prevent Campaign

PREVENT: a tool for mass surveillance and social engineering

Find more information about this campaign below.

Background information

IHRC has opposed PREVENT since its inception as part of its wider campaign against anti-terrorism laws and policies in the UK and many other countries. PREVENT is a controversial part of the official UK counter-terrorism strategy which the government claims is concerned with preventing radicalisation and tackling extremism.

Although PREVENT is presented as a colour-blind programme, its origins and implementation show that it is invariably targeted at the Muslim community, being used as a pretext for mass surveillance and social conditioning.

For these reasons IHRC is opposed in principle to the whole PREVENT programme. We see it as resting on racist and Islamophobic assumptions. We believe that by demonising Islam as innately violent the programme has contributed to the legitimisation of institutional discrimination against Muslims.

Our campaign on PREVENT has included reports, public events, calls to scrap the policy and resource packs for communities to resist its implementation. Please share these.

IHRC believes that the UK PREVENT policy and the raft of counter-terror laws and policies brought in since 1997 need to be scrapped, and existing laws regarding violence and incitement be applied where appropriate.

Key facts & figures

0 %
false positive

Prevent referrals up to 31 March 2020.*

0 x
More Asians

reported to prevent than non-Asians.*

0 x
More Muslims

reported to prevent than non-Muslims.*

0 %
of Muslim Students

in a 2020 survey believed that the Prevent policy operates on Islamophobic stereotypes.**

0 %
of Muslim students

believed that Muslim university students were being wrongly referred.**

* False Positives: the Prevent counter-extremism policy in healthcare, Dr. Hillary Aked, Medact, 2020

** Pushed to the edge: the consequences of the ‘Prevent Duty’ in de-radicalising pre-crime thought among British Muslim university students, Tahir Abbas, Imran Awan & Jonathan Marsden,. Dec 2021

Your support helps our campaign

We work with different organisations from Muslim and non-Muslim backgrounds, to campaign for justice for all peoples regardless of their racial, confessional or political background.

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