Abolish Prevent: CAGE launches powerful community resource on toxic policy

Abolish Prevent – that is the overarching ambition of the independent grassroots organisation, CAGE. The advocacy group has launched a new website, abolishprevent.com, to support the Muslim community against Prevent. The powerful online resource has drawn together more than 200 pieces of content and seeks to educate the wider community on the venomous British governmental policy known as Prevent.

A number of resources have been made easily accessible. These include past reports, a detailed timeline on the work that CAGE has carried out over the past decade, as well as an elaborate 8-point plan to abolish and replace the so-called anti-radicalisation programme that has unfairly blighted the Muslim community for many years. [1]

The new website forms as part of CAGE’s ‘International Witness Campaign’, remembering twenty years since the brutal so-called War on Terror was launched by the US and its allies.

Prevent is the the most significant plank of the domestic front of the so called War on Terrorism in the UK.

As such, this website forms part of our ‘International Witness Campaign’, remembering 20 years of the failed War on Terror.

Learn more here: https://t.co/KyxvRp7GYw

— CAGE (@UK_CAGE) December 22, 2021

In a Wednesday press release, the advocacy group hailed the development. CAGE’s managing director Mohammed Rabbani said that despite facing “trenchant criticism from right wing forces and initial scepticism from civil rights groups”, the website would serve “as a permanent record evidencing the overwhelming need to abolish Prevent”. [2]

Rabbani further added that the abolition of Prevent is a necessary step:

“Abolishing PREVENT is the only sensible option. The evidence is clear that the policy undermines civil liberties, and only serves to bolster the ever-encroaching surveillance infrastructure created by the state to demolish our rights and freedoms.

“Impacted communities, activists and organisers can all benefit from this website as it presents a community-led response to the failed PREVENT programme in one central place. We renew our call to all right minded individuals and groups to join our campaign to abolish what has been one of the most pernicious policies in modern times.” [2]

Prevent is the British government’s widely disparaged and so-called anti-radicalisation instrument. It has been credited with the alienation and discrimination of Muslims. Critics liken it to a resource that is merely designed to target adherents of the Islamic faith, as well as members of the Black, Asian, and minority ethnic (BAME) communities.

Indeed, within the education system the use of Prevent has become shockingly prolific, with young children being referred to the ‘programme’ for the most farcical of reasons. The policy was introduced into the school system in 2015 as a “statutory duty”, and in one example, in September 2019, a four-year-old boy fell into its radar. [3] The boy was referred to the scheme after a member of staff at his after-school club allegedly overheard the toddler saying that his father had “guns and bombs in his shed”. Of course, it later transpired that the young boy was innocently talking about the videogame Fortnite. [4]

Furthermore, in 2017, the programme faced criticism from another stratum of society. Tait Coles, an author and assistant head teacher at a Leeds comprehensive school, and presently a vice principal at a Bradford academy, decried the way in which Prevent is marginalising not just BAME pupils, but teachers as well. Coles said in a piece on the student and teacher resources website TeachWire:

“BME teachers meanwhile feel that Prevent unnecessarily targets Muslims, shuts down debate about important subjects and has a (maybe irreversible) negative effect on Muslim students and school communities, where there is a real concern that they are being stigmatised quite simply due to the religion that they follow.

“…An excerpt from an interview of a BME (Muslim) teacher who expresses their realistic concern: ‘It is targeted at Muslims, it makes Muslims feel worse, or more strongly against the state, so to speak, than they would normally have. I mean I am [a] very moderate [Muslim] – but to me I still dislike that, the Prevent agenda, and I feel like it’s targeting Muslims.’” [5]