On Thursday, the Home Office released new aggregated data about the demographics of people referred to Prevent from April 2023 to March 2024. While there has been some improvement in the detail of the data, including around age and gender, the government is still refusing to publish information about how Prevent impacts people in different racial or religious groups. The new data shows the government’s continued focus on monitoring and changing what children and teenagers think.
For the first time, the government has provided the public with a more detailed age breakdown of Prevent’s impact by introducing additional age categories for children and teenagers referred to the programme. The data continues to show that Prevent predominantly affects people under the age of 18, with this demographic making up approximately 57 percent of all referrals and 59 percent of cases discussed at a Channel panel.
The government has also provided some basic new detail about how Prevent impacts women and girls, and has provided a breakdown for referrals made before and after the outbreak of atrocities in Israel and Palestine on 7 October 2023 – potentially responding to concerns of the kind discussed at RSI’s recent expert panel event on Prevent, Palestine and free expression. To some extent, these are helpful developments in terms of assessing how Prevent impacts people’s human rights – although they do not capture, for example, threats of referrals that never became actual referrals.
However, yet again, the Home Office has failed to publish data about the racial or religious identity of people referred to Prevent, or their disability status. Access to such data is essential for evaluating some of the largest concerns about Prevent: fears that the teachers, police and others referring people to Prevent are disproportionately targeting Muslims, children of colour and children with disabilities (or people who are neurodiverse). The Home Office had disclosed data to RSI about Prevent and racial identity data for previous years following our freedom-of-information requests – data which we concluded showed a potential criminalisation of people who identify as (or are perceived as) Black, South Asian or of Middle Eastern descent. We continue seeking further data from the Home Office and the National Police Chiefs’ Council about the racial, religious and disability impact of Prevent.
There also remains an underexplored gendered aspect to Prevent, with 88 percent of referrals involving people who identify as male. The government has also said there were at least 792 referrals of people identifying as female, among the 6,906 cases in which gender was recorded (meaning women and girls amounted to 11.5 percent of these cases). Further, it has said that ‘[f]emales accounted for a higher proportion of Islamist referrals than referrals for “Extreme right-wing concerns”’. However, it has not included an assessment of whether those facts might indicate bias against Muslim women and girls (or those perceived as Muslim).
RSI continues to call on the government to scrap the Prevent strategy. However, in the meantime, it should use the data it does have to monitor whether the police and other public bodies are using Prevent in a discriminatory way – and publish more information about the impact of Prevent.
