About Prevent
Read about a brief history of Prevent, browse FAQs, follow the links to touchstone resources and criticism of Prevent by major professional bodies, rights organisations, and the United Nations.
The Prevent duty has been sold to the public and public service employees as a legal duty under Section 29 of the Counter-Terrorism and Security (CTS) Act.
It evokes a language of fear and violence to criminalise religious and political beliefs deemed by the Home Office and the Commissioner for Countering Extremism to be ‘extreme’ at any given time. Currently, there is no independent, external oversight of Prevent.
To show the impact of this on people, Prevent Watch co-authored the People’s Review of Prevent, which has been endorsed by the United Nations.
Concerns about Prevent
Children Targetted
31% of referrals are children aged 14 and under; over 50% are under 20, and 70% of our cases involve children. With our support, they have been able to disengage Prevent.
Surveillance State
Over 5m people public service employees have been trained in Prevent. Our cases increasingly feature employees who choose us to speak out against Prevent.
Suspect Community
Muslims are the target community, and they make up 95% of our cases. The remaining are non-Muslim children and activists for equally misinformed ‘right-wing extremism’.
Chilling effect
Prevent has had a ‘chilling’ effect on open discussion, and 20% of our cases are referrals that feature free speech violations. This is particularly problematic for education and the well-being of children at school.
Institutionalised Islamophobia
By creating an environment of mass data collection, Prevent pushes challenging voices out of public spaces where they can be moderated. But 99% of our data removal cases are successful.
Flawed Science
Prevent’s assumptions linking targeted political beliefs and religiosity to violence has no credible evidential basis. However, Prevent’s deceptive statistics are used to prove ‘success’, further reinforcing it.
“Imagine having your 10-year-old son being the subject of a decision by counter terrorism with no opportunity to explain or challenge the referral and the situation? This is all having a harmful impact on my son.”
The History of Prevent
Prior to existing as a legal duty, Prevent was introduced in 2005 by the then Labour government as a policy targeting the Muslim community in the wake of 9/11 two years earlier. The strategy took on a more formal form post-7/7.
Since then, successive ‘reviews’ saw Prevent become concerned with much broader “indicators of extremism” which have come to include ideas held by anti-war and environmental activists, as well as those that challenge neo-liberalism and democracy.
A report by CAGE entitled Prevent: A Cradle to Grave Police State gives an excellent account of Prevent in the early years.
In 2023, Amnesty International authored a report calling for Prevent to be withdrawn, entitled This is the Thought Police.
In 2013, after what has become known as the Birmingham Trojan Horse Affair at the centre of which was a hoax letter claiming the “Islamicisation” of an outstanding school – claims that were eventually dropped – Prevent became a legal duty.
In the media flurry around the Trojan Horse Affair, key political figures ensured Prevent was mistakenly and harmfully made part of safeguarding policy.
The Prevent duty is unprecedented. Never has the UK trained its educators, medics and social care professionals to report individuals in their care based on a series of “indicators” defined by the state.
These “indicators” were conceived after a small study on a group of prisoners, which resulted in a list known as the ERG22+.
The authors of the study stated that their study was not meant for broad application, but only meant for use in prisons – certainly not against children and young people in schools and universities.
Nonetheless, the ERG22+ list forms a checklist of beliefs and behaviours that form the basis of a Prevent referral.
A report by CAGE ‘The Science of Pre-Crime’ gives more explanation about the ERG22+ and why its application is dangerous to longstanding judicial principles.
The test of a fair and just policy is that it stands up to criticism and addresses its harms.
In the last review of Prevent, the government reviewer did not address these harms.
Instead, the reviewer based his recommendations on a handful of cases. The Home Office accepted them all.
As an alternative, we co-authored the People’s Review of Prevent, that was based on our 700+ cases to date.
Prevent operates in the ‘pre-crime space’ on the dangerous assumption that a criminal act can be prevented before an individual ever plans, or even intends it.
To do so, it must ignore key legal principles including the assumption of innocence and the need for a solid evidential basis for suspicion.
This is why Prevent is harmful to all who encounter it, but especially to children and young people.
Prevent is justified as a crucial part of the toolkit for “preventing” terrorism, but there is no credible evidence that it works. One cannot claim success for preventing outcomes that have been predicted based on biased assumptions, and not evidenced.
Despite warnings from the UN that Prevent erodes key rights, and a recent recommendation to suspend Prevent, millions of education and health staff, as well as social workers, must implement the Prevent duty daily.
Beliefs that have caused Prevent referrals include criticisms of democracy, UK foreign policy, and Palestinian activism.
People who have converted to Islam or voiced certain religious beliefs have also been targeted, and children with autism are increasingly being referred.
Frequently Asked Questions
In 2015, the Counterterrorism and Security Act passed into law. Section 29 of this Act is known as the ‘Prevent duty’. The Prevent duty placed a legal responsibility on schools, nurseries, universities, healthcare providers and the social care sector to have ‘due regard to the need to prevent people from being drawn into terrorism.’
While this may sound good in theory, Prevent has securitised public services, since all its employees are trained to spots signs of ‘radicalisation’ and ‘extremism’.
Concerns are reported to a Prevent Lead, who will then interview the individual, and decide whether or not to refer the case to a Channel Panel. Around 90% of Prevent concerns are never followed up, so it is innocent individuals – mostly children and young people – who encounter security services, often in an educational setting.
Prevent existed as a policy long before 2015. It was introduced by the New Labour government in 2003 in response to 9/11. As the government sought to deal with a risk of “home-grown terrorism” in response to 7/7, Prevent began to expand.
Despite a long British history of terrorism and counter-terrorism, Prevent is unique. Never before has the UK trained its educators, medics and social care professionals to detect those who they deem might become involved in terrorism.
In 2024, the Home Office has refined the age groups “to provide additional detail on the makeup of Prevent referrals”.
Data has shown, year after year, that children make up approximately two-thirds of all Prevent referrals. Last year:
- 6,884 referrals were made to Prevent where the age was known;
- children aged 11 to 15 were the largest group (2,729; 40%);
- those aged between 16 and 17 were the second largest group (892; 13%)
The Home Office breaks down the Prevent statistics by “type of concern”. The sharpest increase in referrals last year was in the category “vulnerability present but no CT risk nor ideology present”, at 36% (2,489 individuals).
For the fourth year running, the number of referrals for “extreme right-wing concerns” (1,314; 19%) was greater than referrals for “Islamist concerns’ (913; 13%).
Last year, the vast majority of total referrals (93%) were not taken up for “deradicalisation” by Channel.
While the Muslim population of the UK is less than 5%, there is a disproportionate focus on Muslims under the “Islamist extremism” concern, with normative religious practice and beliefs being at the centre of most referrals in this category.
In the past, Prevent was only focused on the Muslim community, and a significant portion of the Prevent funding went to ‘Muslim areas’, known as ‘Prevent Priority Areas’. This broad-brush approach has meant all Muslims in a given area are viewed through the security lenses of terrorism, thus creating ‘suspect communities’.
Recently, after viewing several submissions raising concerns about the discriminatory nature of Prevent, including from Prevent Watch, the United Nations Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination urged the UK government:
• to suspend Prevent
• to revise its counter-terrorism strategies
• to give adequate reparations to children and families who have suffered abuse as a direct result of Prevent.
Panic created by the Birmingham Trojan Horse Affair created the environment to force Prevent, which is a security policy, into safeguarding practice throughout education, health and other public services. This has eroded trust, which is a crucial part of a functioning public service.
Recent research has shown that Prevent in fact is not safeguarding at all. Safeguarding experts, doctors and social workers among others have criticised the Prevent duty stating it is not their role to do the police’s work and act as counter-terrorism operatives because this it not their job.
It is now widely accepted that Prevent does not fit under safeguarding. Rather it is an abuse of existing safeguarding policies and a threat to children’s welfare in a multicultural society.
We believe that existing safeguarding policies without Prevent are adequate to deal with any genuine safeguarding concerns. We also believe that to oppose Prevent is to guard the integrity of an effective and just public sector.
Prevent is described as being voluntary yet our case evidence shows that coercive tactics are used by Prevent officers.
For example, individuals are often not informed that engagement with Prevent is voluntary and are made to feel that they have no choice but to engage with Prevent – often the threat of social service involvement is used in cases involving children, thus the unspken threat of child removal can be present.
When individuals have refused to engage with Prevent, they have faced school exclusion or, in cases of adults, professional malignment and even loss of a work.
Prevent criticism is consistently dismissed by Prevent leads and practitioners as ‘myths’, but as our case library reaches 850 cases, and with various committees and rapporteurs within the UN criticising the policy, it is becoming more and more difficult for the Prevent lobby to justify the policy, especially in education and health.
The environment created by Prevent and counter-terrorism policies has seen children as young as 4 years old questioned by counter-terrorism under the guise of Prevent. This is not a myth, and similar cases continue to be reported to us.
Many people, organisations and bodies have spoken out against Prevent, including various United Nations committees.
The organisations that have criticised Prevent in the UK are listed below. All of them have either endorsed the most recent call to scrap Prevent, and/or its removal from education, especially schools and nurseries.
Prevent is a failed and counter-productive policy based on flawed science which was taken from a small prison study of the pre-crime beliefs and behaviours of convicted terrorism offenders – it was never meant to be used on such a wide scale, let alone in schools.
There have been serious human rights and civil liberties concerns raised about Prevent, detailed in the People’s Review of Prevent and other published reports by other groups. These concerns are only dismissed by those who profit from Prevent.
We believe Prevent has caused irreversible damage from schools to healthcare. It has had a toxic effect across the board as parents and children have lost confidence and trust in authorities, including teachers, and many children do not feel safe to express themselves fully at school. We know university students self-censor as a result of Prevent, and it has chilling effect on free speech.
“By dividing, stigmatizing and alienating segments of population, Prevent could end up promoting extremism, rather than countering it” — United Nations
Who has criticised Prevent
The far-reaching consequences of the Prevent strategy on British Muslims is a key concern for Fionnuala Ni Aolain, the UN Special Rapporteur on the promotion and protection of human rights and freedoms while countering terrorism. She shares her insights with TRT in this interview. Read More >>
This is the Thought Police, a report authored by Amnesty International, illustrates that Prevent is a dangerously broken system where the vast majority of people reported do not present any threat. Read More >>
The United Kingdom has become the victim of a series of dangerous assaults, writes Irina von Wiese, Liberal Democrat Member of the European Parliament. Read More >>
Predicting very rare events is extremely difficult. No tools have been developed that can reliably identify people who have been radicalised, who are at risk of radicalisation or who are likely to carry out a terrorist act. Assessment of risk is therefore best done on a case-by-case basis, as part of professional safeguarding practices. Read More >>
Prevent reinforces an ‘us’ and ‘them’ view of the world which divides communities and sows mistrust of British Muslims. It should be replaced by strategies based on dialogue, transparency and openness. Read More >>
The British Medical Association agreed a motion to support any members who refuse to take part in the Prevent training scheme. Doctors said the obligations on them were “Orwellian” “Kafka-esque” and “like a scene from Minority Report” – claiming the measures were creating “a climate of fear and mistrust”. Read More >>
In a public statement, the groups of mosques that represents up to 70,000 Muslims, has vowed to boycott the government’s anti-terrorism Prevent programme after accusing the policy of being a racist attack on the Islamic community. Read More >>
360 leading Professors, Academics, professionals in Terrorism and community leaders call for an end on Prevent including: Karen Armstrong, Professor Marc Sageman, Professor Noam Chomsky (Massachusetts Institute of Technology), Professor Humayun Ansari (Royal Holloway, University of London), Professor David Miller (University of Bath) and many more. Read More >>
In a statement, religious and community leaders in Newham – who regularly draw thousands of locals into their mosques – warn that the schemes are “exclusively targeting young Muslims for the views they hold on religion or issues such as government foreign policy”. Read More >>