Prevent scheme was rotten from the start

Prevent targets Muslims (Pic: Flickr/DFID)

A new report on the government’s “Prevent” scheme has exposed its claims to be combatting terrorism. 

Prevent was created by the Labour government in 2003, at the height of its “War on Terror”. 

Its remit was significantly broadened under the Tories. 

In 2015, it became a statutory duty for workers in schools, the NHS, prisons and local authorities to report people they suspected were at risk of turning towards extremism. It singled out Muslims and turned ordinary people into spies. 

This followed the 2014 Trojan Horse scandal, an Islamophobic hoax about an alleged plot among Muslims to take over a group of Birmingham schools. 

Anti-Prevent campaigner Rob Ferguson told Socialist Worker, “The effect of Prevent was to cast Muslims as a suspect community, a potential enemy within. 

“Tens of thousands of children have been referred to Prevent over the past decade,” he said. 

“The referral reasons range from expressions of support for Palestine to a 10 year old Muslim boy being spoken to by police after mistakenly saying he lived in a ‘terrorist house’ instead of ‘terraced house’.”

The new report, by the Children’s Commissioner for England, shows that more than half of Prevent referrals were for children, and that most those referred were not considered ideologically radicalised. 

The report’s author, Dame Rachel De Souza says, “Almost three quarters of referrals for children in 2024-25, were not about radicalisation in the way we traditionally think—being a right wing, left wing, or Islamist extremist. 

“They were where children had no clear ideology identified in the referral, but many had a fascination with extreme violence or mass casualty attacks.”

In the majority of cases, the people referred were sent back to the institutions that referred them.

The report also shows that neurodivergent children make up a disproportionate number of referrals to Prevent. 

Rob told Socialist Worker the report’s findings, “don’t necessarily reflect changes in the cohort of kids referred. 

“They reflect changes in the way they’ve been classified. It was never true that the vast majority of kids were identified as ideologically radicalised according to the various Prevent criteria. 

“In order to kind of accommodate that reality, the Prevent criteria were basically widened to include ‘violence fixated individuals’ and ‘no identified ideology’.” 

While referrals for far-right terrorism are on the rise, Rob said, “At an individual level, we are not comparing like with like. 

“When a Muslim kid in a class is targeted by Prevent, it is seen to reflect on every Muslim in the school, on the family, on the community. When a white kid is referred for far right views, it does not cast every white kid in the school or beyond as part of a suspect community.”

“It would be a mistake to think that somehow Prevent is tackling far-right extremism,” he added. 

The report ignores the impact of economic and political crises on children, and it ignores the rise of far right figures like Andrew Tate in radicalising young people into racist and misogynistic hate. 

Instead, the report puts the blame on social media. Rob said, “The report lets the real culprits off the hook. The politicians, the mainstream media, our state institutions, and so forth.”

The report makes recommendations for changes to Prevent. But these recommendations are an indictment on the scheme. The only way to implement them would be to scrap it altogether.

For instance, the report calls for a “new pathway for children at risk of committing violence”. 

Prevent was rotten from the start. It was not designed to support vulnerable children but to criminalise and target them. 

Socialists, parents and teachers’ unions should argue for it to be scrapped.