31 March 2016

Mohammed Abdel-Haq: Why preventing the Prevent strategy isn’t an option

During the Easter weekend, delegates at the National Union of Teachers annual conference in Brighton voted overwhelmingly to back a motion to scrap the UK government’s Prevent strategy.

Prevent is one of the four strands that make up the wider UK counter-terrorism strategy CONTEST, and on 1st July 2015 the Prevent Duty was created which placed a legal obligation on teachers (among others) to help ‘prevent people from being drawn into terrorism’.

Much criticism has been levelled at the Prevent strategy. Many people claim that Prevent is Islamaphobic in nature, that it encourages racial profiling and stereotyping, and that it stops people from speaking about radicalisation for fear they will be reported to the authorities. [ConservativeHome] Read more