Since 2003 - and publicly since 2006 - the government has been running a
programme designed to reduce the danger of terrorism by preventing
'radicalisation': PREVENT.
There's an obvious problem in the basic approach of PREVENT: there's a
difference between becoming a 'radical' and becoming a terrorist, and
only one of these is something that the government should be trying to
stop. If the government wants to stop people becoming terrorists, what they need to stop is that
specific step in the process of 'radicalisation' which takes people into
actual terrorist involvement. This step is, of course, fiendishly
difficult to identify, and takes different forms for different people;
the entire broad process of 'radicalisation' (meaning 'becoming more
radical') is much easier to combat. The problem is that if you make it a
government priority to prevent people becoming more radical, you're
committing the government to opposing certain political views, whether
the people holding them are violent or not.
The government essentially has two impossible options: one target which
is too small to hit and takes too many different forms to define
consistently, and one which it can hit but shouldn't. Attacking an
entire sub-culture with 'radical' views is a bad idea, ethically
speaking - a democratic government shouldn't be in the business of
banning certain forms of politics. It's also bad tactics. Say you've
identified 500 people with more or less jihadist views, including 10 who
are actually planning a terrorist action and 40 active sympathisers. In
that scenario, putting the 450 people under intensive surveillance is
at best a waste of resources; at worst, it will cause enough alienation
to turn some of those people into active sympathisers, making the
original problem worse.
The problem with PREVENT was summed up in the first published document on the strategy, which
defined 'radicalisation' as "The processes whereby certain experiences
and events in a person’s life cause them to become radicalised, to the
extent of turning to violence to resolve perceived grievances". Although
'radicalisation' literally means 'becoming radicalised', it's also
defined as "becom[ing] radicalised to the extent of turning to
violence".
Things didn't get much better in the second iteration of PREVENT,
announced in 2009. Now what was at issue wasn't 'radicalisation' (always
an under-defined term) but 'violent extremism'. The assumption was that
it was possible to draw a line between acceptable and unacceptable
forms of radicalism, the unacceptable kinds being inherently (and
recognisably) 'violent' in themselves. Since this is in fact impossible,
there was widespread suspicion of PREVENT in this period, precisely on
the grounds that the fear of 'violent extremism' was having a chilling
effect on free speech. In the same period, ironically, some
PREVENT-funded projects were focusing - or attempting to focus - on the
specific stage in the process of radicalisation which leads into violent
activism. This necessarily meant that some official funding was going
to people with radical - and in some cases quite unpleasant - views: if
you want to stop radicals turning into terrorists, the people you want
to work with are the radicals.
The Coalition government announced a third version of PREVENT in 2011,
responding to two different sets of concerns. On one hand, the 'violent
extremism' narrative was abandoned; a definite line was drawn between
radical views, on one hand, and support for terrorism on the other. On
the other hand, earlier versions of PREVENT were heavily criticised for
channelling public money to (non-violent) extremists, and connections
were drawn between 'extremist ideologies' and support for terrorism. In
other words, we rapidly went back to square one: the idea of opposing
terrorism while tolerating radicalism effectively disappeared, with
Prime Ministerial statements to the effect that PREVENT should oppose
extremism in all forms, violent or not.
Throughout the brief history of PREVENT, two things have been constant:
the aim (influencing people not to become terrorists) and the means (an
attack on radical ideas). The greatest irony of this tangled and
unedifying story is how little it corresponds to what we know about
desistance from crime. If you want to help career criminals to go
straight, the research suggests that the best thing to do is help them
to feel that they're redeeming themselves in the process - not making an enforced break with their past, but going straight of their own accord and with their heads
held high. The last thing you do is tell them that their entire view of
society is wrong and demand that they adopt the opposite of
their existing views: the government is not a racket, the police are not bent, shoplifting is not a victimless crime, cannabis is not
harmless... But according to the PREVENT approach, with its stress on getting people to abandon radical ideas, this is precisely how you
get terrorists and terrorist sympathisers to 'go straight'.
Are terrorists that different from ordinary criminals? Is PREVENT really
poorly designed? Or is the goal of PREVENT something other than
preventing people becoming terrorists?
