Prevent

The Prevent strategy, launched in 2007, seeks to stop people becoming terrorists or supporting terrorism.　It is the preventative strand of the government's counter-terrorism strategy, CONTEST, and the Police and Local Authorities have a pivotal role to play in its delivery. The current threat level to the UK from international terrorism is severe. The most significant international terrorism threat to the UK remains violent extremism associated with and influenced by Al Qa'ida.

Last year, the government launched a review in to the Prevent strategy which found that the previous Prevent programme that the Home Office inherited from the last government　was flawed, and the Prevent strategy for 2011 has now been re-focused.

It is guided by a number of key principles:

Prevent will remain an integral part of the government's counter-terrorism strategy, CONTEST.
Prevent will address all forms of terrorism, including the extreme right wing, although it will focus on those forms of terrorism that pose the greatest risk to our national security
Prevent will also tackle non-violent extremism where it creates an environment conducive to terrorism and popularises ideas held by terrorist groups
Prevent will make a clearer distinction between counter-terrorist work and work to support cohesion and integration of communities
Prevent progress will be evaluated and monitored against a common set of objectives

The strategy now contains three objectives, these are to:

respond to the ideological challenge of terrorism and the threat from those who promote it
prevent people from being drawn into terrorism and ensure that they are given appropriate advice and support
work with sectors and institutions where there are risks of radicalisation that we need to address

Delivering Prevent through policing involves four main activities:

Community engagement and community intelligence generation to identify groups or individuals in the community that are involved in extremism activities, or people who are vulnerable to becoming radicalised
Identifying and disrupting potential risks
Managing the impact of Prevent policing activities on our communities
Raising awareness of communities and partner agencies about violent extremism, identifying vulnerabilities and the Prevent agenda

Key Facts:

The previous Prevent Strategy was perceived to have had a disproportionate impact on religion and belief and to some extent race, namely on Muslims of South Asian, Middle Eastern or African heritage (Prevent 2011 EIA) because it was perceived to be too Islam-focused
Despite this, the British Crime Survey reports that as a whole, Muslims express higher levels of trust and confidence in the police than the general public, challenging the claim that Muslim communities have become alienated through Prevent work (Assessing the effects of Prevent Policing UPSI 2011)
The British Crime Survey shows that confidence in the Police is lower amongst young Muslim men, although this is reflected for young men in the general population (Assessing the effects of Prevent Policing UPSI 2011)
Muslim women over the age of 45 also have lower levels of confidence and less contact with the police, meaning there may be a risk that mothers that may well be best positioned to pick up on early warning signs when young people are at risk of radicalization will not approach the authorities (Assessing the effects of Prevent Policing UPSI 2011)
When people were asked whether the new Prevent strategy would have a negative impact on race, the majority of respondents (55%) answered no - it would not have a negative impact on race (Prevent EIA 2011)
When respondents were asked whether the proposed strategy would have a negative impact on religion/belief, the majority of respondents (59%) answered yes - the strategy would have a negative impact on religion/belief (Prevent EIA 2011)

Useful Links:

Prevent 2011 Strategy and Equality Impact Assessment

Assessing the Effects of Prevent Policing: Universities' Police Science Institute Cardiff University