Reporting violent extremism, Prof’s research to aid US and Canada

HOW can family and friends of potential terrorists and perpetrators of atrocities such as school shootings be encouraged to report their concerns to the authorities? Government agencies in the USA and Canada want to find out, so they can forestall extremist violence, and have called on the aid of a University of Huddersfield professor who has researched the issue and provided policy guidelines in the UK. 

It will mean that Professor Paul Thomas works closely with universities in Los Angeles, Chicago and Toronto, passing on the expertise he gained when collaborating on a project titled Community Reporting Thresholds, funded by the UK’s Centre for Research and Evidence on Security Threats (CREST). 

It resulted in the production of a report which made a series of recommendations that have influenced  policymakers and counter-terrorism specialists, with whom Paul Thomas continues to collaborate. He is Professor of Youth and Policy at the University of Huddersfield and has researched a wide range of community issues, including the Prevent programme that is designed to halt extremism.  

The CREST-funded research was carried out in tandem with Professor Michele Grossman of Deakin University in Melbourne, Australia. When the National Institute of Justice in the USA and Public Safety Canada both announced that they wished to fund investigations into methods of countering violent extremism, Professors Thomas and Grossman – who is also a Visiting Professor at Huddersfield - made successful applications, based on their research into community reporting thresholds. 

When they work with new colleagues at the University of California in Los Angeles (UCLA), the University of Illinois in Chicago and Ryerson University in Toronto,  Paul Thomas and Michelle Grossman will adopt the same methodology that they used for their Australian and UK studies – although with much larger sample sizes -  and will hold an intensive introductory workshop for all the research teams, to take place in Chicago. 

Field workers will then conduct a series of in-depth interviews with members of the public who live in communities where there has been some history of radicalisation and violent extremism. A range of scenarios will be put to the interviewees regarding concerns about an ‘intimate’ becoming involved in terrorist planning, in order to discover if, when and how they will report their concerns. 

“We know from the recent inquest on the London Bridge attack that very few friends and relatives do share concerns and often when they do, it is very late in the day,” said Professor Thomas.  

“So we need to know much more about what will help and guide people to identify concerns about intimates and what will help them to report and share concerns. What are the blocks, the conduits or enablers?  Internationally, we don’t know enough about that.”  

The two-year North American studies will reflect increasing concern about the rise of the Far Right and in the USA there will also be a scenario that deals with non-political mass violence, such as school shootings. 

When all the fieldwork has been completed, he will then be involved in the analysis of the data and the drawing up of conclusions and recommendations. 

After the UK study, the key findings were that members of communities are “primarily motivated by care and concern for their intimate in considering reporting”.