The Prevent Duty

The Prevent Duty is a legal obligation placed on authorities in the UK, including teachers, to identify and report signs of radicalisation. The goal is to stop people from being indoctrinated by terrorist ideologies. But activists argue that the policy infringes on civil liberties and intrudes on the lives of young people. 

Featuring:

Professor Steven Greer - a scholar of human rights and counter-terrorism

Professor John Holmwood - sociologist and co-chair of the People's Review of Prevent

Artwork by Danielle Khoury

Transcript

Cait:

Let's start with what we can all agree on. Domestic terrorism is a grave ongoing problem in Britain. Since I moved here in 2016,  two members of parliament, Jo Cox, and said, David Ames have been murdered by terrorists. One by a white supremacist, the other bias supporter of ISIS. 

Islamist terrorists drove a van into pedestrians on London Bridge before going on a stabbing spree. 

At an Ariana Grande day concert at the Manchester arena, a suicide bomber blew up himself and 22 other people, injuring 139 and leaving many more traumatised. That's just a small sample. 

These tragic and horrifying events tend to leave behind questions: Why did this happen? Why wasn't there more security in place? How did the government, the intelligence services, the venue miss the signs? And what is wrong with Britain that we allow such abhorrent attitudes to fester? 

What if I told you that the government already had a solution? A method of crushing terrorist ideas before they begin to take root. Of identifying future terrorists and placing them on a new nonviolent path. Would you believe it? There is a policy that's sold is that same solution. It's so controversial that organisations have sprung up to challenge it. And one person refused my invitation to appear on the podcast because they have previously received death threats as a result of the stance. What is this highly charged policy? It's called The Prevent Duty. 

You're listening to Wood for the Trees, the podcast about the messy questions. I'm Cait Macleod. On each episode of Wood for the Trees, I interview experts with different points of view to try to get to the bottom of controversial social and political debates. The series is all about crime policing and justice. And this is episode two, The Prevent Duty: Countering Terror or Terrorizing the Innocent?

My experts this week are both professors here in England who have become involved in quite personal ways, on different sides of the prevent debate. Let's meet the first one. 

Steven:

I'm Steven Greer. I'm professor of human rights, university of Bristol law school. I'm also visiting research fellow at the Oxford Institute for British Islam.  I've taught a lot of different things but counter-terrorism was pretty much the first serious research interest.  And then I, you know, developed interest in human rights with a wider perspective, not just counter-terrorism. , so that's what I've been doing basically for the past 40 odd years. I'm on the brink of retirement. In fact, I had my retirement party a couple of days ago. 

Cait:

As I mentioned on episode one, the interviews or the series were recorded throughout 2022. So Professor Greer is now several months into his retirement

Steven:

So yes, I dunno if you've heard about my troubles. Do you know that I was  falsely accused of Islamophobia last year? And I was subjected to a disciplinary process, which ultimately completely indicated me, but there's been some difficulties with how the university and law school have  handled that. So I'm kinda leaving under a bit of a cloud. I'm very displeased and very dissatisfied with  how they managed it. 

Caitlin:

This was news to me. And I wasn't quite sure what to do with it. So I sidestepped it to begin with and continued with my planned questions. We'll come back to it later.
How did you become interested in counter terrorism?  

Steven:

Well, I grew up in Northern Ireland.  I was born in 1956, so I was there on until I left to go to university in '76 and I was back and forwards. And that was the time of the so-called Troubles. You know, the, the civil conflict, terrorism. It was a very grim time. I mean, you come from South Africa. I mean, so probably before your time, but you know, it wasn't so dissimilar. Very, very, conflicted society, lots of antagonism, sectarian, terrorism, so on and so forth. And this disfigured my youth, because, no-warning bombs were going off and people were being shot left, right and center  you know. So I wanted to know why this had happened and what we thought we could do to stop it. 

And the debates about counter terrorism were not so dissimilar as they are today. There were those we believed that counter terrorism  couldn't be justified or  there were huge problems with it. And those on the other end of the continuum who wanted it to be as severe and as draconian as possible, including capital punishment  but in between, there are many different voices such as mine, which we're saying there's got to be counter-terrorism. But it's gotta be humane and lawful and sensitive to the political context  

So that's a long answer to your question. It's just, the study of kind terrorism is integral to my background, my experience. 

Cait:

 Why is counter-terrorism a top priority for Britain? I think the number of deaths that you see, just if you quantify them, is not enormous. But obviously it's tragic and brutal that these things do happen, but why should it be a top priority? 

Steven:

Well, you see the thing is terrorism doesn't just kill people and destroy lives and damage property. It threatens our basic democratic institutions because these are often targets. You know, the IRA way back in the day,  they managed to launch a mortar attack on Downing Street. And of course, before that,  '84, the IRA bombed the Conservative Party conference in Brighton. So the targets for these organisations are not just ordinary people, and you're right to say the actual risk of being a fatality or, or a victim of terrorism is very, very low. In fact, you're more likely  to die in an accident in the home than to die in an act of terrorism, but unlike an accident in the home, terrorism poses huge threats to transport systems, the economy, government. 

Let me take another example from Tunisia with the attacks there a few years ago, that pretty much destroyed Tunisian tourism. The Tunisian tourist industry was at the center of the economy. So a single attack by lone government, killing dozens of people, dozens of tourists, completely destroys native Tunisian tourist industry. So that's why we should take it seriously. 

Cait:

And what is the government's current approach to counter-terrorism? How are they doing in your opinion? And have they got the right approach? 

Steven:

Yeah, pretty much.  There isn't any perfect approach and there's always gonna be debates about the big questions and the finer details, but  the UK of course had a long run experience of terrorism, counter-terrorism going back, arguably till the end of the last century not just in the recent past, past few decades, but going way, way back. I mean, there were, there was a series of outrages called the Fenian outrages in London, in the 1860s, 1870s, where there were, attacks upon government officials  bombs and so on, so forth.

Before that there were insurrection movements in Ireland. But terrorism in the kind of modern form probably dates from the middle of the 19th century.  So the UK's got a huge experience with it.  And it's been constantly reflecting upon that, refining that developing it well, 9/11 of course  massively changed all the calculations and the environment and the thinking about how to approach it.

The government at the time and successive governments since have developed what they know what's known as Contest, which is an abbreviation of counter-terrorist. 

Cait:

Contest is the UK's counter terrorism strategy. It was launched in 2003, following 9/11. And has been built on and updated since then. It has four pillars, all starting with P and each one deals with a different stage in the life cycle of a terrorist attack, if you will. 

Prevent aim to stop people becoming terrorists or supporting terrorism.  It targets terrorist material online and tries to identify and rehabilitate radicals. 

Pursue aims to stop terrorist attacks through the use of intelligence and things like disrupting the flow of terrorist, finance. 

Protect involves measures like border and transport security. And controlling explosive materials. 

Prepare is about running drills and strengthening the emergency services. 

And in fact it isn't Prevent (the first P) in general, that's controversial but a law that was introduced in 2015, which is known as the Prevent Duty. This law places, a formal duty on some authorities, including teachers to actively monitor and report any signs of radicalization.   

Steven:

Nobody has actually suggested that the Contest program should be abandoned in its entirety because there isn't any obvious alternative to it. Apart from Prevent the other three piece have largely escaped criticism. 

Cait:

And how does the Prevent program work? 

Steven:

You see a particular problem here is the character of the current threat. And the fact that since jihadi terrorism is the principal terrorist threat post 9/11, and jihadis are often, at best, indifferent to whether they survive the attack or not,  and indeed many of them want to become martyrs, the main preventive strategy that was approached that was used in Northern Ireland, which was punishment, doesn't work.

So in Northern Ireland,  prevention was about if you're involved in terrorism and we catch you, you're gonna be severely punished. That won't work with suicide bombers, for example. So you've gotta try some other kind of preventive approach. 

The argument here in the thinking here is it's gotta be further upstream. By the time  terrorist acts are being prepared  it's too late. You've gotta get them before. You've gotta get those who may be being sucked into terrorism before that point. And this is of course a huge challenge.  The question becomes, how do you identify those people , who may be recruited into terrorism before they've actually begun to clearly move down that path. That's the challenge. 

How it works is that if anybody suspects anybody else, if I suspect a neighbor or if a neighbor suspects me or a colleague or a student vice versa, that something said or done raises concerns that we may be interested in or about to be recruited into terrorism, we can inform the authorities and this goes through various stages.

There's an initial filtering stage where most of these referrals are binned, ditched. They're not taken any further. And it's only if people are willing to cooperate that they're taken further and they can be referred to a whole range of social services, including mental health services and deradicalisation programs.

So only a tiny fraction of those who are actually referred end up in deradicalization. And it's only with their consent. And obviously deradicalization is unlikely to work unless people want, are willing to cooperate with it. Just why it would be a mistake in my view that...one of the debates that's emerged basically is to make cooperation with deradicalisation obligatory and to make it an offense not to cooperate.

I think that's a huge mistake cause that won't work.  Unfortunately of course  people pull the wool over the eyes of the authorities. I mean, some people have been through deradicalisation programs and they now have gone on to acts of terrorism but this is an unavoidable challenge.

You can never guarantee that somebody who appears to be cooperative is genuinely cooperative. This happens in all conflicts. In warfare, for example any, both sides will recruit agents and sometime agents are double agents and you don't know to whom their true loyalties lie. And that you just, we've just gotta, accept that and get on with it. 

Cait:

In one of the articles you've written, you write that "any fair and open minded review is more likely to recommend that Prevent be retained and reformed, and that the myths which it has acquired should be systemically dispelled." So, if we start at the beginning with the idea that Prevent should be retained, what are the most positive aspects of Prevent? Why should it be retained? 

Steven:

Because it's the only thing in the frame that gives us any possible handle upon steering people away from terrorism.  If you dispense with Prevent, how then are you going to prevent terrorism? What other resources are you going to use in order  to divert people from it upstream? Because the threat of punishment won't work. So that's why it's got...there's gotta be something like Prevent.

And I would just say here at this juncture , the British Prevent program is actually modeled upon those that were pioneered in the Muslim world that were used by particularly Saudi Arabia against its own Islamist insurgents.

And, Saudi Arabia, although their human rights record leaves a lot to be desired to say the least, the program that they introduced was very similar in concept to Prevent. It's based upon identifying people who are at risk. And then trying to talk them out of it. It's not about torturing them or anything like that, or imprisoning them. You take them into, an air conditioned room and an imam, a very well qualified Muslim scholar comes and tries to persuade them that the Islamic faith doesn't justify what they're intending to do, or they might be inclined to do.

Pretty much every country in the world now has some kind of counterpart to Prevent. Now there's differences in different places, but the basic assumption of all these programs is the same: identify people who are at risk and try and talk about it.

Now, if you dispense with that, how else are you gonna try and steer people away from terrorism before it's too late? 

Cait:

Mostly we think about these programs, how they benefit potential victims of terrorism, but are there positives for the individuals that are actually identified by the program?

Steven:

Oh, yes, I think so. There was a very, there was a serious case in 2009, a young man called Andrew Ibraham, who was the son of a prominent Bristol surgeon. And he came from a privileged background. He'd been to a private school. When he went to City of Bristol College to study, one of his teachers became concerned that he was saying radical things, things that suggested he was interested in terrorism and, he had burn marks on his hands and his fingers. The teacher reported this to the college authorities. The college authorities didn't do anything about it. His own mosque reported him to the police. He was a convert to Islam, by the way, he wasn't born a Muslim. The police arrived at his flat as he was preparing a suicide vest to go and bomb. The main shopping district in Bristol, Broadmead.

Now he, Andrea Abraham has since been sentenced to a long time of imprisonment and he now deeply regrets,  he says, he's been recruited, as it were, much too late for him. But he was saying if.. that if Prevent had been available at the time, it could have steered him away and saved him from the faith that he has suffered.

So yes, Prevent is fundamentally about protection in multiple senses. It's about protecting those people who might be sucked into terrorism from the consequences of their own mistake, and also protecting those that may be harmed as a result. 

It's not just about punishing or being unkind or stigmatizing people.  It's a fundamentally an issue of safeguarding of  the potential terrorists themselves. 

Cait:

Do you support Prevent exactly as it is? Or would you like to see some reforms or improvements?  

Steven:

As in most things in life, and I talked about the Irish problem before opinion is often on a spectrum. There's one end of the opinion here is hostile of Prevent, wants it scrapped. And I've said that's just completely untenable. It doesn't even begin to address the other difficulties that that would create. But the other end of the continuum, there are those who want greatly to strengthen Prevent and who want, for example,  to make cooperation with deradicalisation compulsory and for it to be an offense to be refused

In between, and that's where  most sensible people find themselves, including myself, which is to say the program is fundamentally sound, but it needs to be refined. One of the things that most needs to happen is it needs to be better explained. We need better information more finely grained information about how it works. We need to hear from those people who've been involved in it and of course, what was their experience? How many of them, what percentage thought that they benefited from it, this kinda, this kind of thing.  

 You see the other thing you find with the anti-Prevent movement is that they're  people who want to complain about Prevent,  many of whom have not actually been through the programme themselves. And  of those who have been through the programme, the anti-Prevent movement is only interested in those who've had a negative experience of it. They don't seek out those who may have had a more positive experience of it. And of course, if you've had a positive experience of it, you may not want to broadcast that because that would put you in, danger from the movement. Cause it's not something that they want to hear said.

Cait:

This is the same problem. I had an episode one in the debate about police reform. Each side cherry-picks examples or accuses the other side of doing so. Leaving the rest of us with a foggy picture of the truth. The anti prevent movement may focus on negative outcomes. But of course a government sanctioned review will likely do the opposite. And if individual negative experiences are bad enough to be unacceptable, those positives may not matter.  

What about evidence that prevent is effective? Is there any way we can quantify that? Obviously it's difficult to measure terrorist attacks that don't happen as a result of it. But is there some kind of way that we can objectively measure how well it's working 

Steven:

Well re-referrals. There's only a tiny percentage of people who are referred to deradicalisation programmes who are referred a second or any subsequent time.
I can't remember the statistics offhand, but it's way less than 5%. So either that means that the original concerns have been properly addressed or else people who have done it are very effectively deceiving the programme.  

You're right to say, you can only ever say when the programme's failed when somebody's been through it and then goes on to commit an act of terrorism. The number of occasions of that appears to be very, very small. There've been less than a handful of  known or publicised episodes of that. And I suppose the very fact that an act of terrorism was committed  will mean that it will be publicised. So I think we can say that the failure rate of prevent is actually very, very low. But that doesn't necessarily mean  that the success rate is high. Becasue it may well be the case that a lot of people are being scooped up in Prevent and are being channeled through it who are not really a threat in the first place. We don't know that for sure.  A lot of these things are fundamentally unanswerable, certainly scientifically unanswerable.

And we've just got to make the best of the fact that human behavior is often very, very difficult to predict,  but that's no different from, any kind of crime. If you've been convicted of an offence, for example, and you've served your sentence or you're released on license, there is a risk being taken. There's an assumption. The assumption of the whole criminal justice and penal system is that if you've been found guilty in a fair trial and sentenced that you will learn a lesson from that. You will not re-offend.  Sometimes that's not true. Some people do re-offend, some people just offend again and again and again.

Cait:

You've previously written about the myths surrounding prevent. Would you mind running through some of those.  

Steven:

There's half a dozen of them, or so. The main ones are that it's Islamophobic and racist,  it's hostile to human rights, that it chills debate in universities and colleges, that it's a violation of freedom of speech, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And none of these has really been properly demonstrated. 

One of the myths, the core myths is that  Muslims in Britain are all deeply hostile to Prevent. It's not true.  Muslims do not speak with one voice in relation to this question One of the most important things that they discovered was that hardly anybody knows about Prevent that includes Muslim. And when Muslims and others have the Prevent programmes explained to them, a huge majority support it. 

The second is that, Muslims are all systematically being targeted by Prevent and they're being stigmatised and victimised and vilified and so forth and criminalised by Prevent. And that's not true. Prevent doesn't target anybody on the basis of their religion or other beliefs as such. In fact recent statistics show that about three quarters of those who are now being referred to Prevent are neither Islamist terrorists or far right terrorists. They're from some other whole range of other ideologies. They're often people suffering from confusion, mental health issues, people who've got confused ideologies.  Muslims are now only a small proportion of those who are referred, in spite of the fact that Jihadi terrorism is the biggest and the greatest threat.

It's not a violation of human rights either. It's not, it's never been judicially tested. The Equality and Human Rights Commission, for example, doesn't take that view. It's not a violation of freedom of expression, the right to freedom of thought, conscience and religion. So there you go.

Cait:

When a professor of human rights with an Oxford law degree tells you that something is not a violation of human rights, one is inclined to nod and agree. But even if you buy that the Prevent duty is not in theory, targeting a particular religious group or ideology. it is put into practice by humans. Fallible, biased, sometimes downright hateful humans who will be tasked with the challenge of distinguishing harmless people with nasty ideas from people who might one day turn their nasty ideas into nasty violence. And regardless of human rights. It does give one a bit of an icky feeling. to think of neighbors reporting one another for things they've said.  

Nevertheless, there's something very appealing about Professor Greer's pragmatic approach.   He acknowledges that we cannot know if Prevent is really successful. He acknowledges that some people might take part in a deradicalisation programme purely for show. The idea is, the project at hand is difficult and imperfect, but it's the best we've got and we have to try. You could argue that even if Prevent only stops one attack or saves one life, it's worth it. But that really depends on the cost.

You said that Prevent is not any kind of an infringement on human rights. But do you think you could describe it as harming individuals who are taken into the programme? Even If you compare it to something like labelling a child at school a "problem child" or something like that, that there is a harm and, especially where the individual turns out to not be a risk, that's kind of an unwarranted harm.

 Steven: 

I think with a primary school child, there's a family issue there.  If concerns are raised about what a  primary school child is saying, they're almost certainly just gonna be reflecting something they've heard somewhere else. That's not gonna be as it were their true and settled and their  autonomous opinion. So that's a huge problem. So I would not be inclined to put primary school children through the program, at least not on their own, not without their families being involved. 

Look, there's all kinds of harms. I went through a a red traffic light many, many years ago. And I got noticed from the police saying, if you want to avoid three points being added to your license, you'll go to road traffic safety awareness school.

That's not unlike Prevent. You come to the attention of the authorities for something you've maybe done or said, and they offer you a solution to it. And in, in the road traffic case, that's much more harmful and punitive because there's a threat.  If you don't attend road safety awareness, you'll have three points added to your license. Prevent us much more benign than that. Prevent simply says, you've come to our attention. We're concerned that you may be at risk of being drawn into terrorism.  If you'd like us to try and help  steer you away from that, please cooperate with what we have on offer. If you don't wanna corporate with it, then there's nothing we can do about it. We can't punish you for it. I dunno how that harms people.  

Take another example.  If you've been the host of a noisy late night party and , the neighbours call the police, the police call at your door and say, we've had a complaint about the noise, that could be stigmatising for your other neighbors,  and it may be harmful. You may not welcome the fact that the police were called,  or it may even be a misunderstanding or mistake. They may go to the wrong house, for example. So in terms of harms, being referred to Prevent, if it's harmful at all, it's only a very, very minor harm.

But another, the other thing is, of course the referral to Prevent is confidential. So unless you choose to disclose it to somebody, nobody else will know.  The only other people who know are those who have made the reference,  and I suppose if it was from school that might make you feel a bit,  exposed and vulnerable.

Cait:

Do you think there's a tendency from the anti Prevent camp to make the process sound more sinister than that?

Steven:

Oh yes. Yes. Yes. And there is an element, I'm sorry to say, there's an unfortunate, unholy alliance here between militant Muslims, people who want to use the freedoms  of a liberal democracy against it and, either naive or willing fellow travellers - the far left we're probably about here.  And the unholy alliance here is that they're both acting in collusion against a programme, which,  for the militant Muslims at any rate  their hostility towards is intended to  make it less effective so they can advance their own Islamist cause.

Cait:

Are you suggesting that  people with  jihadist leanings are  posing as anti prevent liberals? 

Steven:

Yeah, yeah. Yeah. Some of them are at best ambivalent about Jihadi terrorism. , but that's on the far extreme. I'm certainly not saying that everybody in the anti prevent movement, is in that Calgary. But I'm afraid to say that some of those who are in the anti prevent movement, are actually, seeking to undermine it in order to advance militant Muslim causes.

Cait:

As an aside, I haven't fact checked this. I wouldn't know where to start. It sounds plausible and far fetched all at the same time.  So I moved us out of the realm of fact and back into the safety of the realm of opinion.  

When you read about domestic terrorism, there seems to be a lot of disagreement around this issue of cultural assimilation. In France, they banned headscarves in school, for example. And one of the requirements that came in with Prevent is that schools have to teach British values at school, whatever that means. What do you think about that strategy?

Steven:

I think assimilation should not be the objective.  The difference between assimilation and integration is assimilation is about joining the dominant society and losing your distinctive minority identity. Integration is joining the dominant society and retaining your distinctive minority identity. So it's the latter that ought to be encouraged. As far as teaching British values are concerned,  I would much prefer that we conduct the debate in terms of humane and life-affirming values, rather than any kind of national value.

Cait:

Having conducted the interview and heard nothing Islamophobic from professor Greer, as far as I can tell, I felt less trepidatious about his saga at the university of Bristol. 

I asked him to tell me a bit more about the story. He says that many years ago, he developed a course for the University of Bristol Law School which included a module called Human Rights in Islam, China, and the Far East.  

Steven:

For many, many years it was annually reviewed. There was never any complaint about it. And then suddenly out of the blue, or were almost out of the blue, the University of Bristol Islamic Society denounced it as Islamophobic.

They made a formal complaint to the university, which wasn't very well handled.  They were cross about how it was taking so long to get it settled that they went on a social media campaign demanding that I apologise or be sacked and that the module be scrapped. And the university conducted a five-month investigation at the end of which I was completely and,  unreservedly exonerated. 

Cait:

He says that one of the complaints against him was that he supported Prevent which led to accusations of Islamophobia and racism. At one stage Greer and his wife fled their home because they feared that his critics wished them harm.  I've only heard one side of the story. But it is telling that he was invited as a result to become a fellow at the progressive Muslim think-tank the Oxford Institute of British Islam.  

Steven:

So anyway, people will have noticed that and will be very reluctant to defend, prevent, because it can get you into serious trouble. 

Cait:

Why does prevent inspire such anger? Maybe my next guest can shed some light

John:

Hi, I'm John Holmwood. I'm an Emeritus Professor of Sociology at Nottingham University, and I've been a quite active around issues associated with the government's counter-extremism, Prevent strategy, going back to appearing as an expert witness for the teachers in the misconduct cases brought in the Birmingham Trojan Horse Affair and most recently I've acted as co-chair of the People's Review of Prevent.

Cait:

We'll come back to The People's Review of Prevent a bit later. First, let me tell you about the Trojan Horse Affair, a highly contested series of events, which took place in Birmingham, a city in England in 2015. A fragment of an anonymous letter was turned into authorities. It described a plot by radical parents and administrators to infiltrate public schools. And run them according to strict Islamic laws. No such plot was ever discovered. It was in effect a work of fiction. But the affair put the spotlight on conservative Islam in schools. There were complaints from whistleblowers who said that schools were doing things like segregating boys and girls and refusing to teach evolution. 

Teachers were fired. Schools were closed. Some argue that the whole thing was used as an excuse by certain members of government to push a far right agenda. Others say it brought to light, genuine concerns held by the Muslim community.  

John:

And gradually the Trojan Horse Affair itself, having been a big media event, shrank to focus on just four schools and one school in  particular. Newspaper reports talked about over a hundred teachers being involved in it. In the end, only 12 were accused of misconduct, and in fact, the misconduct cases collapsed as a consequence of misconduct on the behalf of lawyers representing the government.

Cait:

And those were the cases in which Professor Holmwood acted as an expert witness for the teachers.  

And what was the political impact of this event? 

John:

 I think there was already movement to develop new policies for schools, but this became the basis of bringing in a new Prevent Duty so that all schools were then required, all schools in England that is, were required to teach fundamental British values with the implication that ethnic minorities and particularly ethnic minorities with non-traditional religious backgrounds were in some way at odds with those values. And so that was one aspect.

And then also a so-called safeguarding duty where schools were asked to monitor their pupils for signs of extremism, changes in behavior and so on. And then to report it to relevant authorities for possible programme of deradicalisation. This was introduced for all public authorities. Not only schools and by schools, I mean, nursery schools, right through to, secondary schools, but also colleges and universities, but also health providers were required to have that as well. So it was, a serious change in policy and one with I think significant consequences for pupils and for different Muslim communities.

Cait:

And were you concerned about it right from the beginning?

John:

Well, my concern at the beginning was that the representations of what happened in Birmingham seemed to me to be false and, misleading. 

I was interested in how Prevent shaped responses to the Trojan Horse Affair, and then also how the Trojan Horse itself shaped the development of the Prevent Duty.

 It seemed to me that the Prevent  was being used to further a political policy and, was being used in a biased way against teachers in schools with a high proportion of Muslim pupils.

Cait:

What concerns you about the safeguarding aspect of Prevent specifically?  

John:

So I think it's had a major impact and it's a major impact with regard to behaviour and ideas which are not themselves illegal. 

So the first thing to say is that Britain has really quite extensive counter-terrorism laws, more extensive than most other countries. That includes laws regarding nonviolence offenses, glorification of terrorism,  having the symbols of prescribed groups,  et cetera. That's one set of offenses. And of course, violent offenses as well. The counter extremism program is directed in what's called a pre criminal space that is in relation to attitudes and behavior, which are themselves lawful, but which are argued, might have an association with the development of - you know, the argument is used - like an escalator or a conveyor belt towards violence offenses.

But of course there can be no demonstration of any causal connection between the two. So you have a very large programme directed at behavior and ideas, which are lawful and which are also open for the government to modify what it's going to count as a problem of extremism - so it can include Black Lives Matter, it can include disruptive protests and so on - and has given various indications that that's what it intends to do. But the direction is initially at British Muslims and Islamism, which it also associates with  religious conservatism as well. 

So anybody who indicates a change in their attitude or change in behavior, for example, a young woman deciding to wear the hijab, for example, that is potentially an indication of a change in behavior and something that should be potentially scrutinised under Prevent. 

And of course, what you're dealing with is young people in circumstances in which they're growing into their social and political identities. And so it would be really surprising if there weren't lots of instances of changes, of new forms of behavior, new ways of expressing themselves and so I see it as a sort of quite serious constraint upon the development of young people and their expression of their views and sense of self, and being able to make mistakes in the public domain, which I don't mean, you know, which I don't count, obviously, criminal offenses as mistakes that they should be allowed to make. But of course, for attitudes and behaviors which are not illegal, then I think it's really concerning that there should be such a programme directed towards. 


Cait:

 The idea that young people need room to experiment with ideas, even highly distasteful ideas, seems perfectly reasonable to me. And yet if a teenager were in the process of being groomed by radicals, it makes sense to try and catch that. And nudge them in another direction while they're still at a formative stage. 

School spend all day influencing and directing pupils thinking, instilling values through codes of conduct and carefully developed curricula. And that's perfectly acceptable. Surely then the question is not whether Prevent tries to influence pupils but whether that framework is discriminatory or excessively restrictive or punitive.   

How specific are the guidelines about what counts as extremism or what counts as something you should refer to Prevent? Is there a lot of ambiguity and room for interpretation or is it quite specific?

John:

Well, there's a lot of ambiguity in them and necessarily so. One of the things you need to do is think of how the guidelines were first designed and the context in which they're designed. So what the program was initially developed around was radicalisation within prison, and a particular concern was the radicalisation of non-violent terrorist defenders.

Now they've already given some indication of their proclivities  so I'm not arguing that it's incorrect to be concerned about people in that situation. But if you draw up a set of criteria based upon an evaluation  of non-violent offenders and their attitudes, trying to identify what might be worrying aspects relating to their engagement with ideas  and whether they have the capacity to do harm, you're doing it in a very specific population. 

The clinical psychologists who develop it, say, well, it's very difficult to make judgments about where somebody lies within a spectrum  of behavior. That can be done within a very restricted and well-trained group. But you're now applying this policy across  all public authorities. They can't have the level of training  and refined judgment that occurs within clinical psychologists 

So it's a very large net.  And in the end of that process, only about 5% get identified as meriting the deradicalisation programme. 95% are false positives, that is are judged by the more specialist panel not to warrant being referred.

Cait:

If you are referred to Prevent and then determined not to be a need of de-radicalisation is that really so bad? Do, do you actually incur any harms in that referral process?  

John:

So you've got an incredible amount of worry, suspicion, concern, and alienation of children and parents along the process.  People are being considered even before they go to the panel. And by being considered, you can be considered by police officers called in, interviewed by police. And because you've not committed an offence, none of the protections of the Police and Criminal Evidence Acts applies to you. So you don't necessarily have to have  a responsible adult presence. Your parents aren't going to be invited to be present.  Because if you consider some, children under 10 are being caught up in this process, the suspicion is being directed, not that the child is a terrorist threat, but they might be radicalised within their family. So you are bringing a considerable amount of suspicion, police involvement, . 

Schools now, of course, have to show  that they've got monitoring processes   so there'll be a whole series of records within schools about Prevent concerns. Then records at Prevent panels about these concerns. And these will be part of national databases. And because what is identified as potentially at the end of it is a terrorist offence, that material can be kept virtually indefinitely, even though the process through it all is the conclusion that there was no warranted action that needs to be taken. And our view is, it's a misplaced policy because even for the 5%, about which you have a concern, they still have not committed any offences.

Cait:

This is a very different picture from the one painted by Professor Greer. He described a referral to Prevent as an anonymous, voluntary process. No more harmful than going to traffic school for a traffic offense. By Professor Holmwood's account, on the other hand, children are made to feel like criminals and put on watch lists. 

Perhaps both versions are true for different individuals who've been through the system. I can certainly see how introducing police to a situation changes the flavor of things. To have an officer ask you about something you've said brings to mind authoritarian regimes.  

John:

 And that's our concern about Prevent not that children's behavior... some of the behaviors that have triggered the referral...that they shouldn't be under consideration, but they should be under consideration within the context in which they arise. So if a child makes a thoughtless remark or a worrying remark, there is no reason not to pursue it in context and ask, what did you mean by that? Rather than say, well, it's not for me to make the judgment of what they meant by it, I will report it. 

Cait:

 It does seem like an extraordinarily ambitious idea to try and predict how people are going to behave in the future. I mean, we can't really even do successful election polls. The idea that you can guess how people are going to behave in the future seems quite science fictional to me. 

John:

 Well, it does arise in science fiction. I mean, The idea of pre-crime is in one of  Philip Dick's dystopian novels, and I think it is dystopian. But of course the problem is there's always a sense that if something terrible happens (and obviously one's not denying  how horrible violent terrorism is ) there's always the question, well, couldn't this have been, or if only we had, spotted this earlier. But of course, retrospectively being able to say that there were signs generates this discourse of, well, let's look for the signs. 

Cait:

Professor Holmwood acknowledges that prevent does pick up individuals who later become terrorists. Ali Harbi Ali, the man convicted of killing MP Sir David Amess, was previously referred to Prevent. That implies Prevent is accurate at least some of the time. But given that Ali later committed an act of terrorism, it's also an example of the policy failing.  

John:

 So the idea that we could stop an individual well, I think we might be able to, but one of the ways we could do that is if we invested in probation services, invested in different kinds of security rather than a blanket program that is thrown over every child in England.

Cait:

So does that mean you would, in theory support some pre criminal interventions if they were more targeted and, you know...?


John:

I think everybody recognises that intelligent based interventions are appropriate.  That's why we have security services and police. They don't only act after the event of a crime. They have intelligence about a crime beforehand, and they act in relation to that. So, yes, certainly the public anticipates protection in relation to threats of violent crimes. But that's an investment in security services. It's not an extension of the security services into pre-crime.

I mean, if I give an analogy with stop and search, so I'm not in favor of stop and search and stop and search operates in relation to profiling and so on. But imagine you say, well, stop and search might be useful in relation to knife crime. Wat you're interested in is finding a knife. You're supposed to have intelligence and suspicion about the possession of the knife. What is happening in terms of Prevent, as a form of stop and search is you do the stop and the search and you find nothing. All you find are attitudes which are not illegal. were you to find something, then that would be the basis of a criminal charge. So if somebody was downloading terrorist material, that would be a criminal charge. 

The public are being persuaded that they are made more secure by something which is a major intrusion into civil liberties and the civil liberties of, in principle of all young people, but in a discriminatory way against Muslim young people.

Cait:

I've tried to wrap my head around what sort of comments or behaviors might be reasonable cause for a Prevent referral. It can't just be things that are religiously conservative and offensive. But it also can't be anything that would be considered an indication of something criminal. It is illegal, for example, to use language that encourages terrorism. I can't figure out what precisely is left when we remove these two categories. But maybe the parts of the internet I frequent are too vanilla.  

So let's talk a bit about the reviews. If you could maybe start by saying, well, what is the Shawcross review and why is it controversial? 

John:

Well, I think if we, again, accept the distinction I've made between counter-extremism, which is engaged with activities and ideas which are not illegal, and counter-terrorism, which is concerned about illegal acts, one of the things about have something being defined as illegal, is it subject to all sorts of legislative processes of scrutiny and safeguard. Whether that's safeguard in relation to collecting of evidence or whether it's a safeguard in, in relation to review of how the legislation operates.

So, counter-terrorism legislation has an independent reviewer who operates under statutory duty to give oversight of the operation of terrorism laws and is required to report each year, an independent report based on that. So, because there are no offences in Prevent, there has been no review of Prevent.

So 2011 was when this new policy was indicated. There was a review suggesting it was necessary, but that wasn't an independent review. And so we've carried on through until 2019 when there was a promise to review as one of the requirements for Theresa May to get a bill through parliament that there would be an independent review.

So effectively that was eight years without an independent review. When the reviewer was put in place the person selected to do the review, Lord Carlile, had been involved in 2011 and was on record stating how positive, he regarded Prevent. So there was a lot of protest and challenges to Lord Carlile as the reviewer. Lord Carlile stood down and then William Shawcross was appointed.

And William Shawcross was viewed by many, to be even more ideologically committed to Prevent  from the point of view of Islamist extremism. So that gave rise that to a boycott of the  Prevent review. 

So our idea was, well, let's organise the evidence about prevent from the perspective of the organisations and groups who were questioning the independence of Shawcross. And let's also consider the nature of the individuals and families who have been impacted by it. So that was, in a sense, our remit with the People's Review was to provide an opportunity for preventing evidence, which we felt Shawcross and his team would be unwilling to listen to.

Cait:

And how was that reviewed, carried out and who participated? 

John:

Well, we had an open call for evidence.  We set up an advisory committee of community groups, but also of independent academics. We held round tables with these groups discussing different aspects of concern. We reviewed case material that had been presented to Prevent Watch through people wanting to challenge how they had been treated under Prevent processes. And we also reviewed all the reports that different independent bodies had produced. And we engaged with the UN rapporteurs on human rights, terrorism legislation and so on. 

Cait:

Was the conclusion of that  report foregone in the sense that it was set up in opposition to the government and there were existing concerns?

John:

It was foregone to the extent that yes, I think it's unlikely we were going to say, well, gosh, having examined it, the evidence points to the necessity for Prevent. So I won't be disingenuous with you on that basis. But we were academics involved in doing the review, so you do have to meet certain standards of evidence and discussion and  argumentation. 

So I think if anybody reads the report, I think they will judge that it's a moderate report. That is, the argument's are moderate. There's no ad hominem attacks.  We don't bandy the word Islamophobia around. We do conclude that Prevent operates in a discriminatory manner and we give evidence for that.

Cait: 

The people's review found that teachers responded differently to pupils who expressed right-wing views compared to children who expressed Islamic fundamentalist views. Right-wing views like xenophobia we've seen as distasteful, but mainstream. And fall into the category of, oh, well, what can you do? They get it from their parents? Islamism on the other hand was seen as a reflection on a whole community, a minority community that was deemed problematic.  But as Professor Holmwood has admitted, the review was to some extent, a forgone conclusion.  

John:

So schools, I think you'll find are not really encouraged to teach anti-racism in the same way. Indeed, black Lives Matter is identified as a potentially extremist group for the purposes of Prevent. The government keeps moving back and forth on that issue. But the belief in structural inequality, for example, is seen as the politics of grievance. So you have this kind of language, which is the language of the right wing, and it sits within the policy and so is not really treated equally. 

Cait:

Do you think schools should be making an active effort to focus on integration as a way of preventing radicalisation?  

John:

The threat to integration does not come from ethnic minorities or minority religion. The threat to integration comes from a secular majority who think that others, in order to speak, have to pass their voices into the dominant voice rather than be allowed to speak in their own way, so depending on what criteria you use, you could say that British Muslims are of the most integrated community in Britain. That is, they show the strongest commitment. It's a so-called British values, and that's true in all survey data.

British Muslims have the same attitudes as others within Britain. They're not in favor of terrorism. They like the idea of live and let live, they believe in religious tolerance because they wish people to be tolerant of their religious expression.

Cait:

Do you think there's space for the Prevent strategy to be reformed and become effective and ethical, or is it just completely toxic and should be thrown out the window? 

John:

 I can't  see any reason for a policy that engages so extensively into the everyday life of children and communities within Britain. So I just think if we dialed things down and addressed terrorism as a security issue, not as a problem of integration, and instead put all the efforts that we put into Prevent, into young people that would be an advantage.  .So my view is that  you can serve positive outcomes for community cohesion, you can have a improvement in security, as an unintended consequence of just investing and committing to the improvement of the lives of young people. 

Cait:

There are echoes here of what we heard from professor Alex Vitale in episode one, with regard to defunding the police. Social measures are one of the things that have been shown  to reduce crime. But we just don't live in a world where extensive and flawless social solutions are going to be rolled out anytime soon. So we have to make policy decisions based on the world that we actually live in.  

One more question. Do you find that as a critic of Prevent, you're sometimes accused of supporting radicalism.  

John:

 It has become an unintended consequence of Prevent.  What I argue is represented as dangerous, you know, radical. And so you already get statements of fellow traveler with Islamists and You know,  in fact, my orientations are conservative with a small c.  And yet just by virtue of speaking out  on issues that affect a minority, you are regarded as an extremist. I do think it's shocking

Cait:

So, where does this leave us? I do think we should be concerned about Prevent. It's concerning that it points the finger at so many innocent people. And it's concerning that, because it deals with non-criminal activities, it falls through a sort of legal loophole. That lets the government act in relative secrecy and limits the protections afforded to those implicated. I'm not comfortable giving the government such loose reign over a realm so easily corrupted by bias. 

That being said, I'm not convinced we should do away with the policy either. I think we should try to protect young people from all forms of grooming. And it's difficult to do that when nothing criminal has occurred. It may also be possible to make a false alarm trivial for the person implicated. By keeping things low key and getting the police out of the picture. At the end of the day, a lot turns on the question: Does this policy keep us safer in any significant way? And it's not an easy question to answer.

Since I conducted these interviews, the Shawcross review has been released. Shawcross was scathing about the program, but not for the same reasons as Professor Holmwood. He writes that Prevent is too focused on the concept of safeguarding and treats potential terrorists as victims and claims that the programme focuses too much on far, right extremism instead of Islamism, which he views as the real threat. Home Secretary Suella Braverman has responded with a promise to overhaul the program. But we may have a labor government after the next election.    

 Let's go back to Professor Greer for a moment.  

Steven:

It would be absolutely unthinkable for a former director of public prosecutions, like Kier Starmer to come out and campaign against Prevent. He's not gonna do that. So any British government for the foreseeable future is going to be committed to Prevent. The Conservatives are in power. They may want to strengthen it. They may want to make it obligatory to incorporate with it. If Labour's in power, they will maybe want  to go down the route of increased, accountability and so forth. But no nobody's gonna scrap it.

Cait:

It's really interesting that the people who champion and want to strengthen Prevent are conservatives. Because conservatives are the people who are, in effect, targeted by the policy. People with right-wing views or conservative religious views are the ones that are going to get referred so there's a kind of an irony there

John:

 What you notice is the real dismay people have about religion, and that is the strong sense that they had that people were becoming more and more secular, so just as we expected religion to be disappearing, suddenly there is religiosity within ethnic minority communities and they are disproportionately communities with children. And so that's one of the reasons why the issue is appearing within schools. 

And, you know, the curious thing about the Trojan Horse Affair and about all the things around Prevent is from the point of view of the liberal progressive perspective, they're happy talking about racism, but they don't want to talk about the rights of religious expression. And that includes the right to express  legitimate conservative opinions as well. On the right, they're happy with conservatism. They just don't like brown people. I don't mind the Archbishop of Canterbury,  but oh my word, there are all these other people  making, you know, religious arguments expressing themselves in that way. And people have got really agitated 

Cait:

Before we round up here. I just wanted to share with you an interesting story that Professor Holmwood shared with me.

John:

One of the things arising from the Trojan Horse was working together with  LUNG Theater Company and they wrote a play based upon the Trojan Horse . And I travelled around with them and it's a terrific play and it's very sort of moving . The play was being performed in an English city, large Muslim population. The theater was a big theater and it was packed with school children for a matinee performance. And the play begins with a teacher saying,  "I am the Trojan horse. I am a terrorist. Don't let me near your school.  I'm gonna huff and I'm gonna puff and I'm gonna blow your school up." And the entire theater erupted in cheers. 

Then the play ends  with exactly the same line "I'm going to huff and pull and blow your school up" and you could have heard a pin drop. And that for me, captures  both the ebullience of children willing to celebrate something that they're not really imagining. "Oh, the school's gone and hoorah" cuz that's what we're supposed to say. And then to listen to something and to reflect.  

Now  that happened in a dark space so the teachers weren't under an obligation to work out who started the cheering and not. But if that had happened in a school space  and a few children are cheering at blow the school up, that's a Prevent referral for you. 

Cait:

You've been listening to Wood for the Trees with me, Cait Macleod. A big, thank you to my guests, Steven Greer and John Holmwood. 

Throughout the season, I'll be exploring lots of messy questions around the theme of crime and justice. Including prison reform, drug legalisation, and protest policing. You can find future episodes wherever you're listening to this.  To avoid missing out, why not subscribe? And if you'd like to support the podcast, you can leave a tip at buymeacoffee.com/woodforthetrees. 

There are links to some of the facts I've mentioned in the shownotes for more info visit cantseethewood.com  or email me at cait@cantseethewood.com

Thank you for listening.