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For the latest breaking stories, sign up to cypnow.co.uk/email-bulletins8 Children & young People now 25 June–8 July 2013

By Gabriella Józwiak

After the brutal murder of soldier Lee Rigby in Woolwich on 22 May came the reprisals.

There were attacks on mosques and Islamic centres around the country, including in Kent, Essex and Gloucester. In Muswell Hill, north London, a suspected arson attack on a Somali community centre burned the building to the ground.

Rigby’s murder and the subsequent attacks have reignited debates on how to stop violent extremism. In parliament, Labour leader Ed Miliband called for earlier intervention to stop the young being radicalised and urged the government to listen to Woolwich youth workers who had asked for more attention to be paid to “the link between violent extremism and gang-related activity”.

The government has responded by launching an extremism taskforce chaired by the Prime Minister that met for the first time on 3 June. It has asked each government department to investigate what it is already doing to prevent extremism and to report back before the end of this year with practical suggestions for action.

As part of wider counter-terrorism efforts in the wake of the 7/7 London bombings, the government has had an anti-extremism drive in place since 2007, called the Prevent Strategy. This was revised in 2011 to focus on 25 local areas identified at greatest risk of extremism. It sets out how local authorities and police forces should work together to develop multi-agency responses to extremism and requires councils to partner with schools, youth services, youth offending teams and other agencies.

A Home Office spokesman says the new taskforce will build on the

Extremism taskforce will build on the work of the Prevent Strategy, which focuses on the 25 areas identified as being at greatest risk of extremism, but what have youth workers in these areas achieved so far?

Projects to prevent extremism in young people under the spotlight

The active Change Foundation in waltham Forest has worked with more than 200 young people since 2003

youTh work work of the Prevent Strategy. Complementing that strategy is Channel, a Home Office programme that identifies and supports 15- to 24-year-olds who might become involved in extremist activity. Between January 2007 and December 2012, Channel received almost 2,500 referrals and worked with more than 500 young people.

Bradford is one of the 25 areas that is the focus of Prevent. Since the launch of the original strategy, Bradford Council has maintained funding for its open-access youth service and given five of its youth workers training on conflict resolution, Islamist extremism and the far right.

At risk of extremismGraham Hutton, youth service manager at Bradford Council, says the Prevent agenda has helped the council realise it needs to provide a consistent response for young people at risk of extremism from all its partner organisations. “We have made connections between youth work and the range of curriculum-based work going on in schools and colleges in the district,” he says.

The youth service has also worked with the police to identify and help those vulnerable to extremism. “Our interventions have resulted in these young people being encouraged into more productive activities,” he says. “We have helped them develop critical thinking skills to empower them to make more informed choices.”

A soon-to-be-published peer review of Bradford’s Prevent work suggests the approach is working. “Informal feedback indicated that statutory and voluntary youth sectors are providing the glue in communities for young people to divert them away from gangs and criminal behaviours,” says Hutton.

But, he adds, the work faces many challenges. He wants longer-term funding that can be spent on early intervention work. Keeping up to date with the latest threats

and national and international events is also difficult. “We will not be changing any of our work as a result of recent events, but we are in touch with key local services and communities that allow us to assess potential risk areas,” he says.

Bradford YMCA’s youth workers have been running projects to encourage understanding between different faiths and ethnicities. “Our projects are about getting people to work together and understand differences,” says the charity’s volunteer co-ordinator Amy Tutin. “It’s not about tackling extremism – it’s about trying to get in earlier than that, which might prevent extremism in the longer term.”

She says that although Bradford is different from how it was during the 2001 riots, community divisions remain. “In one of our clubs, we noticed the Asian lads were upstairs and the white lads were downstairs,” she explains. “We said

we wouldn’t let this happen. So we made a rule that for the first half of a session, everyone had to be downstairs.”

One of the YMCA’s projects was In Good Faith, which delivered cultural awareness training to young people through interactive and informal education sessions such as a visit to a Hindu temple.

Tutin says many of the young people began the project with intolerant views. “At the beginning, some of the young people thought Polish people get given £1,000 as soon as they arrive in the country and a huge telly,” she says. “That’s what their parents told them. We need to tackle that ingrained, generational ignorance.”

Answering questionsShe says part of the solution is giving young people a safe space to ask questions. “Why do you wear a headscarf? What is halal food? Sometimes we’re too afraid about

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offending people, so we don’t ask and don’t understand,” she suggests.

In the London Borough of Hackney – another Prevent priority area – the council published a report on how the community felt the strategy was working. The report, released in January, found little awareness of Prevent among community leaders and young people, who were more concerned about young people joining gangs than radicalisation.

When asked how Prevent could be made more effective, the interviewees said intervention needs to start from the age of 10, since that is when children begin to make decisions about “their faith, what their role is in their community and what they want to do in life”.

They also suggested training young people in “critical thinking” and getting them to question information they get online.

Extremism taskforce will build on the work of the Prevent Strategy, which focuses on the 25 areas identified as being at greatest risk of extremism, but what have youth workers in these areas achieved so far?

Projects to prevent extremism in young people under the spotlight

The active Change Foundation in waltham Forest has worked with more than 200 young people since 2003

But some Prevent priority area councils are less keen to talk about what they do. The London Borough of Greenwich, which became a priority area in 2012, declined to comment on its youth work around extremism. Leeds City Council said any information it provided about Prevent would need to be approved by the Home Office. Haringey, where the Muswell Hill fire occurred, also refused to comment.

In Waltham Forest, another of the capital’s priority areas, the Active Change Foundation has been working to tackle violent extremism since 2003. Founded by Hanif Qadir, the charity has delivered interventions for more than 200 young people and takes referrals from the police and National Offender Management Service.

Qadir says the organisation is successful because its youth workers develop specific intervention plans for each individual. “It is important to understand the extremist mindset and also how that mindset was constructed,” he says. “By knowing this, an intervention can deconstruct or dismantle the extremist mindset.”

He says Prevent is an effective mechanism for change among young people, but thinks there is a disparity in how well different local authorities deliver the strategy. “Areas should not act without a proper assessment of the problem in their area,” he says. “Once you understand the problem, then these areas should develop their own Prevent Strategy to address the groups and individuals in their area.”

Qadir says organisations also need to be appropriately trained in addressing an extremist point of view and how extremist groups target communities. And like many, Qadir says early intervention is crucial. “Preventing violent extremism works by developing resilient communities,” he says.

Paul Thomas

It’s been a sobering few weeks. We’ve had the shocking murder in Woolwich, racist

reactions against Muslims fuelled by the English Defence League (EDL) and the convictions of Muslim young men for plotting a terror attack on an EDL rally in Dewsbury, west Yorkshire.

This all highlights the need to challenge ideologies that promote violence and hatred, but how do we do this? The government’s new taskforce is re-examining the role of Prevent, the education-based programme aimed at diverting young people and young adults away from terrorism that has been developed nationally since 2007.

Past and present governments deserve praise for focusing on prevention, but my research around what Prevent has looked like in practice, outlined in my recent book Responding to the Threat of Violent Extremism – Failing to Prevent. It leads me to question whether Prevent is really an effective way forward.

Prevent has worked with large numbers of young people nationally, often through youth work organisations and methods. There has undoubtedly been good Prevent-funded youth work in some areas, but it currently has major flaws that greatly limit its effectiveness.

Firstly, it has worked almost entirely with Muslim young people only, and this is problematic for a number of reasons. Many young Muslims feel that their entire community is being focused on, while there is no concern with extremism and racist activity in mainly white areas. Ironically, some white young people see Prevent as another example of ethnic minority communities getting all the government money and concern while their needs and experiences are ignored. Such mutual resentments were at the heart of the 2001 riots in Bradford, Burnley and Oldham.

Those riots led to the new focus on “community cohesion”. A central belief of the cohesion approach is that extreme and antagonistic attitudes to “other” communities can grow in situations where people lead “parallel lives” and have little contact with, or

understanding of, other ethnic, social and faith communities.

Encouraging greater contact with and respect for other communities through cross-community partnership work has been central to community cohesion activity, with youth work in areas like Oldham providing some of the most inspiring examples of this.

For Prevent to be truly effective, it has to focus much more on cross-community work with young people of all backgrounds. Such work should enable greater understanding, tolerance and respect, but should also facilitate genuine and open discussion around the key social and political issues, resentments and fears that exist between young people.

For me, the best example of Prevent work to date has been the UK Youth Parliament’s Project Safe Space, which did exactly that. It allowed young people to learn greater skills and understandings of democratic processes within a community cohesion framework and so developing resilience against extremism within and across communities.

Prevent should go in this direction and connect much more closely to youth empowerment processes and structures nationally, and to the National Citizen Service.

To facilitate real debates about political, faith and racial tensions, youth workers and other education professionals need to feel confident and equipped, but too many don’t feel that at present. The UK Youth Parliament failed to persuade Prevent to fund a major training programme for youth workers on “having difficult conversations” with young people around such issues. We urgently need more focus on such training and skill-sharing for youth workers.Paul Thomas is a reader in youth and education at the University of Huddersfield

expert view

“Young Muslims feel there is no concern shown about extremism and racist activity in mainly white areas”

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