Keeping Our Mouths Shut: The Fear and Racialized Self-Censorship of British Healthcare Professionals in PREVENT Training

Abstract

The PREVENT policy introduced a duty for British health professionals to identify and report patients they suspect may be vulnerable towards radicalisation. Research on PREVENT's impact in healthcare is scant, especially on the lived experiences of staff. This study examined individual interviews with 16 critical National Health Service (NHS) professionals who participated in mandatory PREVENT counter-radicalisation training, half of whom are Muslims. Results reveal two themes underlying the self-censorship healthcare staff. The first theme is fear, which critical NHS staff experienced as a result of the political and moral subscript underlying PREVENT training: the 'good' position is to accept the PREVENT duty, and the 'bad' position is to reject it. This fear is experienced more acutely by British Muslim healthcare staff. The second theme relates to the structures which extend beyond PREVENT but nonetheless contribute to self-censorship: distrustful settings in which the gaze of unknown colleagues stifles personal expression; reluctant trainers who admit PREVENT may be unethical but nonetheless relinquish responsibility from the act of training; and socio-political conditions affecting the NHS which overwhelm staff with other concerns. This paper argues that counterterrorism within healthcare settings may reveal racist structures which disproportionality impact British Muslims, and raises questions regarding freedom of conscience.

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

“…Snowballing method is a favoured method in health practitioner research (Carey et al 1996) given that healthcare settings rely heavily on trust (Gabbay and le May 2004). As counter-terrorism is a sensitive and moralising subject (Younis and Jadhav 2019), snowballing has the advantage of being able to rely on informal networks of trust. At the same time, a disadvantage of snowballing is that it potentially draws from a particular set of participant characteristics.…”

“…Notes 1 It is important to affirm the primary author is a racialised Muslim. The implications of this are discussed elsewhere (Younis and Jadhav 2019). 2 Such participants affirmed the need for a counter-radicalisation strategy or celebrated its positive potential to address the Far-Right threat.…”

“…Despite the policy's disparate iterations over the years, one concern has remained consistentracism (Open Society Justice Initiative 2016). This concern has been raised by unions, NGOs, religious organisations, over 140 academics and international rights groups such as the United Nations (Younis and Jadhav 2019). In spite of this, there is little research exploring Prevent's impact on healthcare practices, though over 830,000 NHS staff have received Basic Prevent Awareness training and over 470,000 have attended advanced training (UK Parliament 2018).…”

Taking the National(ism) out of the National Health Service: re-locating agency to amongst ourselves

“…Thirdly, it is important to note that politics in the UK has been taking a fascistic turn, where migrants are being interned and healthcare workers are now obliged to work as a border force (Younis & Jadhav, 2019). Whilst I was unable to comment on intersections of ethnicity in this paper due to the geographical positioning of my research, maintaining nationalist sentiment in healthcare activism is only further likely to legitimise Brexit campaigns and NHS levies for migrants.…”

Seeing and unseeing Prevent’s racialized borders

“…They need only to be hinted at through, for instance, references to beheading videos which invoke ideas of Muslim savagery (James, 2016), prompting a practitioner to make a referral and thus reproducing the racial border. Tacit racialized knowledge empowers white practitioners to make referrals while at the same time silencing Muslim practitioners from speaking out (Younis and Jadhav, 2019).…”