‘There can be no keener revelation of a society’s soul than the way in which it treats its children.’ Nelson Mandela
The racist riots that broke out across the UK in the Summer of 2024, using the façade of ‘protecting children’ to hide deadly motivations of hatred and racial bigotry, have acutely revealed how perceptions of terrorism are racialised in UK policy and imagination.
Laments of ‘how did we get here?’, ‘this is not us’ and ‘this is not what it means to be British’ (and therefore what it means to be White) occupied the media in the immediate aftermath. However, political narratives rapidly shifted from the initial terms ‘extremists’, to ‘far right’ and eventually to a much-sanitised language of ‘thugs’ and ‘criminals’.
As children and families cautiously returned to support services, hostels, work, school and colleges, communities are still working through the traumatic aftermath of what many have referred to as acts of terrorism.
What is being done to address violent extremism?
The UK government’s PREVENT [preventing violent extremism] agenda has always been overtly primarily targeted at Muslim communities since its inception in 2007. Despite official expansion to include other forms of ‘extremism’, the Ministry of Justice acknowledge that terrorism legislation has disproportionately impacted Muslim and Asian communities. Ethnic breakdown statistics of terrorism offenders are not published by the Ministry of Justice, but the report implies offenders are Asian and White, a claimed reflection of ‘the terrorist ideologies prevalent in the UK, most notably Islamist Extremist and extreme Far Right terrorism’. If far-right extremism is one of the biggest threats, as it is globally, then how can PREVENT protect children from this transnational danger?
Prior to 2015, there was some discretion in how local authority areas engaged with PREVENT. Targeted work, primarily undertaken by the police and youth workers, was done in communities seen to be at the greatest risk of involvement in violent extremism or terrorism. Merseyside Police, for example, prioritised right-wing extremism in White communities to address increasing racist and religious hate crimes. This was in no way a perfect model of protecting children, however, it had two features which are important to consider. Firstly, it used racist and religious hate incidents, albeit known to be under-reported, as an indicator of potential extremism. This doesn’t happen now. Secondly, it worked with children to educate them away from extremism, did not stigmatise them or bring their families automatically into contact with the criminal justice system or social services or led to concealed official records being kept. This doesn’t happen now either.
Who is protecting the children?
The 2015 PREVENT Duty placed a safeguarding duty on public bodies (except in Northern Ireland) to identify and stop ‘radicalisation’ in children and vulnerable adults. Responsibilising public bodies like schools and colleges, with no expertise in radicalisation and extremism, to make reports of the children they suspect to be vulnerable to being involved in future terrorism is a form of pre-crime surveillance, powerfully argued to violate children’s rights.
‘Islamist extremism’ has dominated political and media narratives on terrorism since the start of the ‘war on terror’ and shapes how the public thinks of potential terrorists. Indications are that the Duty is labelling and stigmatising, in particular, Muslim children and their families. However, the absence of proper statistics, one focus of my article ‘False Evidence Appearing Real (FEAR)’, means we don’t fully know what is happening to children of different ages or backgrounds under this Duty. However, racial and religious profiling is obvious. Children thought to display vulnerability to ‘Islamist’ extremism are consistently reported as those suspected to be most at risk of radicalisation. These PREVENT referrals, the majority coming from schools and colleges, are often unfounded and made for the most bizarre reasons.
So, what of the ‘far-right’ extremism behind the summer racist riots? These riots appeared to have taken public bodies by surprise, indicating they were not seeing consistently high levels of race hate crimes as an indicator of a potential coordinated extremist attack or a threat to children. Yet, in the rioting mainly White men were observed leading these racist attacks and encouraging children, as young as 10 in Northern Ireland and 11 in England, to join them.
If PREVENT responds to this in the way it has responded to Muslim children groomed for involvement in criminal activity, PREVENT will no doubt fail these children too. The prioritisation of punishment over support for children has not only had devastating impacts on British children and their families internationally but also domestically.
PREVENT is clearly a failed strategy for protecting children from harm, yet one which successive governments seem so reluctant to give up. The UK cannot just keep adding to a list the forms of ‘extremism’ we expect teachers, nursery workers and youth workers to predict through monitoring the thoughts, behaviours and actions of our children.
If protecting children were really our priority, our focus would be on the dangers that adults pose to them. It is not. Children who have been under the dangerous influence of divisive or hateful agendas would be offered support, therapy and education without criminalising state intervention. They are not. Children would be empowered to come together and explore politics and world events safely in their schools, colleges and youth clubs, to shape their own views. But they’re not.
The time has come to accept that clandestine reporting of suspicions of a child who looks like they could be a ‘future extremist’ into statutory processes built for adult ‘offenders’, is an unsafe practice which harms, rather than protects, all children.
Leona Vaughn is Derby Fellow at University of Liverpool, with a longstanding background in equality and human rights.
‘False evidence appearing real’: the evolution of pre-criminal safeguarding for childhood radicalisation in the UK by Leona Vaughn is available on Bristol University Press Digital here.
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