Creating dialogue in countering violent extremism

Event Description:

Attendees: youth workers and youth networks from Integrate UK and The Bristol Horn Youth Concern (BHYC)

Demographics:participants (including youth workers) 4 males and 8 females; 4 from the Bristol Horn Youth Concern and 8 from Integrate UK.  Age range of participants was berteen 16-22 years old. Most participants were BAME minorities.

The event itself ran smoothly and attendance was sufficient given some heavy rain and the rugby world cup final overlapping with the event. The day began with Integrate UK who used their resources – ppt slides and a video titled “TwinTrack” about grooming – to raise awareness about violent extremism and gang violence grooming. They invited critical thinking with discussions around who we consider is a victim and who is criminal based on racial/ethnic presumptions.

After a brief 5-minute bathroom break used to get participants to vote on the pizza flavour they preferred, Roisin Crowley led a dynamic workshop. She began with some quick activities that required participants to move around the room, but that also made them interact and learn more about each other. The second part of her workshop invited participants to use the alphabet to think about the words that best describe their lives. By the end of the workshop, the participants were engaged in a relaxed, respectful environment. We then headed to the main foyer to enjoy the pizza together.

We also welcomed the presence of Moestak Hussein, the Counter Extremism Community Coordinator for Bristol City Council. Previous to the event we had an email from Lisa Whitehouse founding director of Intercultural showing her interest in attending the event with a couple of  their volunteers, however we did no meet them on the day.

Everyone carried on with their Saturday at 130pm.

Rationale:

There are many different organisations working to prevent violent extremism in the UK. These include practitioners from the UK Government’s Prevent strategy, youth workers, and front line workers of charities and other organisations. Prevent policy has been key in guiding the efforts of fighting extremism, partly because of funding, but also because of the networks and alliances being formed in the field. People’s views on Prevent policy in the UK tend to be split between those who are strongly in favour of it, and those who are strongly against it. However, our recent data shows that the views of youth workers and practitioners are more complex and less polarised than this, existing on a spectrum. Practitioners’ views are often tied strongly to their political position. However, their perception of the existing division and polarisations of others’ opinions also inform their views and how they express them. This is the first of a series of events with three main purposes:

• To provide youth with communication tools which will enable them to celebrate and redefine their identities.
• To bring youth workers and practitioners from different organisations together in order to share expertise, and design sessions that raise awareness of violent extremism in the UK.
• To bring young people from different organisations and youth workers together to develop tools to help counter violent extremism, whilst exploring themes such as racism, religion and Islamophobia.

Funding and planning :

This event was funded by the University of Bristol Public Engagement, under the frame of Thinking Futures 2019 and ESRC Festival.

Planning for the event was manageable with other work commitments with the help of the UoB impact team, mainly Ben Meller and Diane Thorne. Ben, was helpful from the initial planning of the event, sharing his experience to help brainstorm around the event details, up to the day of the event providing resources and logistics required. Diane, also helped with the actual process of room booking, Eventbrite management and with the registration of facilitators are UoB suppliers.

Pre-event meetings with the facilitators (Roisin and Nasra) for a planning session was very useful. They too had some insight into what resources would be needed and the type of room they required. But most of all just to build rapport and make sure everyone understood the main goals of the event.

Outcome

All three aims of the event were met on a different scale. The main achievement for the event was building bridges between young participants and youth workers belonging to two different grassroots organisations in Bristol. Although these two organisation carry out similar work with youth (P/CVE and gountering grooming, among others), they did not know about each other's work.. It was clear that pupils enjoyed learned about each other’s activities and projects. The workshop allowed them to build rapport even further.

Although, specific religion and ethnicities was targeted, participants shared some of these characteristics (Muslim - BAME). It was a pleasure to see that they engaged beyond these identities, as the main trait shared across all participants was their overall interest in youth empowerment and community engagement.

There was critical engagement with P/CVE efforts, particularly with the process of grooming, including gang grooming during Integrate UK’s session. The discussion also involved the recognition of ethnic and religious bias, such as the assumptions people make when they talk about gang grooming and violent extremist grooming.

The workshop section focused on identity and subconscious bias was led by Roisin Crowley. Where participants looked at how we can have differing interpretations of certain situations based on body language. Followed by an exercise which encouraged diversity in identities.  

Opportunities for improvement

• More overall time for the session to run.
• Arrive to the venue with more anticipation in order to attend unexpected circumstances without affecting the start time of the session.
• Include time in the session for young participants to mingle and further share their roles in the organisations and even their hobbies and interests. Perhaps allow them to share social media interests and their profiles for future port-event interaction?
•  Always have a member of UoB staff (or someone) to help run the activities; prep the laptops, resources, serve drinks, arrange chairs. So that the host of the event can focus solely on interacting with the participants and facilitators.
• Bring evidence of room booking and contact number of who can resolve a double booking in case there is overlap.
•  Bring a printed list of attendees and the printed participation certificates with a few extra without a name in case some extra people joined on the say of the event.