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Race and Youth Policy: working with young people
Race and Youth Policy: working with young people

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3 Themes of race and risk within youth policy

A major policy theme over the past decade during the period of the coalition government has been the focus on so-called ‘gangs’, thus highlighting the relationship between race, policy and injustice. Smithson and Flint argue that:

The governance of young people’s behaviour through the imposition of increasingly punitive measures needs to be viewed in terms of the messages they send out about young people by increasing fear and intolerance and also the degenerative effect they have on relations between young people and those organisations [which] seek to control them.

Smithson and Flint (2006, p. 36)

Analysis of youth policy and its growing preoccupation with risk helps in seeing the close relationship between our understandings of young people and their lives, and the priorities of policies directed towards them. Usually, these initiatives seem to involve persuading young people to improve their ability to overcome the risks through education and training, or constraining them through the criminal justice system when these fail.

Young men, particularly those from a Black or Asian background are viewed as high risk groups, and via youth policy is articulated through the gang and Prevent agendas. Prevent was first launched in the UK in 2003 as governmental response to the 9/11 Twin Towers terrorism attack in the USA. It is viewed by many as a vehicle to justify the surveillance of Muslim people, particularly young Asian men, and has resulted in negatively labelling Muslim Asian youth as a ‘problem’.

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For Fahid Qurashi: …the framing of the terror threat in the ‘war on terror’, as an ‘Islamic threat’, has afforded a surveillance infrastructure, embedded into Muslim communities, which has securitised relations with local authorities. Its intelligence products, as well as the affective consequences of surveillance, have served to contain and direct Muslim political agency. Fahid Qurashi (2018, p. 1)

The ‘war on terror’ discourses have served to underpin the Prevent agenda, despite the coalition and Conservative governments placing blame on their Labour predecessors in terms of the way the strategy was conceived and rolled out: The Prevent programme we inherited from the last Government was flawed. It confused the delivery of Government policy to promote integration with Government policy to prevent terrorism. It failed to confront the extremist ideology at the heart of the threat we face; and in trying to reach those at risk of radicalisation, funding sometimes even reached the very extremist organisations that Prevent should have been confronting. (HM Government, 2011a).

Since the attacks of 9/11 Ihsan Yilmaz has noted how Muslims across Europe have been facing discrimination due to the impact of Islamaphobia, wherein: The wider phenomenon of Islamophobia includes the prejudiced perception that Islam has no values in common with other cultures, is inferior to the West , and is a violent political ideology rather than a religion as such. Ihsan Yilmaz (2016, p. 19)

However, he makes an important point by noting that Islamaphobic ways of thinking were already present before the 9/11 attack when the ‘war on terror’ was conceived by then American president George W. Bush in 2001. The Prevent programme today remains controversial and contested, with Qurashi (2018) questioning how the normalisation of Islamophobia can be addressed given that the strategy casts all Muslims as potential terrorists and ‘threats’ to the safety of the nation.

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Find out more [Tip: hold Ctrl and click a link to open it in a new tab. (Hide tip)] about how the Prevent strategy resulted in a thirteen year old boy being asked if he was affiliated to the jihadist group Islamic State.