If Prevent responds to this in the way it has responded to Muslim children groomed for involvement in criminal activity, Prevent will no doubt fail these children too, writes Bristol University blog Transforming Society.
The racist riots that broke out across the UK in the Summer of 2024, using the façade of ‘protecting children’ to hide deadly motivations of hatred and racial bigotry, have acutely revealed how perceptions of terrorism are racialised in UK policy and imagination.
Laments of ‘how did we get here?’, ‘this is not us’ and ‘this is not what it means to be British’ (and therefore what it means to be White) occupied the media in the immediate aftermath.
However, political narratives rapidly shifted from the initial terms ‘extremists’, to ‘far right’ and eventually to the sanitised language of ‘thugs’ and ‘criminals’.
As children and families cautiously returned to support services, hostels, work, school and colleges, communities are still working through the traumatic aftermath of what many have referred to as acts of terrorism.
These riots appeared to have taken public bodies by surprise, indicating they were not seeing consistently high levels of race hate crimes as an indicator of a potential coordinated extremist attack or a threat to children.
Yet, in the rioting mainly White men were observed leading these racist attacks and encouraging children, as young as 10 in Northern Ireland and 11 in England, to join them.
If Prevent responds to this attempt to draw white children into right-wing violence in the way it has responded to Muslim children groomed for involvement in criminal activity, Prevent will no doubt fail these children too.
The prioritisation of punishment over support for children has not only had devastating impacts on British children and their families internationally, but also domestically.
Read more on Transforming Society.
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