Is Prevent doomed to fail? A qualitative study of perceptions towards the United Kingdom Prevent strategy 2011-2021

The Prevent strategy is one of the four delivery strands for countering domestic and international terrorism under the United Kingdom’s (UK) national counterterrorism strategy, Contest (HM Government, 2018). This qualitative study of Prevent focused on the periods between 2011 to 2021 when Prevent shifted from being a strategy that addressed social risks believed to cause citizens to become radicalised, to focusing on individual risks and responsibilities that oriented new understandings of radicalisation. In June 2015, the Prevent Duty imposed a statutory reporting responsibility on many professionals working across social institutions including social services, health care, and the education sectors. The purpose was to ensure that adequate reporting structures for data collection were put in place to report the concerning attitudes and behaviours of individuals thought to be identifying with radical or extremist ideologies.

Since the transition of Prevent in 2011, and the introduction of the Prevent Duty in 2015, few empirical studies have examined how Prevent discourse intersects with the experiences of those delivering Prevent in tandem with members of community groups who are likely to be subject to Prevent interventions. This thesis addresses the research gap by analysing a corpus of Prevent documents collected from official government web portals and interviewing twenty participants who deliver Prevent alongside members of community groups. The Prevent documents and interviewee narratives were analysed using Thematic Analysis (TA) guided by the five research questions listed in Chapter One of this thesis.

The findings of this study revealed most interviewees across all sub-groups felt, to varying degrees, “at risk” of physical and reputational harm when delivering or interacting with Prevent. Interviewees expressed concerns about how Prevent discourse employed knowledge to label and categorise those from marginalised communities as risks to society, causing them to feel exceptionalised and “othered.” Furthermore, interviewees from the health and education sectors expressed some hesitancy to engage in broader critical discussions about counterterrorism policy for fear of repercussions from their employers. Finally, interviewees from the different sub-groups failed to identify intersubjectively what other groups prioritised as trust attributes. The trust theme in this study, as it related to risk and power, was the most revealing to account for why interviewees from community groups were reluctant to engage with Prevent, and why some professionals exercised only minimal compliance to meet their statutory Prevent Duty obligations.