Prevent Strategy

Helping the Vulnerable Being Drawn towards Terrorism or Another Layer of State Surveillance?

David Lowe, Robin Bennett

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN:
  9780367508227
• eBook ISBN:
  9781000349504
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Public Law
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Prevent Strategy is a collection of work from practitioners – youth workers and the police – and academics researching Prevent. This book examines overcoming the stigma attached to Prevent being implicitly racist, problems related to the section 26 duty, training staff on Prevent, creating safe spaces to have open discussions, problems regarding extremists' online activity, and the law surrounding freedom of expression.

Since its introduction, the UK's Prevent strategy has been surrounded with controversy ranging from making the Muslim community a dangerous 'suspect community' to being another layer of police surveillance on individuals who have not been arrested or convicted of a crime. Despite amendments to the strategy – which now covers all forms of extremism – and adopting a multi-agency approach, these suspicions remain, exacerbated by the section 26 Counter-Terrorism and Security Act 2015 duty on specified authorities to prevent vulnerable people being drawn towards terrorism.

This book's findings on the Prevent strategy will be an invaluable tool for staff in education, the health service, and the criminal justice agencies who carry out the section 26 duty. It will also appeal to academics and students studying the area of terrorism and security.

Chapter 1

Youth work, radicalization, and Islam
Forming empathic spaces for young Muslim people to engage in discussions of so-called radicalisation and extremism of religious ideology, identity, and foreign policy

Stuart Wroe

‘Serious concerns’ were raised by a human rights organisation regarding the ‘effect on education and students’ human rights’ of the UK government’s statutory Prevent duty on schools, implemented under the Counter-Terrorism and Security Act 2015. In closing down spaces to articulate personal beliefs and opinions in schools and the public arena, it stood accused of driving children to discuss issues related to terrorism, religion, and identity ‘online where simplistic narratives are promoted and go unchallenged’.¹ Rather than pushing young Muslims, ‘Out of public space and into private space where it is a lot more difficult to challenge and refute ideas,’² we should be enabling ‘spaces for wide-ranging discussions of religious ideology, identity and foreign policy, particularly among young people who feel excluded from mainstream politics.’³

This chapter assesses the extent to which youth work’s informal education processes and approaches can create empathic spaces for young Muslim people to engage in such wide-ranging discussions. Drawing on Fine,⁴ Chambers,⁵ Freire,⁶ and a reflexive critical consciousness in Pakistan Punjabi Sufic practice and tradition,⁷ this chapter adopts and builds on the author’s experience of global youth work processes as a form of informal education for social change. It assesses the potential of youth work’s informal education processes to enable Kundnani’s ‘spaces for wide-ranging discussions of religious ideology, identity and foreign policy, particularly among young people who feel excluded from mainstream politics’—spaces to facilitate young Muslims’ dialogue and practical solutions to contest socially demonising discourses by asserting and self-defining their own identities; by drawing upon Islam as a meaningful category by linking past and present within a British context. Commentators within Muslim Youth Work, too, are calling for ‘spaces that feel welcoming; spaces which young Muslims can identify with, where they are neither demonised nor idealised and where struggles and contradictions are allowed to ensue in the emergence of identities’⁸; and ‘where debate is open, however controversial or sensitive.’⁹ As Margaret Ledwith (nd) maintains, ‘… reclaiming the radical agenda begins by creating critical spaces for dialogue.’

Whilst there is a growing body of research highlighting the threat from right-wing extremism, the focus of this chapter will be on young Muslim people. The primary basis of the author’s global youth work is that of education for social change, working towards making change in individuals, nations, and our global society. With over 17 years global youth work experience working with some of the most marginalised young people in the UK and globally, and with the support, guidance, and friendship of local Senior Youth and Community Worker Mashuq Hussain OBE (Order of the British Empires), the author has worked for over eight years with young people from the third-generation Pakistan Punjabi diaspora in East Lancashire—communities in the ‘long shadow of exclusion and humiliation cast by national policies designed to protect ‘us’, and to ask who is (and is not) “us”.’¹⁰

With a focus on change, principal features of youth work’s informal educational approaches are the centrality of dialogue¹¹ and the voluntary participation of young people.¹² We seek to ‘liberate’ participants, for them to have a greater awareness of their situation in order to promote activism, thus seeking to turn young Muslims’ feelings of ‘frustration, stigma and anger’¹³ into peaceful and peaceable actions and a stake in society.

There is recognition of youth work’s ability to ‘… connect with young people who are in danger of exclusion or are already excluded from more structured social institutions.’¹⁴ Youth work informal education approaches provide opportunities to discuss, debate, and challenge. The work requires an inherent understanding of young people’s perspectives and of their multiple identities and experiences. Trust and the ability to communicate at street level is also fundamental, involving an inclusive approach that seeks to work with young people in their own spaces and environments.¹⁵ Yet, in, ‘working with young people at the very margins (sites of possibilities that are exciting and “on the edge” [where] cultures are created and reshaped’),¹⁶ the most pertinent issues are often those most problematic in relation to the state and law, especially as in this case, the UK government’s dominant macro-discourses on terrorism.

Macro-discourses—micro-impact

The UK government’s dominant macro-discourses on terrorism have a micro-impact on young Muslim people. For them the external world structures their internal world and their sense of self as young Muslims. They construct their identities in context-dependent ways, drawing on such discourses.¹⁷ The post 9/11 ‘invention of “radicalisation”’¹⁸ is institutionalised at the heart of the government’s ‘official narrative on the causes of terrorism’¹⁹ and in effect is a ‘political shibboleth,’²⁰ ‘the master signifier of the War on Terror.’²¹ Drawn up in a hurry²² and ‘heavy footprints of policy,’²³ the UK government’s Prevent strategy is considered a ‘toxic brand’²⁴ relying upon the counterfactual invention of ‘radicalisation’ and related unstable knowledge about transitions to ‘terrorism’ to undertake governance of communities rendered suspicious, risky, and at risk.²⁵

‘Radicalisation’ is mentioned 186 times in the UK government’s Prevent strategy.²⁶ Its ubiquity in the document, in terrorism discourses, and in wider media and public usage is not matched by any clarity or precision regarding its definition. In a two-line entry in the Review’s glossary, it is said to refer ‘… to the process by which a person comes to support terrorism and forms of extremism leading to terrorism … ,’²⁷ a definition that lends itself to the accusation of being a simplified politicised label that conceals complexity.²⁸

Some commentators regret a misappropriation or distortion of a term which has also engendered much more positive connotations (i.e. to be ‘radical’ being to be ‘progressive’).²⁹ At the time, Mahatma Gandhi’s radical views were viewed as extreme by the British government, but were also non-violent. So, the notion of radical has been degraded through the dominant UK government’s discourse, from an understanding associated with peaceful activism and ‘…the principles and demands [that] often provide the backbone of tomorrow’s mainstream thought and attitudes …’ to ‘… code for the brainwashing of young Muslims to commit violent acts.’³⁰

According to Baroness Sayeeda Warsi, former Minister of State for Faith and Communities in her 2017 book, The Enemy Within: A Tale of Muslim Britain, ‘discussions around the ‘root causes’ of terrorism became a difficult area for policymakers. In the glare of a 24-hour international media circus, there was a hurried move to the how of terrorism without sufficiently understanding the why—a political need to find a quick and easy answer to what makes a terrorist.³¹ Following the 2004 Madrid and 2005 London bomb attacks, experts and officials in discussing the underlying factors leading to the attacks started referring to the idea of radicalisation, ‘… whenever they wanted to talk about “what goes on before the bomb goes off”.’³²

Within the public realm and mainstream media, ‘radicalisation’ was used intercha...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Note on editors
• Note on contributors
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 Youth work, radicalization, and Islam: forming empathic spaces for young Muslim people to engage in discussions of so-called radicalisation and extremism of religious ideology, identity, and foreign policy
• 2 The lived experiences of Prevent in university law schools
• 3 Determining extremist behaviour: differentiating between freedom of expression, legitimate political commentary, and hate
• 4 Combating online extremist recruitment: the criminalisation of opinion and belief
• 5 The role of the police in the Prevent strategy: the disparity between Prevent in practice and academic research
• Conclusion
• References
• Index