Latest
Revealed: Babies and Muslims lost in a flood of Home Office statistics on Prevent strategy
Prevent Watch Director Layla Aitlhadj draws out the real implications of the latest Home Office statistics in relation to the Prevent strategy – here are
like prevent, these pre-crime policies in the past created ‘thought crime’
Pre-crime policies in Japan and Russia prior to World War 2 reveal uncanny similarities to the UK’s Prevent strategy and relied on the same social
Why are autistic children an extremism ‘threat’ in this latest harm of Prevent?
The latest in the harms of Prevent training is that it links children with autism to extremism, using high numbers of referrals to ‘evidence’ this
university reactions to encampments show how prevent undermines education
Last week, I visited one of the encampments for Palestine happening on university campuses to speak about Prevent and how it is being weaponised to
THE SECOND Prevent Learning Review is leading us down the same dangerous path
In the span of one week, two Prevent Learning Reviews have been published. Here, we turn our attention to the review related to the killing of MP David Amess, to show similar critical flaws and misleading conclusions.
Prevent Learning Review: 5 reasons why its conclusions are misleading
The political framing of the Southport atrocity as a Prevent failure ignores the counter-terrorism mechanisms beyond the Prevent framework.
Report
Launch: A Response to the shawcross Report
On 21st March 2023, we published an 85-page evidenced-based report A Response to the Shawcross Report, the government’s Independent Review of Prevent.
Prevent experts and co-authors of the report Prof John Holmwood and Dr Layla Aitlhadj, who also wrote the People’s Review of Prevent, have detailed how the Shawcross report is flawed.
Some criticisms include that the Shawcross Report:
• endorses ideologically-led policy where Prevent is placed under the direct control of a politically-appointed ‘commissar’ within the Home Office, with no legal accountability or parliamentary oversight;
• proposes that Muslim-led civil society organisations are ‘extremist’ and ‘Islamist’ by virtue of challenging policy within the broad framework of Islam;
• supports rhetorical claims about increased threats from ‘Islamist extremism’ not sustained by Home Office data;
• perpetuates further harms to children and vulnerable adults by going against the logical argument that follows from Shawcross’s own evidence: that Prevent is unnecessary in schools and in healthcare.
Joint statement
London 21st March 2023 – Over 200 civil society organisations, community leaders and professionals have in a joint statement called for the Shawcross report to be withdrawn.
Liberty, Amnesty International, Rights & Security International and Child Rights International Network and many more strongly criticise the review that was ideologically shaped, partial in its discussion of evidence, and replete with errors. Implementing these recommendations increases issues of discrimination, free speech and child protection already inherent in Prevent.
Launch: The People's Review of Prevent
Video: Report Launch
On 15th February 2022, we launched the first People’s Review of Prevent, an alternative to the review to be conducted for the government by William Shawcross.
Our report reviews case-based evidence about the operation of Prevent and the harms it causes to individuals and communities. We show that Prevent is disporportionate in its impact on Muslim communities and harmful, primarily in its actions directed at children and young people.
Our report shows that Prevent involves serious potential breaches of Children’s Rights and Human Rights.
The government argues that terrorists operate with disregard for human rights and that the language of rights should be used against them, but it neglects its own breaches of human rights.
ForewOrd
Sadly, Conor passed away in September this year. Please read our obituary here.
“Prevent expands the frontiers of state power well past crime into that pre-criminal arena we used to call freedom. It leads to the stigmatisation of certain communities as suspect and even dangerous, regardless of how carefully they seek to stay within the law. Our culture, our society, are better than this, both more resilient and better able than is commonly supposed to draw upon cross-community solidarity.|’
Read the full foreword written by Conor here
Data provided by this Report underscore the critical need to directly attend to deep concerns about discrimination, stigma, de facto criminalization of individuals particularly children, privacy violations, intrusion on the freedom to practice one’s religious beliefs, and negative impact on the right to education, health, and participation in public affairs for targeted individuals, primarily Muslims. It highlights the need to address the role of professional bodies in securitized prevention — from teachers to social workers to medical staff— and opens a wider debate about the consequences of ‘pre-criminal’ regulation for the rights of the child.
Read the full foreword here >>
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