The People’s Review of Prevent is an alternative review to the Government Shawcross Review.
This review provides a voice to the people most impacted by the Prevent Duty.
Prevent is described as ‘safeguarding’ children from harms. However, under Prevent, safeguarding is focused on protecting the wider public from children believed to be ‘risky’, rather than protecting children from harms.
Throughout our report we present case studies that show how real these harms can be and the distress they cause to children and their families and carers.
The Trojan Horse Affair involved false allegations of an Islamist plot to take over Birmingham schools. This is a response to those attempting to have the final word.
We assert the need for a new notion of “British values” that suits the universal character of our population in this excerpt from the People’s Review of Prevent.
The Department for Education has released its new Prevent Duty Self-Assessment Tool for Schools, designed to help Designated Safeguarding Leads and wider Senior Leadership Teams implement Prevent.
The UK’s Prevent counter-extremism strategy involves data collection and retention that makes it a vast form of surveillance that can remain with a person for life, even when that person
Recently, Prevent Watch spoke about Prevent to parents who had gathered to discuss changes in the school curriculum with regards RSE.
The claim to target the far-right was a red herring to bring Muslims on board with the Prevent policy in the UK. Now, the government is saying that to target the far-right would be to police “mainstream” views shared by many in government. What is going on? We discussed this with Surviving Society as part of their Legacies of the War on Terror podcast series. Our podcast included why the long-delayed William Shawcross Review of Prevent will recommend more focus on the Muslim community, despite recommendations from counter terrorism experts to keep focus on the “far-right” and “incels”. We also talked about some of the the far-right cases that we have seen at Prevent Watch among children, and how they could have been dealt with differently, avoiding trauma to children and families. The positioning of the far-right as part of “defending British values” is quite clearly supported by people like
David Cameron’s ‘muscular liberalism’ has done away with multiculturalism and constructed a notion of ‘British values’ that scapegoats ethnic minorities by presuming they share none of these values. Prof. John Holmwood argues in this article for the Islamic Human Rights Commission that this has huge implications for education, since it has been injected into schools via the academies (and free schools) programme which removed schools from local authority control and which was actively promoted by Policy Exchange and pursued by Michael Gove. The requirement to promote ‘fundamental British values’ that is part of Prevent is incorporated under Section 78 of the Education Act 2002, which means that the moral and spiritual development of children is now subordinated to a national security agenda. Source: The British Government’s Prevent strategy: Putting religious intolerance at the heart of policy – IHRC
JUMP TO: Prevent is a psychological control policy that is about placing whomever the target groups is, in a disempowered, apologetic and fearful position as a default. This can only be counter-productive to healthy society. It does this because it stops people from expressing our perfectly legal and non-violent beliefs fully and freely. Let’s start by acknowledging that there is a lot of money to be made in the “Prevent space”. In other words, there’s a monetary reward for “supporting Prevent”; that is, you get paid when you agree to report state-defined “suspects” in the community to Prevent. So Prevent is about creating divisions among people, when moderation actually happens when people are free to interact. How Prevent psychological control works Muslims who don’t opt into community-based Prevent, can face pressure to participate in the programme at work. It’s really important that people who work in public services like teachers
The far-right and Ukraine compared to Palestine solidarity in UK schools is the subject of this CAGE survey and brief released in July 2022, taken from 462 responses.
The UK Prevent strategy is contributing to undue moral panic and harming young people in the name of “counter-terrorism”, writes Prof John Holmwood, co-author of the People’s Review of Prevent. Here’s a summary of his original piece which appeared in the Middle East Eye. The cases of Child Q and other children have cast a light on the “adultification” of Black children, but this approach also features in the UK Prevent strategy, Britain’s counter-extremism tool, although in this case it is applied to ethnic minority children generally. Under Prevent, children are regularly subjected to interviews by counter-terrorism police without a responsible adult being present. This is occurring to thousands of children each year. Yet they are not under suspicion of a terrorism offence, only of potentially coming under the influence of an extremist “ideology”. Children under 15 make up around a third of all referrals (there were 7,318 referrals in
