End Prevent-related Islamophobia in the UK

Prevent is a counter-terrorism strategy that forces teachers, NHS workers and others to report suspected extremism under vague criteria, and it mainly impacts children and young people.

Some of the main achievements of our work during 2025 include: 

• The investigative research carried out using freedom of information (FOI) requests which culminated in the publication of the report ‘Caught in the Web: Prevent databases and the policing of children’ in January 2025. 

• Additional FOI disclosures (some of which have been given subsequent press attention) about Prevent and its equality impacts. Although the picture it shows is incomplete, it's a step towards us reaching our objectives.

• The government's most recent statistical release regarding individuals referred to Prevent includes some of the equality monitoring data that we requested.

• We published a literature review to examine what academic research tells us about the relationship between autism and violence – and the findings are clear. There is no evidence of a direct causal link between autism and violence.  The review also shows how intersecting inequalities shape experiences of discrimination: autistic people of colour, and those from minoritised religious and ethnic groups, face higher risks of misdiagnosis, over-policing and criminalisation. 

Our ultimate goal is to end Prevent, and we hope that by compelling better equality monitoring, we will unearth the racial and other discrimination that we strongly suspect plague the programme. This work will continue in 2026. 

Links:

• Review: The (lack of) relationship between autism and violence