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.
RICU, a mysterious communications unit within the Home Office, dedciated to “behaviour change activity in support of national security priorities”, has signed a £1m deal for “media monitoring and evaluation
A social media network for young people that has been launched around the term “woke” is actually a covert British government counterterrorism programme, security officials have admitted. A Facebook page and Instagram feed with the name This Is Woke describes itself as the work of a “media/news company” that is engaging “in critical discussions around Muslim identity, tradition and reform”. In fact, it was created by a media company on behalf of the Office for Security and Counter-Terrorism (OSCT) at the UK Home Office. The OSCT is refusing to disclose information about the network, however, and will not explain the reason it was created, claiming that to do so would “prejudice the national security of the UK”. Read more
The British government is attempting to prevent publication of material that would show how counter-extremism propaganda is being channelled covertly through radio dramas broadcast in the UK. Lawyers for the government are resisting an attempt to force disclosure of documents that would expose the role the Home Office’s secretive Research, Information and Communications Unit (RICU) has played in the creation and production of supposedly independent radio shows. Read more
A secretive British government counter-terrorism propaganda unit is working on campaigns aimed at changing the behaviour and attitudes of young people in the Middle East and North Africa considered to be at risk of becoming violent extremists, Middle East Eye can reveal. The campaigns, which have so far run in Tunisia, Morocco and Lebanon, use rap music, graffiti, filmmaking, social media and sports to bolster their credibility and “deliver messages about alternative pathways to vulnerable youth”. The work is led by the British Council, a public body that promotes the UK abroad and is part-funded by the British Foreign Office, through a programme called “Strengthening Resilience in MENA” which has been funded by the European Union since 2016. Read more
Nobody had heard of RICU and its use under Prevent, until this report revealed how the Home Office uses a secret unit to push state-scripted narratives on “grassroots” groups.
