Thread by @Tarek_Younis_

[Thread] I am very delighted to share the main output of all my work of the last few years, with a summary of it below:

Islamophobia in the National Health Service: an ethnography of institutional racism in PREVENT's counter‐radicalisation policy

onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.111…

Interests involve (inst.) racism, counter-terrorism and Islamophobia. How is prejudice towards Muslims legitimised through policies in healthcare? How can we operationalise institutional racism?

The Prevent reveals a lot how prejudice towards Muslims operates in healthcare. /2

This is empirical work which connects policy, Prevent training and actual Prevent referrals. The purpose is to operationalise Islamophobia as a systemic issue BEYOND overt verbal and physical abuse (hate crime). /3

The key term I would like to bridge in to policies in the War on Teror, especially as we enter 2020, is Colourblindness. I explain how gov efforts to mitigate Islamophobia by pushing CVE towards ‘far-right’ or employing more Muslims doesn’t help—it makes things worse /4

The paper is unfortunately NOT open access but let me know if you’d like to read it. I summarise its content below, and I explain its significance given the recent UK election results. If you’d rather read this as an article, see here on my blog /5 tarekyounis.org/articles/islam…

Note: release of this paper coincides with gov Prevent statistics, which again celebrate the fact that more “Far-Right” are being referred than Muslims on very faulty logic. I address this in my article, but also here in a dedicated thread /6

https://twitter.com/Tarek_Younis_/status/1207690879370244096

As we know, the Prevent duty was introduced in the NHS in 2011, not because there was evidence associating terrorism to health status, but because of a moral duty for everyone to ‘play their part’ in counter-terrorism. Cast as wide a net as possible—see it, say it, sorted /7

Is there any clear profile of "radicalisation"? No. What are +1mil. NHS staff trained in then? Training is incr. elusive—a generic collection of ‘risk factors’ (low self-esteem, identity, etc). The stated purpose is for staff trust their ‘gut feelings’—better safe than sorry/8

No other social ill with such deficient evidence has such a public duty. Consider between in 3 years there have been over 300 domestic HOMICIDES in UK. Is there a dedicated training program to report (largely white male) pre-criminals vulnerable to spouse violence?/9

Insistence on gut feeling is KEY to understanding how racial prejudice is legitimised through policy—institutional racism. What are gut feelings? NHS is not an apolitical space. NHS staff reflect the public’s popular imagination. WHO is associated with threat in UK imaginary?/10

Muslims, obviously. I shouldnt have to qualify this, but here’s a recent survey. Racialised Muslims (as in, ppl who look/act “Muslim”) embody ‘threat’ in public imagination. Then a policy like Prevent comes along and says ‘refer potential pre-threats’ /11 theguardian.com/world/2019/feb…

Everyone knows the rest—I’m not going to repeat what so many others have said about Prevent: the chilling effect, depoliticisaiton, racist referrals etc. What’s more important to me is what Prevent reveals how race and racism operate in healthcare settings /12

Example: a GP who immediately thought of Prevent when a Muslim male said he wanted to homeschool his children. She then withheld asking further questions. This small, invisible but racialised interaction explains how little gov Prevent statistics captures in terms of impact /13

Would the GP have thought of Prevent if the patient was a white, middle-class woman wanting to homeschool her child? No. No referral happened, nothing changed visibly—yet the clinical interaction changed irreversibly because of the Prevent duty/14

Again, as I explained before, this is the failure of government statistics to capture impact of Prevent duty, which potentially has impacted the minutia of clinical interactions with EVERY patient—beyond referral statistics /15

Muslims are associated with threat in British public imagination. The gov knows this. What do they do? In training, we see what I call ‘performative colorblindness’: the active erasing of this commonsensical association between Muslims and threat. They do this in two ways /16

1) They tell ppl NOT to associate Muslims/Islam with radicalisation. “Is it a Muslim with a hijab/beard? No.[Note: I’ve done police training where they said yes to beard]” What are they doing: raising a Muslim signifier (beard) then erasing it. This raising/erasing is endless /17

Prevent assumes it’s addressing prejudice by doing so, but in reality, performative colorblindness only substantiates the reality that the public DOES associate threat with Muslims. Is it an effective pedagogical strategy to just train people not to be racist? No—obviously not/18

VERY IMPT: Anti-racism is NOT the purpose of colorblindness. Rather as @thenewjimcrow explains well, the purpose is to clear the policy maker from the charge of racism. They can now say that any racist referral is the problem of individual prejudice, not the policy itself /19

Second, psychologisation is key, using a universalist language of ‘vulnerability’. Just as anyone is susceptible to mental illness, so too is everyone susceptible to radicalisation based on our shared human framework /20

What else is the gov doing then to address the racism of the Prevent policy then? The following are key points which each need to be deconstructed individually: 1) Employing more Muslims in CVE/Prevent and 2) Pushing ‘harder’ towards the Far-Right and white people /21

As for 1) Obama. We know very well by now representation is hardly the solution to systemic discrimination and institutional racism. Worse, it makes it even more difficult for the public to understand how racism operates through policies /22

2) 'More Far-Right': problem with this is obvious if you’ve followed what I’ve written until now. See pic attached. Simply put: “White referrals to Prevent still operate upon a race frame in that their bodies alone are insufficient to conjure the threat of radicalisation”/23

Here there is usual smirk of power, shrewdly pulling out an ace in the sleeves:

Well then, Tarek, what is the alternative to Prevent/CVE?

[perhaps it can be read: what can be done to ensure those involved don’t feel guilty and keep their jobs?]/24

The truth of the matter is, there isn’t a single alternative but many alternativeS which change according to space, time and damage done. What was an alternative to CVE pre-2011 is no longer an alternative today. Such is the devastating impact of politics-led policies /25

Moreover the alternativeS have to be systemic. TNI provided a very good, comprehensive evidence-based framework for political violence—a progressive alt. to the CT strategy the UK currently has, incl. Prevent. I’ve yet to see an official respond to this/26 tni.org/en/publication…

History has no control groups, but what evidence is there that NHS staff reporting those who pose a threat (to themselves/others) to police was insufficient? This saves the NHS a ridiculous amount of time/money from evidence-deficient Prevent/27

Prevent cannot only be judged by its stated objectives. I give the example of a mayor who poisons a city’s water to kill a few rats. He might catch the rats—but the city is sick, or rather, a part. group that is least grievable in public imaginary/28 theconversation.com/british-muslim…

Here Prevent will draw on good will, shrouded evidence (‘we’ve helped 300 people!’), dubious labels (‘we stopped an extremist!’). But what if politics-based, racist policy is making things worse, revealing how prejudicial judgements are legitimised and made w/o concern? /29

Take the issue with accountability for example: what if a staff member acts upon racial prejudice and refer a bearded Muslim? What then? Nothing. The referral may be rejected, but this person goes back to work, like it was just another, totally normal occurrence /30

Without clarity/transparency what interventions/success looks like (I mean ALL cases, not just ones gov allow us to see), Prevent doesn’t allow civil society to creatively/constructively address pol. violence on our own terms /31

If success e.g. is giving a Muslim mental health services under coercion (remember: if you don't accept Channel intervention, you may fall under Pursuit of CT strategy), then I have something to say about that. And I know this is happening. /32

Maybe we need to trust staff to do their jobs, not descend upon them with more policies to manage their behaviour, especially as it relates to very low-probability events as terrorism. I trust staff less with a duty to act upon their ‘gut feelings to detect and report threat’/33

Proof in the pudding: recent election. We see VERY clearly how Islamophobia has zero importance in the British public’s decision-making. Ppl have acquiesced to the ‘Other-ing’ of Muslims. The existence of Islamophobia has been all the while contested, mocked and disregarded/34

Any racialised policy which affects Muslims in THIS political climate will never inspire moral panic. People, like Boris Johnson, will simply continue their day-job believing ‘Islam is the problem’. /35 businessinsider.com/boris-johnson-…

And there are many people like Boris Johnson—hence the election results.

Is that not reason enough to withdraw the Prevent duty and immediately consider alternatives? I guess not. /end

I would like to thank my co-author @deletedalit for his help, @BritishAcademy_ for funding and support, and @SHIjournal for publishing