UK Program Lets Radicalized Youth Without Ideological Motivations Fall Through the Cracks
Earlier this month, Security Management highlighted the UK’s early-intervention antiterrorism program, called Prevent, noting the overall increase in referrals to the program and, particularly, the increase in youth referrals. It also reported that the young person who stabbed and killed three girls at a dance studio in Southport in 2024 had been referred to the program three times, and that the government determined that the killer’s Prevent referral cases had been closed prematurely.
A new report from the office of the UK’s Children’s Commissioner highlighted the ways the Prevent program failed at-risk youth and issued a set of recommendations to correct the failures.
“I…think about services which should have identified the risk and intervened to stop it but didn't,” Children’s Commissioner Dame Rachel de Souza wrote in the report’s forward. “Since that dreadful attack we have learnt more about the failings of those services but also of a wider problem. There is a group of children—those who are radicalized but are fixated on violence without a clear ideology—that the system we have created to protect us all from terror doesn’t work for. That keeps me awake at night.”
How Prevent Is Set Up
Anyone can make a referral to the Prevent program about someone they believe is at risk. Police with counter-terrorism expertise assess each referral to make an initial determination of the risk of radicalization. If sufficient risk exists, the case is discussed by a multi-agency panel led by police and that can include local authorities, education professionals, and health professionals.
If the panel agrees that sufficient risk exists, then the case is referred to the Channel program, and a personalized program is developed and offered to the individual as a voluntary form of early intervention.
Referrals that do not progress through to a Channel intervention may be reported to specific agencies, such as mental health, education, or local authorities, who may be a position to offer services to the individual.
The UK’s counter terrorism policing program touts the success of the program, noting 31,000 cases have been assessed since 2019 and around 500 cases each year enter the Channel intervention program. “Channel has supported 5,000 people to move away from terrorism since the introduction of the statutory Prevent duty in 2015,” the program’s website reported.
Problems with Prevent
The main problem with the Prevent approach, and the failure most directly related to the Southport tragedy, is readily apparent in the Channel program’s guidance document. It establishes three objectives for Prevent, the first of which is: “to tackle the ideological causes of terrorism.”
Prevent was designed to prevent terrorism where terrorism is defined as the use or threat of violence for ideological purposes. However, the referrals made to the program are often made in order to alert authorities to the possibility of violent radicalization regardless of ideology. The disconnect means Prevent, and the subsequent Channel program, are not effective mechanisms for many of the referrals, which are made about individuals that fantasize about violence but without a clear or fixed ideology, as was the case for the Southport attacker, who had been referred to the Prevent program on three occasions.
The Children’s Commissioner analysis of Prevent data from 2024-25 found that 71 percent of those 17-years-old or younger referred to Prevent had either no clear ideology or no dominant ideology.
“The majority of these children referred into Prevent do not actually progress to receive an intervention and are often referred back to exactly the organization that referred them, most often an education setting,” de Souza wrote in the forward. “Here we have a system holding a great deal of worry about a group of children, seeking somewhere for them to get help, or someone to hold responsibility for them, and not finding it. Children referred in, then referred out. That is not good enough—and the failures in the system have tragic consequences.”
Recommendations
The report from the office of the Children’s Commissioner contained 12 recommendations designed to address the shortcomings in the Prevent program and additional ways the government can help prevent extreme acts of violence perpetuated by and against children. Here are those 12 recommendations in full (links added for clarity):
Tackling online drivers of harm
Recommendation 1: The government should restrict technology companies from accessing children, until they are able to prove that they have measures in place to protect them from harm—covering both protections on seeing specific types of content, as well as protection from features that increase the risk of encountering that content—such as curfews, no advertising, no recommended content, no ability for constant scrolling, and no ability to be contacted by strangers. This must cover not only social media platforms, but gaming, AI chatbots, image generators, and messaging services too.
Recommendation 2: Ofcom should assess regulated services’ compliance with their safety duties by an outcome measure. This means that if a child is convicted of a terrorism offense where it is found that engaging with content on a regulated service contributed to the commission of their crime, that platform’s compliance with their safety duty should be reviewed.
Recommendation 3: Online platforms should be required to complete a risk assessment for the risk of radicalization or violence fixation. The risk of radicalization or fixation on violence on online platforms requires a system-wide assessment of how features such as algorithms contribute to a child’s behavior. It is essential that these risk assessments are fully transparent, and counter-terror police should be added to the list of relevant bodies who are able to access these risk assessments under s393 of the Communication Act.
A new pathway for children at risk of committing violence
Recommendation 4: The Home Office and Department for Education should issue joint statutory guidance on children who pose a risk to others. This should require that all children where there is a concern that they might commit violence or other forms of harm—because they are violence fixated, drawn into terrorism, or because of concerns about criminality—are referred to the Multi Agency Child Protection team in the child’s local area.
This should build on learning from areas which have introduced parallel referral pathways, where children are referred to Prevent and local authority safeguarding teams simultaneously. These assessment teams should act as a triage for all these children, including drawing on expertise from counter-terror police at the initial assessment stage when concerns about terrorism are identified, and then children should be allocated to the appropriate intervention from there.
Recommendation 5: A national database of evidence-based interventions for children at risk of harming others must be established, including for children who are fixated on violence, but who do not have an ideology. All local authorities should establish a pathway and a set of these evidence-based interventions for children at risk of harming others. This should include close working with Youth Justice Teams to carry out preventative work with children. Children should continue to be progressed to Channel interventions if that is assessed as being the most appropriate intervention for their needs.
Recommendation 6: The Department for Education should review Working Together to Safeguard Children to be clear that risk of committing violence or harm to others should be a reason for a safeguarding referral to be made and for support to be offered.
Recommendation 7: Updated, and frequently revised, training should be provided to education and health professionals and others who might refer children, to clarify which children should be referred and how referrals should be completed.
Recommendation 8: The Youth Endowment Fund should be funded to support the Home Office to build the evidence base on the effectiveness of interventions for children at risk of committing serious violence with and without fixed ideologies.
Recommendation 9: In the long term, the Department for Education should introduce legislation to amend the Children Act to set out how harm from outside the home should be tackled.
Working with health
Recommendation 10: The Department for Health and Social Care’s mental health strategy must include a specific strand of work on children, which should include clear pathways for neurodiversity, a shared outcomes framework to establish the effectiveness of interventions, and pathways for children with trauma who currently fall between gaps of health and children’s social care.
Improving data
Recommendation 11: The Department for Education should roll out the consistent childhood identifier without delay to all children, whether or not they are in contact with social care, in order to ensure that opportunities for sharing data and information are not lost.
Recommendation 12: Local Prevent and policing should improve their data recording, with a standardized approach overseen by Counter Terror Police and Home Office so it is possible to track children through the system to understand how many are referred, and exactly what the outcome of their referral is.
