hud.ac.uk/research/education
Issue 07 July 2019
Spreading the word – community reporting of involvement in extremism Research collaborations between HudCRES researchers and international colleagues are supporting more effective policy and practice efforts to prevent terrorism. How to prevent domestic terrorism is a challenge facing governments internationally. Many terrorists give some indication of their intentions to those around them yet few reports to the Police come from ‘intimates’, family or close friends of potential attackers. Ground-breaking research on this vital issue was developed in Australia by HudCRES Visiting Professor Michele Grossman (Deakin University, Melbourne), leading to a subsequent collaboration with Professor Paul Thomas and Dr Shamim Miah in a high-profile UK replication study funded by the Economic and Social Research Council through the Centre for Research and Evidence on Security Threats (CREST). The resulting ‘Community Reporting Thresholds’ report (download from crestresearch.ac.uk/projects/ reporting-violent-extremism) received significant policy interest, with the research team providing a number of briefings on the implications of the findings to officials at the Home Office and the National Counter-Terrorism Police Head Quarters.
The Community Reporting work is part of a portfolio of HudCRES research and publications supporting more effective efforts to prevent terrorism and extremism. This includes ongoing collaborations with local authorities in the region, and in the first national study on how English Schools and Colleges were understanding and implementing the counter-terrorism ‘Prevent duty’ (Busher et al.,2017) with Coventry and Durham Universities. Professor Thomas’s analysis of the effectiveness of Britain’s Prevent strategy has also featured in books commissioned by the German Federal and Flemish regional governments.
The international gravity of this topic has now been demonstrated by further international research collaborations. Professors Thomas and Grossman have joined with colleagues from the University of California Los Angeles and the University of Illinois at Chicago in a US ‘Community Reporting’ replication study scheduled to start in September 2019, funded by the US Government Department of Justice. We are also awaiting final confirmation of funding from Public Safety Canada for a Canadian replication study in collaboration with Ryerson University of Toronto. In each national case, the aim is to develop evidence-based insights and recommendations on how revised policy and practice approaches can support community members to take the very difficult decision to report someone close to them, as well as developing a research data set to guide recommendations to governments on an international basis.