact terms that I used 30 years ago that people would have beat me with a baseball bat for. And now we have people openly voting and supporting those policies and ideas."

'We can't beat them through debate'

If Christian is tired, perhaps it's the effect of a sense of obligation — to continue his work, keep on top of the emails, keep meeting with extremists and their families. To not tap out.

He can't. He's repenting.

He's also genuine about what he believes is the power of compassion to create change.

"We can't beat them with words," he says.

"We can't beat them through debate. We can't debate in an illogical ideology and win. You can't. Nothing you can say will beat it because you're fighting against lies.

"So it has to be an emotional winning of hearts and minds.

"Through experience, through constant learning, that's how we change. And by changing the system and the problems we have."

Christian doesn't position himself as some kind of counter-extremism superhero. He says he has "unique insight" — but not all the tools.

"This is something that I think is going to take all of us to solve," he says.

"I think we just need to learn to understand that we are connected. We're all different but in so many ways we're all the same and we need each other to survive.

"We're all cells in one body and when some of the cells are sick, well, the body tends to die."