This week, newly-released Prevent statistics showed that a record 44% of those referred to the anti-radicalisation scheme in the last year were aged under 15. At the same time, Counter Terrorism Police published a joint paper between the Five Eyes Alliance of the UK, USA, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand, warning of the “imminent threat to national security” posed by terrorist minors.

In subsequent reporting, the two developments have been closely linked — and no doubt the publication of both on the same day was intentional — but the Prevent referral statistics do not support the argument of a teenage terror threat.

Really, Prevent’s statistics tell us more about those making the referrals than they do about the nature of the terror threat to Britain. Prevent uses the public sector — especially education — as its main vector of delivery, which will always skew referrals towards the kinds of people with whom those institutions and services interact. This has led to confusion and mission creep even among Prevent practitioners who, as William Shawcross warned in his 2023 review of Prevent, have viewed terroristic radicalisation primarily through a lens of vulnerability.

After all, consider who is more likely to be on the radar of those making Prevent referrals: an autonomous adult becoming involved in Salafi-jihadist activism — an ideology which demands he cut himself off from broader society — or an individual exposed to sources of instability such as drugs and mental health issues, which bring him in and out of contact with various local authority services?

This is not to mention under-18s, who are in contact throughout the week with professionals tasked to report radicalisation risks and who receive regular Prevent training. The trouble arises when Prevent professionals in Government or the police, or the ecosystem of think tanks and NGOs which surrounds the scheme, use the latter cases to extrapolate grand conclusions about the nature of terrorism in Britain.

The apparent mismatch between the ideological basis for Prevent referrals and MI5’s caseload has been the subject of much controversy. For several years, referrals for far-Right beliefs have outweighed Islamist referrals, despite the latter representing some three-quarters of live terror investigations. Again, this arguably reveals more about the referrers than the referred.

There is also an age mismatch: while half of Prevent referrals are for minors, the same proportion of actual arrests is for over-30s, suggesting something is seriously out of kilter. That said, under-17s still represent a significant proportion (17%) of terror arrests, a share which senior police officers have warned is growing.

Unfortunately, absent from the repeated warnings about increased terror convictions of minors is important context: that terrorism legislation has now greatly expanded to account for more online offences. In fact, data from the International Centre for the Study of Radicalisation (ICSR) demonstrates that of 43 terror convictions of minors, not one had actually committed any violence. Many had instead committed online offences, some of them no doubt serious — even urging others to perpetrate violence — but still a far cry from planning or committing an act of mass murder.

This trend of child terror arrests even prompted the Independent Reviewer of Terrorism Legislation, Jonathan Hall KC, to warn in 2022 that “the traditional terrorist model of arrest and prosecute ill suits suspects who hardly belong in the same category as al-Qaeda, the new IRA, or Islamic State […] New ways of diverting children from the clunking fist of terrorism legislation must be found.”

The Five Eyes paper does include case studies of minors involved in terrorism, but only one of the nine presented makes mention of any physical weapon: an IED constructed by a would-be jihadist in Arizona. The other case studies mainly pertain to online activity.

What’s more, these warnings of increasing child radicalisation have been ringing for over a decade but, for the most part, we are yet to see it manifest into real-world violence. The far-Right plots and attacks on both sides of the Atlantic have largely been committed by middle-aged men. Even the Isis recruitment wave of 2014, for all the tropes of vulnerable teens in their bedrooms bewitched by propaganda, saw an average age of travel to Syria well into the 20s.

This is not to downplay the seriousness of these developments. There is clearly something going on at the increasingly porous online borders of extremism, gore porn and edgelordery which demands a response. But, as Hall notes, “police lack other ways of managing the risk.” Of course, that largely seems the thrust of the Five Eyes warning. Yet attempts to foster a more holistic approach aren’t helped by overstating or misstating the nature of the threat posed by teenage terrorists.

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Liam Duffy is a researcher, speaker and trainer in counter-terrorism based in London.

LiamSD12

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