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June 4th, 2013

We need to do a better job at identifying the process of radicalisation and intervening when it is not too late

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Estimated reading time: 5 minutes

Blog Admin

June 4th, 2013

We need to do a better job at identifying the process of radicalisation and intervening when it is not too late

0 comments

Estimated reading time: 5 minutes

Ewan KingEwan King provides recommendations for improving the government’s Prevent strategy. He argues that understanding the journey is the key to understanding the process of radicalisation. Intervening successfully requires early action and engaging with communities. 

There was a significant amount of speculation in the immediate aftermath of the Woolwich attack that the perpetrators were self-starting ‘lone wolves’ who emerged practically out of the blue. The fear is that these types of individuals can become radicalised very quickly with little external influence making their attacks almost impossible to predict and stop. In fact, like many other extremists who become involved in violence, such as those caught in Birmingham bomb plot, the assailants appear to have been on a lengthy ‘journey’, leading them from being ‘typical’ kids, to becoming violent terrorists.

For different reasons, and at different times in their ‘journeys’ these individuals change. They become withdrawn, alter their appearance, revise their friendships and attitudes to others. Exposed to a range negative of influences and influencers such as such as local extremist recruiters or radical online sermons, they are radicalised incrementally. Sometimes this can happen over a very short period of time (posing the greatest challenge to security services), but more often it takes years. Acts of atrocity like we saw in Woolwich are the culmination of this process. When she said that some people are ‘at different points on what could be a path to violent extremism’, Teresa May rightly implied that understanding this journey is they key to understanding the process of radicalisation.

The role of Prevent – the initiative that aims to stop people becoming involved in terrorism in the first place – is to detect when local people have started this journey, and to work out ways to stop it ending disastrously. There has been fresh speculation in the last couple weeks that the government will revise the Prevent Strategy to introduce a stronger focus on tackling extreme speakers and closing down violent internet sites. Sensibly the government has said it will ‘take it’s time’ with this review. In the meantime, I can offer what our work suggests the Prevent strategy needs to focus on.

Firstly, the Prevent Strategy should concentrate more of its efforts on the critical stage in many would be extremists lives: the ‘transition to adulthood’. For many this is the ‘start of the journey’. Those leading Prevent have often found it difficult to cooperate with schools on this agenda, but more needs to be done to work with young people and expose them to the threats and flawed arguments of extremism. Staff in schools and colleges need to be part of this solution. More evidence now exists about what the signs of vulnerability look like, and teachers, mentors and lecturers need to be helped to spot these and respond accordingly.

However, whilst schools have an enormous capacity to influence would-be extremists positively, often the process of radicalisation does not happen in formal institutions, but instead in ‘ungoverned’ spaces – such as gyms, homes, and on the street. It happens to people who have already fallen out of jobs and colleges and don’t attend local Mosques and rarely contact their families and friends. In these cases, more senior and established staff in agencies, such as police, ‘senior community leaders’, teachers and lecturers may not be in regular contact with these individuals. Instead, people at the grassroots levels – community activists, faith workers, housing officers, and volunteers – are more likely to have some contact with these individuals, and be able to act if they notice they are in trouble. Secondly then, Prevent needs to reach more local people and networks, and give them the training, tools and clear instructions of how to help vulnerable people who may be drawn to extremist ideology.

This will require trust. Whist the police and other Prevent staff are becoming better at engaging with Muslim communities, there is still work to be done in both convincing them that they are on their side and that they will not misuse information that is given to them in confidence. The most successful Prevent partnerships are those that involve local communities in their plans and build joint strategies for communicating these to the local populace.

Even in areas where there are good approaches to early intervention the fact remains that some young people will inevitably be drawn into extremism. Research on Prevent indicates that some interventions, like one we are evaluating in East London are having some success in encouraging young people already deeply indoctrinated in this ideology to move away from extremism. Other programmes, such as the young leaders programme in Redbridge, is successfully equipping young people with the arguments and confidence to challenge extremists when they see them operating in the local community.

Sadly, as we have recently seen, not all ‘journeys’ will be corrected in time. In the end, Prevent is just one part of an elaborate response to threats that combine policing, intelligence work and surveillance. Like all strategies it has its flaws, such as focusing on a small number of target local authorities despite extremisms lack of respect for jurisdictional boundaries. And it is right that the government and public are again looking at the policy to ensure it is as robust and effective as possible. But we should also remember, that at its best, Prevent has and will continue to spot people who are about to take a fatal wrong turn, and to help them reconnect with society and out them back on the right path.

Note: This article gives the views of the author, and not the position of the British Politics and Policy blog, nor of the London School of Economics. Please read our comments policy before posting.

About the Author

Ewan King is a Director at OPM, an organisation that helps public services. Ewan leads OPM’s work on reducing extremism, including the government’s Prevent strategy since 2008. He ‘s interested in issues of social cohesion, inter-faith dialogue and building integrated communities. 

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This work by British Politics and Policy at LSE is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported.