Records prompt fears of bias against Asian, Black and Middle Eastern children in UK
(London, 1 October 2024) – New police data on the race of people referred to Prevent, the UK government’s counter-extremism programme, prompts fears that schools and the public sector in England and Wales are reporting people as potential ‘extremists’ due to racial bias, the human rights organisation Rights & Security International said today.
Although the police are only keeping poor-quality data, the records they do have raise concerns that Britons of Asian, Black and Middle Eastern descent are being reported to Prevent at rates vastly higher than their representation in the overall population, the organisation noted.
Statistics published annually by the Home Office show that most people referred to Prevent are children or young people under 21, meaning that any racist referrals may be particularly impacting school-age youth.
‘Prevent has always been a recipe for racism, especially against children,’ said Sarah St Vincent, Executive Director of RSI. ‘The UK uses it to force schools, hospitals, local authorities and police to report people based on vague criteria that leave enormous room for bias. At a time when far-right violence against migrants and minorities in the UK has been exploding, this new data suggests that Prevent is worse than useless: it reinforces and perpetuates racism.’
The National Police Chiefs’ Council (NPCC) disclosed data to RSI in May and June of this year concerning 16,606 Prevent referrals made between 2019 and 2024, following freedom of information requests from the organisation. RSI has since submitted other freedom of information requests to the NPCC seeking more detail about the outcomes of Prevent referrals for each racial group, but the policing body has refused to provide this information. RSI plans to file a complaint with the Information Commissioner’s Office about that refusal later this month.
As RSI has previously revealed, the government is failing to record the racial identity of most people referred to Prevent, meaning that the data the organisation has now received from the NPCC is far from complete and does not allow for certainty about the racial impact of the programme.
However, the data the NPCC disclosed to RSI suggests that schools, police and other authorities in England and Wales may be reporting people from Asian, Black and Middle Eastern backgrounds at rates far greater than would be expected based on the racial composition of the general population. A Prevent referral results in police scrutiny as well as a lasting record in police databases, and can have other serious consequences.
Among the 16,606 Prevent referrals for England and Wales included in the newly revealed data, 3,766 (22.7 percent) concerned people the authorities identified as ‘Asian’. However, the 2021 census recorded that the general population of these regions is only 9.3 percent Asian.
The Prevent referrals covered in the new data also include 1,317 referrals of people described as ‘Black’—7.9 percent of all Prevent referrals in the data set, although Black people form only 2.5 percent of the population of England and Wales.
The data also point to a potential overrepresentation of people the authorities recorded as ‘Middle Eastern’, who comprised 1,435 of these referrals (8.6 percent). The 2021 census did not include a ‘Middle Eastern’ category, and RSI is concerned that the authorities may have recorded at least some Prevent referrals of people from Middle Eastern backgrounds as ‘White’ or ‘Unknown’, adding an extra layer of difficulty to the analysis. However, the organisation noted that in the 2021 census, fewer than one percent of people in England and Wales described themselves ‘Arab’.
The data from the NPCC also included 9,980 Prevent referrals of people recorded as ‘White’, representing 60 percent of the total. By contrast, 81.7 percent of people in England and Wales described themselves as ‘White’ in the census.
The Home Office has previously explained that it is the person making the Prevent referral (such as a school administrator or police officer) who chooses a racial category to describe the person they are referring. This practice stands in contrast to other police data collection policies, which allow people to choose how to describe their own racial identity in most circumstances.
Although the data RSI has now received does not reveal how many of the referrals in each racial category involved young people, other Home Office records show that Prevent referrals overwhelmingly concern children and young adults under 20, a majority of them boys and young men. Home Office records also show that most Prevent referrals come from the education sector and police.
‘We could be looking at a snapshot of educators’ and police officers’ fears of Asian, Black and Middle Eastern boys,’ St Vincent concluded. ‘Although this new data is incomplete, it is an alarming sign that there may well be a problem of racist referrals on a large scale. The government should end Prevent and force the police to track potential problems of racism with the seriousness that they deserve.’
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