PREVENT is failing all children

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’.

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?

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