Childhood Radicalisation Risk: An Emerging Practice Issue

Abstract

Terrorism, radicalisation and risk are contested terms — converging around particular children and young people in England to construct an emergent category of abuse — ‘childhood radicalisation’. With little practice-based research to date in this issue and expected responses via the state, social work needs to step up and engage with the present terrorism debates. In this paper, we argue against peremptorily defining this as a child protection issue. Rather, we think that more debate is needed about the role of social work and policy influences because social work can find itself unwittingly posing a risk to the very families we set out to help. Moreover, social workers might find themselves pawns in an ideologically driven moral panic without the benefit of debate about how we can make a contribution to families, and to this emerging practice issue. This paper offers some suggestions to bolster the confidence and skills needed in approaching this new practice issue. Social workers are themselves at risk of becoming the guardians of radicalisation risk work. This needs resisting if social work is to offer something complementary to the policing and securitisation needs of an anxious politic and ever-hovering media, hungry for sensationalised risk stories.

Keywords:

• risk
• terrorism
• radicalisation
• child protection
• social work

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Tony Stanley

Tony Stanley is a principal social worker at the Department of Education, Social Care and Wellbeing, London Borough of Tower Hamlets, UK. Tony Stanley’s work focuses on risk debates in and for practice. He has recently applied the ‘signs of safety’ practice framework for use in adult social care, and collaborated on a College of Social Work practice guide for working with extremism risk. He has three book chapters due out this year debating risk, sociology, social work and radicalisation. Correspondence to: Tony Stanley, Department of Education, Social Care and Wellbeing, London Borough of Tower Hamlets, 5th floor, Mulberry Place, London E14 2BG, UK. Email: [email protected]

Surinder Guru

Surinder Guru is a lecturer in social work in School of Social Policy, IASS, University of Birmingham, Edgbaston, Birmingham, UK. Surinder Guru’s work focuses on intersections of race, gender and class. Her latest work has looked at the impact of counter-terrorism policies on families of people detained under terrorism legislation. Email: [email protected]