Why Can’t Prevent Stop Rebels Without A Cause?

Children’s Commissioner Rachel De Souza’s initiative to help Prevent improve its response to young, violence-obsessed individuals shines a light on an ultimate vulnerability.

The threat of radicalisation in young people has been a major blight in Britain for decades, as children gain internet access at a younger and younger age with less and less safeguarding. Prevent, formed to intervene in the radicalisation of young people and help those who already are radicalised, is in dire straits trying to help children who don’t have common political or religious ideological motives.

The inquiry into the Southport Attack, wherein three young girls were killed, has entered a second phase wherein it analyses the issues faced by young people obsessed with violence for the sake of it, and why they struggle to access intervention. The perpetrator of the Southport attack was referred to Prevent three times over two years, but his case was

closed prematurely according to Dan Jarvis MP, who said that the young man had already exhibited fixating behaviours on acts of terrorism. Prevent did not take his case to Channel, wherein resources can be allocated to help someone before the case is officially ‘adopted’.

The Stats.

The Children’s Commissioner, Dame Rachel De Souza, has called on the government to analyse the startling statistics of last year wherein cases of ‘fascination with extreme violence or mass casualty’ attacks had a miserable case adoption rate. According to government statistics, 56% of referrals were made about young people with ‘no ideology

identified’. In specifics, those without an ideology that were not susceptible to other forms of radicalisation made up 34% of referrals (3,009). Those referrals had a 4% adoption rate. This is much higher than Extreme Right-Wing ideology (21%) and Islamic Extremism (10%). In the cases of children, 71% of referrals included having no ideology. A staggering 89% of all referrals are male, and 2024-2025 saw the biggest increase in referrals since the data was first recorded in 2015-16.

For these boys of no ideology, De Souza claims they are placed upon a ‘merry-go-round of referrals and inaction’ as they are referred, and then spat back out without intervention. These cases, it is claimed, do not fit ‘Prevent’s parameters’. After that, where do they go?

Back to their life, it is assumed. The consumption of gore content, extreme pornography, and the idolising of mass murderers has allegedly contributed to the rise in these referrals, despite The Online Safety Actcoming into force in the last year. De Souza has recommended multi-agency safeguarding teams and then, if necessary, those referred should be directed to Prevent.

So why can’t Prevent begin to learn more about violent fixations? The ideological aspect of referrals are being eclipsed by young people who have no political/religious cause. They idolise the people who perpetrate these attacks, and find fascination with extremely violent

content on the internet. There’s no singular prejudice — they may just hate people. There’s a misanthropy involved that Prevent cannot seem to pick up on, one that creates much more danger than they realise.

The bulk of it is to do with methodology. Prevent does seek to enable access to more mental health resources, housing support or vocational guidance. Along with this, for cases focused on ideology, a mentor is provided who is skilled in the political or theological field that the

extremism has arisen from. But how can you provide a mentor to someone with no goal except violence, who find that their heroes are society’s most damnable? There are very few people, certainly not enough, beyond the threshold who can empathise with these young

men and say ‘I know how you feel, I have been there’ when such a feeling is only an incitement to commit harm onto innocent people on a mass scale. People who idolise the likes of The Columbine Shooters, the Southport Killer, and other despicable individuals can have nobody ‘on the inside’, so to speak. Prevent cannot provide them with a person to understand them thoroughly as an individual rather than someone with a dysfunction that needs to be corrected. Their violence, being indiscriminate, can’t be solved by empathetic education but rather it must be done through other means.

The aimless violence and idolisation of mass murderers puts you beyond the realm of what we know, of what can be determined. The mindset of those they look up to are so skewed and illogical that it simply can’t be repaired by making them see logic. With nihilistic

philosophies and a disregard for the value of human life, their motivations might be something completely removed from any material objectives or goals. A total moral overhaul for young people who see violence as something unreal, or removed from reality, cannot be done with a theologian or a political exemplar. What would be needed is something that does not empathise with them. The answer might actually be the other way around: to make them empathise with someone.

A Solution?

The derealisation and under-valuing of human life that must be necessary to carry out these horrific acts is the outlier here. The young people with these fascinations are anomalies in a society’s ethical system. Why not make them sit with someone who is on the other side of the fence, whose lives have been changed by these kinds of events? Parents who have lost a child, children who have lost a parent, or victims themselves might be the kind of people that these troubled young men need to speak to. It is easy to only see the news story: X amount killed by lone gunman. You can also see what happened in the gunman’s life beforehand. Rare is it that you get to see the lives of those who must pick up the pieces, who have to live with the consequences of another individual’s actions.

Nevertheless, this is wishful thinking. Who amongst the grieving would really want to spend their time with a young person who idolises their child’s killer, or parent’s murderer? Who would want to relive that time and time again? People who would be willing to utilise their grief, and live within it in the hopes of preventing another person from harming others, are few and far between. It’s a large, taxing request that we simply cannot rely on enough to fix such a deeply disturbing issue.

The bottom line is this: Young men are deeply troubled, and the one organisation that people thought would help do not know how to handle them. Their systems of thought that allow them to enjoy senseless and intense violence are simply not what Prevent was created for. The threats that they have wished to contain have all had thinking behind it, motivations that go beyond the horrible killings and inflicted pain. They are just the means for the terrorist to make known their ideas. They cannot answer the question:

‘What if violence is the idea?’

Cover image credit: Sapphiraesa, via Wikimedia Commons. Licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.