The lock pickers, the gatekeepers, and the non-grievables: a case study of youth workers’ roles in preventing violent extremism

ABSTRACT

In the prevention of violent extremism (PVE), various so-called soft interventions have been introduced, suggesting that teachers, social workers, and youth workers play key roles in detecting and responding to early signs of radicalization leading to violent extremism. Research has been conducted on how these interventions are being implemented and whether or not they may contribute to the securitization of welfare work. In this case study, eleven youth workers and their three managers were interviewed about their experiences of engaging in PVE work. They all worked in a neighbourhood in Gothenburg, Sweden, which was one of the earliest and most affected areas in Europe for recruitment to what was to become the so-called Islamic State (IS). The study focuses on their recollection of how they were informed about the on-going radicalization to violent extremism at the time, what actions they took, and how they were prepared for conducting PVE work. Some of the youth workers noticed signs of radicalization to violent extremism early in 2013, but they worked on short-term contracts and were not in a position to pass on the information to higher authorities. A better organized Gothenburg city could have started its PVE work two years earlier, rather than in 2015.

KEYWORDS:

• Islamic State
• radicalization
• violent extremism
• youth worker

Introduction

Home-Grown terrorism and recruitment to Salafi-jihadist groups in Syria and Iraq haunted Western European countries for about a decade and a half from 2004, and to some extent, the threat is still vivid. The term home-grown terrorist was coined to describe and scrutinize the mechanisms and preconditions that lead young people, born and raised in Western Europe, to become radicalized and turn against their neighbours, willing to cause them harm and fear (Kundnani 2014; Noor 2010). It also raised crucial questions regarding why young people were willing to abandon a relatively safe life in Europe, and go to war for a cause in a country that most of them had no or only vague connections to. In the process of countering this problem, under the auspices of the war on terror, so-called soft interventions were adopted, that is, countering radicalization to violent extremism by pedagogical and social work (Flensner, Göran Larsson, and Säljö 2019). The development of soft policies and programmes has been well researched (cf. Author; Frazer and Nünlist 2015; Sivenbring and Andersson-Malmros 2019), including how firstline professionals (i.e. social and youth workers, teachers) understand and adopt these policies (cf. Herz 2016).

The current case study draws on the experiences of eleven youth workers and their three managers, in a particular neighbourhood in Gothenburg, Sweden, about how they first learned about radicalization leading to violent extremism (hereafter referred to as radicalization) to of young people they knew from their professional work. This study scrutinizes the gap between the detection of radicalization as a problem in everyday work and the countermeasures deployed by the municipality. The particular neighbourhood is a socially and economically stigmatized suburb of Gothenburg, which has been drastically underperforming compared to the average of the city (Lundquist 2017). In this sense, there is an institutionalized normality of deviance, that is, there is a generational continuity of poverty, unemployment, and short life expectancy. Put differently, on an institutional level, it is expected that children born within this area will to a larger degree lead hard lives compared to those in other areas of Gothenburg. The radicalization to violent extremism was, however, a deviation that could not be taken as expected or normalized, calling for action.

The suburb in question was harshly affected by recruitment to the Islamic State (IS), al-Nusra, and similar organizations. Density-wise, it was one of the most affected neighbourhoods in Europe (Gustafsson and Ranstorp 2017). The first signs of radicalization were noticed by youth workers early in 2013, about a year before the matter became a subject of public discussion and almost two years before Gothenburg city administration deployed prevention measures.

The study was guided by the following research questions:

1. How do youth workers, in this particular neighbourhood in Gothenburg, talk about their memories of the first wave of extremism related to IS?

2. How do their managers talk about their memories of the responses to the situation and how this impact the way they led their respective organizations?

3. What conclusions can be drawn for future prevention of radicalization?

The next section discusses related previous research, followed by theoretical outset and methodological design. Next follows the results and the concluding discussion.

Firstline professionals and prevention of violent extremism

There has been a growing number of studies on how firstline professionals understand and adopt soft interventions for prevention of violent extremism (PVE). However, the majority of research has focused on the role of social workers in PVE, with few studies on the role of youth workers. Van de Weert and Eijkman (2019) studied youth workers’ understanding of PVE in the Netherlands. They stated that youth workers are trained to detect individuals at risk of abuse, drug use, being bullied, engaging in criminal behaviour, and so on, by identifying risk signals. However, risk signals of violent extremism are too abstract for the youth workers to be able to conduct PVE work (Van de Weert and Eijkman 2019). In his study of Norwegian social workers, Haugstvedt (2019) found that they understand radicalization as a social problem and go about their work with that perspective. According to Haugstvedt (2019), gaining trust is imperative for being able to conduct PVE work, but that is the case with all forms of social work. However, it may be more difficult to gain trust when performing PVE work because clients might sense that they are being surveyed for their beliefs and convictions. Sivenbring and Andersson-Malmros (2019) also underline the problematic role of social workers in PVE work. They argue that social workers are caught in between safeguarding the rights of their non-criminal clients and acting as informants to security agencies because their clients might be further radicalized in the future and pose a threat. This conflict has been reported in several studies concerning social work and PVE (Dryden 2017; Herz 2016; Lid et al. 2016). Finch and McKendrick (2017) argue that introducing PVE duty into social work generally contributes to the securitization of social work. Haugstvedt (2020) underlines how social workers may become uneasy when assigned to do PVE work, not in the least about how colleagues may view their work, and points to the importance of their being led and recognized by their managers. Social workers performing PVE work need to be recognized as performing important, professional work.

Normalizing, inspecting gaze, and non-grievable subjects

It is both normal and expected for people living in the Gothenburg neighbourhood in question to face social, economic, and health problems. Getting involved in criminal activities is perhaps not seen as normal, but is not entirely unexpected. Becoming radicalized and joining Salafi terrorist groups is, however, far from normal.

Normalizing, a term coined by Foucault (1975), is a powerful tool when analysing the impact that professionals have on their clients from social, medical, psychological, and pedagogical perspectives. Normalization involves institutional actions undertaken to transform the abnormal back to normality. Instead of employing punishment as a result of legal processes, the deviants are to be cured by disciplining them to submit to accepted norms and conduct that passes as normal behaviour by the large majority and thus produce them as normal subjects (Foucault 1982; O’Farrell 2005). According to Thomas (2008), disciplinary power is exercised when individuals integrate the societal norms that they have failed to live up to, and thereby set the standard for how they need to self-regulate to be seen as normal. Foucault underlines that power is not to be understood as the power possessed by an individual, rather it is present and forms in social settings that produce and reproduce definitions of values and conduct that are to be taken as normal (Foucault 1980). In this sense, it can be considered normal to live in a situation where your life expectancy is about a decade lower than a fellow human being living a short drive away as long as your conduct does not violate the norms of the welfare state. In order to analyse how professionals identify deviant behaviour, Foucault (1980) provides another useful term, the inspecting gaze. The observations, discussions, and comments of professionals about the conduct of their subjects reveal the ‘deviant’ pattern that needs to be normalized; that is, how the professionals assess and explain the conduct constitute both what is deviant and the reasons behind it.

However, the neighbourhood in question demands a closer theoretical understanding of how normality and deviance are constructed by professionals. Working as a youth worker in a context where the majority of youth are expected to be marginalized, and where it is common to encounter youths affected by violence, criminality, and neglected social and emotional needs, it may prove difficult to distinguish between different risks. Put differently, who is to be predicted as at risk and for what when everyday life of youths is fraught with different risks? What sort of signs should be read and what matters should be addressed? The inspecting gaze, according to Foucault (1975), is part of an expert system with power to make routine of normality and direct the inspecting gaze towards those who need to be normalized. The neighbourhood expert systems have routines for handling poverty, social problems, school dropouts, and other issues, but not radicalization. Thus, there is a gap in the expert system installation of inspecting gazes for radicalization, which is a new phenomenon. Experts are ignorant about how to relate to individuals who have been radicalized or will radicalize: shall they be treated as people in need or as enemies of the state?

In order to analyse how a new inspecting gaze developed among youth workers and their managers, the term non-grievable subjects is useful. Butler (2009) developed a theoretical outset for analysing when and how casualties in war are portrayed as humanized victims in public representations (i.e. media, political speeches, popular culture) and are thus grievable. She particularly focused on the US lead war campaigns in the Middle East under the auspices of the war on terror. When victims are portrayed as being part of a group that threatens US citizens’ lives and safety, they are no longer understood as individuals with human rights in need of shelter and safety. People who join terrorist groups with the intention of installing fear run the risk of becoming what Bauman (1989) calls ontologically dehumanized, that is, they cease to be accepted as fellow human beings. When young men and women join the IS, becoming enemies to the Western world, their death becomes a non-grievable death. Butler (2009) called for further consideration on how this presentation of non-grievable subjects affects society that does not desire to see its enemies as humane. Family members and former friends of some of the IS recruits who are radicalized and became terrorists will most likely grieve their death. A powerful new inspecting gaze is then turned towards those who dare to grieve the non-grievables.

Research methodology

The study design consisted of interviews with eleven youth workers and their three managers in charge of youth work in a particular Gothenburg neighbourhood in Sweden from 2013 to 2016. There were three different youth clubs in the area; some of the youth workers worked part-time in schools or as field workers. The managers held three different positions and had direct responsibility for the youth workers in this study. Five of the youth workers were hired on short-term contracts during the period focused in the study; all but one has since left the organization. The remaining six were hired on permanent contracts or were made permanent during the study period. Six of the youth workers lived in the neighbourhood in focus; all were men with an immigrant background and were hired on short-term contracts, except for one worker. The remaining five lived in other areas of the city or in nearby municipalities; they all were women, of Swedish ethnicity, and were hired on permanent contracts. All the participants had more than two years of experience working in the geographical area during the period in focus of the study. They were recruited by approaching the youth clubs in the area to find out who had experience with radicalization processes and through collecting information from the human resource department of the city about their employment duration. All youth workers in the area that fulfilled the criteria above were asked to be part of the study, and all employees on permeant contracts agreed to participate. This is also true for those with short term contracts but it cannot be ruled out that there may have been more individuals with short-term contracts that fulfilled the criteria but were unable to be identified. In other words, the ambition has been to include all youth workers rather than randomly selecting them.

This case study is a retrospective analysis of how the youth workers and their managers talk about a particular event in a particular geographical area that is most likely not on-going. The study uses rare processes for in-depth analysis and has the potential of contributing to the theoretical understanding of these processes (Denscombe 2014). The participants were interviewed individually about their experiences. Each semi-structured interview lasted about one hour and was transcribed verbatim. The transcribed data were triangulated and searched for reoccurring themes in relation to the root causes of radicalization, who is responsible for radicalization, and countermeasures against radicalization, a common methodology within case studies (Yin 2006). This process called for five follow-up interviews to obtain more detailed accounts in relation to these themes or to verify particular situations (Braun and Clarke 2006).

The study followed the ethical standards for research and has undergone an ethical review (Vetenskapsrådet 2017). All the participants provided written consent to take part in the study. They were informed of the purpose of the study, that their participation was voluntary, and that they could terminate the interviews at any time. All individual information has been omitted, and all names have either been given pseudonyms or left out. Particular events may, to some extent, be altered in order not to compromise the participants’ right to be anonymous.

Presenting the findings

This section is divided into three subsections for each of the three major themes identified during the interviews. It follows the logic of how the themes were described during the interviews. The major issue, according to the youth workers, was to get close to youngsters at risk of criminal behaviour, including radicalization. The second theme, logically enough, discusses how to overcome the distance between youth workers and youngsters at risk. The third theme focuses on how to relate to young people who are at risk of radicalization or whose friends have joined the IS.

The 9/11 attack

Explaining the root cause for recruitment to the IS in the neighbourhood, both the youth workers with permanent contracts and those with short-term contracts, talked about 9/11 as the major turning point. This was when they started to notice a change among the youngsters. The youth workers explained how the 9/11 attack directed a stigmatizing gaze towards Muslims and how youngsters attending youth clubs in the area were affected by this gaze. For instance, Rebecca, a youth worker who has worked in the neighbourhood for more than 20 years describes the situation as follows:

A few years ago, there was a lot of talk about it [radicalisation]. It all began after 9/11, that was the first time we noticed radicalisation among youth, I have to say. / … / after 9/11, with all the hatred against Muslims, the Islamophobia, youths were pushed into a corner, especially Muslims, and were demonised. We noticed some guys who were always on the edge; they could just as well be drawn into criminal gangs, selling drugs; they found something that they could fight [for], I would say. All of a sudden, there were an increasing number of visits to the mosques and they refused to shake my hand since I am a woman. Then, all the hate towards Jews, they talked about it all the time … that Hitler was right, they celebrated Hitler, and all of a sudden, they started to think on ethnic lines. It was like racial thinking; if you were a Somali, a Kurd, or whatever, you could not hang out with my sister. / … / It was all some sort of confused racial religious thinking, and they all closed in and shut us out. / … / You know, this feeling of alienation that is so strong that you are not welcomed, that you are excluded. One just has to foment a little bit, and it will all … you know people saying that no one wants you in this society, you become easy prey [for radicalisation].

Rebecca talks about radicalization to violent extremism as one of the many likely outcomes for young men living in the area; they are at high risk of engaging in violent and criminal lifestyles. She also talks about how young people in the neighbourhood turn away from youth workers, a situation which she claims has intensified since 9/11. Even if she understands the patterns of racism and Islamophobia that affect young people in the neighbourhood, Rebecca is aware that the youngsters see her as a representative of the expert system. This hinders her from reaching out to and engaging with young men who are at the point of giving up a regular life within the accepted norms of society to join extremist groups. Along with the talk about how social life changed after 9/11, the theme of who is able to make contact with youngsters, particularly the youth at risk, is reoccurring and central in most of the interviews. For example, Kurt, one of the managers, also addressed this issue. Kurt describes how he was asked by the central administration of the city council to provide information about radicalization processes and develop countermeasures. Kurt recalls:

It is a very closed world you know, that is so hard to crack … not only to crack but even just to get close to someone. As a Swedish middle-aged man, it is just so hard. You will be put in a position where you are seen as a police officer or as a spy for the police. / … / [There was a mosque] that we used to visit. Earlier, we were warmly welcomed there, but the warmth gradually faded. We had some contact with individual youths who suddenly disappeared. Nobody knew what happened to them, and later I learned that they [were recruited to the IS]. / … / It was all about the trustful relationships you had built during the years if you wanted to know something.

It is apparent that even when Kurt thinks that he is close to the people in the neighbourhood, he still misses out on what is supposedly important information about the whereabouts of the youths; it is only after they leave for Syria that he is notified. He also expresses frustration with being seen as a police officer, while at the same time it is understood that information from the youth workers is passed on to the police; hence, it is obvious that he does fulfil the role of the inspecting gaze. The problem is how to get close enough to investigate, that is, how to be trustful enough so that the youths in the area are willing to provide information and act in accordance with the expectations of the expert system.

Attempting to bridge the gap between youngsters and youth workers

The gap between the youth workers and the youngsters seen as being at risk is problematic in preventing drug use, violence, and extremism. There have been constant attempts to bridge this gap, the most common of which is to hire people who already have trustful relations with the youngsters. Kurt explains that these people are young men living in the neighbourhood who have an immigrant background. These particular youth workers are called lock pickers by their managers as they are able to open all doors. However, the so-called lock pickers are not hired as permanent staff, but, according to Kurt, are called in when needed, that is, when situations need to be controlled or information should be obtained. Mustafa is one such lock picker. He talks about how he was initially hired to tell youngsters who had broken rules of the youth club that they had been banned from the club, when the permanent staff hesitated to do that out of fear of retaliation. Mustafa was one of the first to realize that young people were joining the IS. He talked to the youths who were considering joining the IS and the families where sons and daughters actually had travelled to Syria to support the IS. He called out for help in early 2013, but there was no response from either the municipality or his fellow co-workers.

What I saw and what I still see is that it [the municipality] does not know what it is doing, and it was so very hard to have your voice heard. We were shouting intensely, ‘Hello, there are some serious issues here, people are dying’. They did not understand it. After a while, it was like, ‘Ok, what shall we do?’ They then hired two people, the so-called social resources. ‘Yeah, but what are they supposed to do?’ ‘They shall have dialogue with the mosque. But no one is recruited there’. You know, do you follow? However, they did not have a clue. They said that we should talk to the parents. For goodness sake [this was something we had already done].

The lock picker system seems to be functional for handling short-term conflicts between permanent youth workers and youngsters. However, it is less fit for handling situations that are new, such as the radicalization process. Amin is one of the lock pickers who, in 2012, started to engage with young people who supported what was to become the IS. He was frustrated that the information about on-going radicalization provided by him was not taken seriously, and explained what he saw as the reason why this early information was lost.

I have been a lock picker for many years. They say [the mangers and the permanent staff], ‘the gangs are threatening our youth club, they will recruit the youngster for this and that, can you please come to us and work for a few days, to talk to the children?’ Always thinking in short terms, and when things calm down in three or four weeks, you are no longer there. / … / We [the lock pickers] knew that we were key to calm difficult situations. For heaven sake, a guy drops a gun in front of the permanent staff, and they do not dare to do anything. So, what do they do? They call a lock picker. ‘Can you come and talk to him?’ / … / I had to quit that work. It just got me into trouble [People in the neighbourhood started to distrust me]. I had to call their parents and tell them that their children are using and selling drugs, can we have a meeting? I had to call their schools and they started to dislike me. / … / They got us into [trouble] because we had access to those circles to solve their troubles. In the end, the municipality started to mistrust me because I could talk to these children, because they listened to me. They asked me how it was possible for me to have these contacts and if I could be trusted.

Being a lock picker means that you do not have access to the chain of command in the organization. You are called in at short notice, for short sessions, with particular duties, and do not attend staff member meetings; the permanent youth workers and managers who are the gate keepers for the expert system have the authority to decide if your concerns and information shall be passed on. Gatekeeping is not just about selecting what sort of knowledge shall be passed on but also deciding what is to be considered as a problem or a duty to the organization. It is evident from the interviews that this has caused internal conflicts within the organization on several occasions. As a typical example, Hussain grew up in the neighbourhood and is well known to the people living there. He used to be one of the youths at the youth centre, and later was hired as a lock picker. During the interview, Hussain talked about situations when he and other lock pickers were particularly needed.

It was during one of the riots in the neighbourhood; many rioting youths attacked the police. It was during a weekend [Hussain was not on duty], so I got this call: ‘Can you go outside [leaving his apartment and seeking up the rioting youths] and calm things down?’ So, me and another guy who also lives here [another lock picker] spent hours trying to calm the situation, to calm the youths. We did our best to prevent them from throwing Molotov cocktails or stones at the police. [When things had calmed down], three or four persons, with higher positions in the organisation [Central administration of the city council] turned up and started to ask us for information [about those involved in the riot and the causes]. ‘What kind of information can you give to us?’ I just felt like, ‘What? You do not even say hello to me; otherwise, man, shall I give you information?’ When the youths are rioting, they can talk to us and ask us to provide them with information; however, they do not even say hello to us. What kind of cooperation is that? They just want information [to show to their superiors] for their own careers, to show to the municipality, ‘wow, look what I provide you with’.

Hussain and his friend realize that they are useful tools to calm situations and obtain information that would otherwise be lost, but that they are not welcomed as full creditable staff members. During the interviews, all youth workers, both permanent and contract-based, recognized the practice of hiring the so-called lock pickers. They all agree that it is unfair and tainted by institutional racism. The organization needs lock pickers, but it does not trust them as fully competent employees. Catharine, who used to be Mustafa and Amin’s manager, agrees that it is vital to have close access to people living in the neighbourhood if signs of concern are to be detected.

[Learning about radicalisation processes among youths] is based on trustful relations. You know, being that person that the youths really trust, and it can be different for person to person. However, young workers have very fine-tuned sensors. They can blend in the neighbourhood and sense all informal networks that operate there. In general, I can tell you that it was some particular youth workers who got to know the most and were [trusted] by the youth.

According to Catharine, a qualified youth worker can blend in and learn about what is going on. This is also a precondition, according to her, to be able to perform solid work. When asked about the lock pickers, she agrees that they are particularly helpful in getting close to the youngsters. On the other hand, she is sceptical about their professionalism.

I have conflicting thoughts about this. I do think that you will gain a lot of trustfulness if you live in the neighbourhood, if you were raised there, and yes, we had a lot of youth workers with that background. However, being the manager, I can tell you that this is something that I really tried to break. I think it is better if you work in an area where you do not live and where you are not raised; otherwise, you will lose your professionalism. This was a matter that we had to pay much attention to. / … / We earlier hired youths that used to be visitors at the centre. They had no education and were somewhere between being participants and employees. Thus, you got a staff member who had no working knowledge or professionalism, but who was like: ‘I am the youth centre in person, I am the neighbourhood personified. I have my authority with this position’. This causes problems; they do not treat people equally; they give advantages to certain groups living in the neighbourhood. Many gender pedagogies have been lost. Therefore, I wanted to at least hire educated people in the staff. There is the professional staff with professional identity, who works professionally. Then, other things will, of course, be lost like knowledge about the neighbourhood. Nevertheless, as long as you are a professional youth worker, it will be all right. We cannot have a situation where staff members are accepted just because they live in the neighbourhood.

Catharine expresses a contradiction between the usefulness of lock pickers and their professionalism. She admits that they do get closer to the youth and obtain information, and are able to calm situations. However, they appear, from Catharine’s perspective, rather to be a part of the problem, since they do not comply with gender pedagogies and favour certain groups. Catharine is, in fact, turning the inspecting gaze towards youth workers with immigrant backgrounds. Being a professional, according to Catharine, means that you have proper education and do not work in your own neighbourhood. Jonny, another youth worker manager in the area, has a somewhat different take on matters. He is more concerned with the general level of professionalism among youth workers, particularly their ability to understand and document their work.

Some of the youth clubs are more or less operated on an emotional level. All it is about is this tradition of ‘making relations pedagogic’. The weaker side of this is that they [the youth workers] have very low awareness, demands [towards the youth], and structure. / … / I started to require documentation of the work, and there was a lot of resistance. They claimed that it was not something they ought to be doing; they just wanted to work directly with the youth. I do not think that it is one or the other; sure, we shall work directly with the youth. / … / but you can still be disciplined and document your work and realise that there is some use to it.

At the policy level, youth work is professionalized by formal standards of education and the ability to produce documentation. Still, these formal standards do not help youth workers get close to the youngsters in their everyday lives, particularly in heated situations. This contradiction arises from the institutional will to make use of the lock pickers as someone with an inspecting gaze while, at the same time, subjecting the lock pickers to the same gaze. When asked about what happens when one of these lock pickers on short-term contracts gets close to being hired permanently by fulfiling the requirements according to Swedish law, Kurt’s answer is simple, ‘Then we say thank you and goodbye, it does not matter if he has done a good or less good work’.

This situation is indeed very problematic. The lock pickers take early action to prevent radicalization by talking to the youth who are understood as being at risk and the affected families; moreover, they call for help and try to pass on information. However, due to how the organization is constructed, this seems to have been largely lost in translation. The lock pickers are not seen as professionals, that is, they are not considered a part of the expert system. The information obtained by them is passed on to the gate keepers, or as Mustafa puts it, ‘we knew what was going on all the time, maybe we did not know all the time what to do even if we did something, something that at least was more than what was offered by the municipality’. Acting on the information provided by the so-called lock pickers, preventive work could already have started in 2013. However, it would take almost two years for the city of Gothenburg to take formal action to prevent radicalization. By that time, three of the eleven lock pickers in this study would have been hired permanently by the city council for the information provided by them in early 2013. However, another obstacle appeared during 2014 and onward, which would impair preventive work.

Creation of non-grievable subjects

In 2014, rumours started to circulate among the permanent youth workers in the neighbourhood that former ‘club visitors’ (i.e. youngsters who used to attend the youth clubs) had left for Syria to join the IS and that some of them were killed. In the beginning, the rumours were hard to believe, but soon, the youth workers alarmed their superiors of an emergency and called for help. Margret, one of the permanent youth workers who used to work in one of the clubs, recalls:

When we first learned that youths had gone to Syria and that many of them were killed, we decided to raise the issue in a general meeting (a formal meeting for all employees and their managers). The reaction was like … yeah, yeah, this is not our duty; this is not something that we should engage in. I was like: ‘But it is youths dying out there’. But no one listened. / … / It was like: ‘This is something for others to deal with’. I do not think that they understood the magnitude of the problem. I guess no one did at that moment. I believe that we in our youth club were the first to realise what was going on. I have been thinking about why this information was not taken seriously. [I think it] is because young people always come to us to talk about all the problems in the neighbourhood.

Margret appears to be disillusioned about how emergent matters reported by the youth and passed on to the managers are handled. Working in a deprived neighbourhood, she regularly came across accounts of suffering, worries, criminality, and other types of information about young people at risk. The stigmatized living conditions in the neighbourhood became normal for the youth workers and their managers; thus, the youth workers were not considered to have expertise to alarm about early radicalization. However, Margret recalls that in 2015, the situation called for urgent action at the policy level. Police officers, and representatives from local and national authorities invited youth workers for in-service training about recognizing signs of concern that might indicate that individuals are at risk of joining the IS or similar groups. The work group that Margret was a part of tried to make use of this information to inform themselves about how to go about when detecting youths at risk:

We talked about the need to keep a sharp eye on the youth. We should pay attention if they were shaking hands [the young men with the female staff], if they looked us into the eye, and in what ways they withdrew themselves or if they even withdrew themselves.

According to Margret, the issue of recruitment to the IS was not a concern at the time. It was one of the many situations that had become normal in the neighbourhood. However, an increase in national and international focus on recruitment to the IS from Western Europe demanded action at national and local policy levels (cf. SOU 2016, 92). Thus, while the youth workers informed about young people who were worried about friends who have died in Syria and others who were thinking about travelling to the war zone, the policy level response was to instruct the youth workers with signs of risk. For instance, youths who picked up certain Muslim (Salafi) social and religious codes were to be understood as being at risk for radicalization. As stated earlier, the turning point was the 9/11 attack. The increasing Islamophobia after the attack made the youth workers realize how harshly affected were the Muslims in the neighbourhood. However, approximately one decade later, a new inspecting gaze started considering the prevalence of Muslim religious practices among youngsters as signs of concern. This change of perception rendered insufficient the competence and experience of youth workers in performing their work. New knowledge about certain religious signals and conduct was considered enough to help youth workers detect at-risk youths.

As the people who joined the IS and those who were later killed in Syria or Iraq used to visit the youth clubs, it remains unclear if it is appropriate to commemorate them. The youth workers explain that it used to be a common practice to light candles for persons who used to attend the club when they died, even when they died violent deaths. Ibrahim recalls how the first report of death was handled.

We first encountered this problem when a Swedish guy was reported to be killed, and it was a guy that had been very close to us. It struck me how we acted differently when he died compared to how we usually did when a young person passed away. We used to have a memorial book for people to write their greetings. / … / This became really hard: ‘Shall we hush things up?’/ … / We also felt that there were other people around him, in particular his sister. / … / So, we decided to report [her] to the social welfare office.

Ibrahim describes the dilemma faced by youth workers as to how to act when they receive information that former visitors to the club had fallen as soldiers of the IS. On the one hand, it is not, as appears by his statement, acceptable to follow the usual practice. At the same time, the situation calls for some action. At the time, they reported the Swedish guy’s sister as being at risk. This is not routine when a person has died in gang-related violence, but the expert system has now installed a new inspecting gaze with new signs of being at risk. The youth workers have increasingly noticed that the youngsters are no longer willing to talk to them about their concerns with friends who joined or plan to join the IS, or those who died. Margret recalls:

One of the youths came to us and said that there was one person (a visitor to the club) that had died. [We] asked if they needed any help, someone to talk to, the way you go about when people are facing hardship. / … / [But], it was very quiet. When we come across similar situations (the death of peers) in connections with criminality then we light candles and they all come here to grieve, the club becomes a memorial site and we talk a lot about those who passed. However, they all became silent. It was like they had never existed when they passed away. / … / as I experienced it all, it was not possible for the youths themselves to talk about it, not at large. There was all quiet about it.

The silence that surrounded both the recruitment to the IS and the death of those recruited impaired the youth workers’ ability to engage in preventative work regardless of whether they wanted to or not. The fact that it is both routine and common practice to handle deaths of young people engaged in crimes indicates that the situation with radicalization to the IS highly sensible and the discrepancy between instructions for detecting risk signals and how to talk to young people who are at risk of recruitment is counter-intuitive. Detecting risk signals within social work should form the basis for engagement in dialogue. Instead, it appears that young people do not want to talk about their concerns or express their sorrow over the death of a friend. They know that their friends have become non-grievable subjects, and it is not possible to talk about them. As friends, or former friends, of non-grievables, there is now a new level of stigma against them. However, deaths of criminal youths other than those who joined the IS are grievable and it is possible to talk about sorrows and fears in relation to them and their criminality with a common understanding of being brought up in a deprived neighbourhood. Being able to communicate with young people living stigmatized lives is obviously a precondition for youth workers to engage in preventive work, but the non-grievables are surrounded by silence and being connected or associated with them may lead to being reported.

Conclusion

This study revolves around an early problematic situation when young people in a particular Gothenburg neighbourhood in Sweden chose to leave for Syria and Iraq to join the IS or similar groups. The individuals in question were in their mid-20s (Gustafsson and Ranstorp 2017); thus, they had already left schools, and only in a few cases were at the time visiting the local youth clubs. The main source of how the youth workers in the area were informed about the on-going radicalization were the so-called lock pickers, hired on short-term contracts at the youth clubs. In some cases, they were also informed by younger siblings and friends who attended youth clubs. The youth workers became aware of the on-going radicalization in early 2013, long before the matter became publicly known and was debated. However, information was not passed beyond the local management level because those with the most vital knowledge had weak positions in the organization and seldom were part of staff meetings. The city of Gothenburg initiated action against radicalization in 2015, due to outside pressure and reports in the media, rather than heeding the information provided by youth workers and its own employees. However, taking action meant, as reported by the youth workers, providing in-service training, which to a large extent focused on different risk signs that youth workers should pay attention to and detect people at risk of being radicalized. The risk signs are to some of the informants seemingly relevant, but for the so-called lock pickers, these signs are either irrelevant or redundant. If you have the ability to create trustful relations with the youth in the neighbourhood, you will not need these signs in order to know what is going on. However, if you do not have such an ability, these signs will not help you to understand what is going on, but rather transform you into the inspecting gaze and make access even harder.

Retrospectively reflecting, it is unlikely that there was much the city of Gothenburg could have done in 2013–2015 to prevent young people from radicalizing. In terms of deploying the services of youth workers, the institutional practice of hiring the so-called lock pickers on short-term contracts and with limited opportunities to pass on vital information impaired their ability to gain access to further information. Moreover, the fact that the lock pickers were also mistrusted by the management and subject to the inspecting gaze was an obstacle in making use of their trustful relations with young people at risk, which potentially could have prevented or at least delayed the process of radicalization. This is an institutional practice that should be thoroughly investigated by the municipality; it should be seen as taking advantage of young men living in the neighbourhood to have them control other young men.

Today, there are no known cases of recruitment to the IS in the neighbourhood. However, criminal and violent gangs are doing their utmost to attract new members with little or no belief in their future. This shows that radicalization, violent extremism, and criminal gangs will always remain a part of the youth worker context in the neighbourhood. All young people growing up in the area are, to some degree, at risk of being recruited for carrying out violent crimes or becoming victims of violence, since the area is more affected by violence than other areas (Lundquist 2017). The youth workers in this study knew that there was little they could do about on-going radicalization and were aware of the problematic misuse of lock pickers. In the interviews, they reason that the idea behind lock pickers is to control and contain situations. However, they have a different take on their role as youth workers; instead of preventing at-risk youngsters from becoming radicalized, they see their role as preventing them from being ‘at risk’. Fred, one of the youth workers with a concrete understanding of what he thinks is his duty, aptly states:

… [We have to continue to work with] all matters about the neighbourhood, things that are important to people who live here. Help young people in overcrowded apartments get some space for doing their studies, helping them to achieve their goals. It is so important when you live in an overcrowded apartment, just to have a quiet place to sit and do your homework. Do you get it? When you have no space or no help to do your homework, it is my job to help with that. / … / To make them believe in the future.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).