Parents urged to report their radicalised teens using online form
Thetimes.co.uk – The Home Office will encourage the parents of radicalised teenagers to report them to the government’s counterextremism programme by using an online form on the gov.uk website.Only 166 of the 6,406 referrals to the Prevent programme in the year to March 2022 were made by friends or relatives, a rate of 2.6 per cent.William Shawcross, the author of an independent review of the counterextremism programme, said counterterrorism and civil society groups working with Prevent had “stressed to me the importance of friends and family coming forward about individuals for whom they have a concern”.
He added: “Friends and family are particularly important because of their perceived instinctive ability to spot behavioural change in people close to them.”Suella Braverman, the home secretary, has pledged to introduce all 34 recommendations made by Shawcross to improve the effectiveness of Prevent in achieving its primary objective of stopping terrorist attacks.Shawcross said that initiatives should be launched to encourage referrals from friends, relatives and community cohorts and that doing so should be made easier, with anyone wishing to make a referral able to find the necessary forms by way of a simple internet search.To build confidence among friends and family that the data would not be misused, Shawcross recommended that counterterrorism police should remove the names of people previously referred to Prevent whose cases did not warrant further action.
This would address fears that the Prevent programme retained a state database of individuals’ details. Prevent places a statutory duty on some public services and bodies, such as schools, hospitals, councils and the police, to refer people who are thought to be at risk of turning to extremism and terrorism.However, the Prevent referral system allows anyone to make a referral, including members of the public.Shawcross said the intervention of relatives and friends could have prevented the Manchester Arena bombing, in which 22 people were murdered.He said that neither Salman nor Hashem Abedi had been referred to Prevent before they carried out the atrocity.
From 2015, both brothers had made statements indicating an extremist ideology. Salman had started to make remarks suggesting he approved of suicide bombings and that he had cut himself off from certain friends and family whom he accused of being “kuffar”, an Arabic term meaning non-believer sometimes used to describe those who deny the word of God.Research by the Counter Extremism Project found that police sources had been told that the Abedis had to have known that Hashem and Salman were becoming more radical. After the attack, a mutual friend said the pair had discussed and expressed support for Isis.
In his review, Shawcross said: “Such accounts suggest Prevent referrals from friends or family could have been particularly important.”Shawcross also recommended extending the duty to report individuals to Prevent to other public sector organisations such as job centres and those working within immigration. He said that people who had sought or gained asylum in Britain had subsequently committed terrorist attacks, such as that on Liverpool’s women’s hospital in 2021.
