RAN Thematic Event: Current challenges and solutions related to working with youth on P/CVE in Vienna, 22 September 2022

RAN Practitioners is organising a Thematic Event on ‘Current challenges and solutions related to working with youth on P/CVE’. Practitioners from different professional fields  who work with youth on P/CVE related topics are invited to participate in this event. Specifically, practitioners from RAN Youth & Education, RAN Families, Communities & Social Care, RAN Mental Health, RAN Communication & Narratives, RAN Prison and RAN Rehab are welcomed to register.

Topic of meeting

Previous RAN events have focussed on different specific vulnerable youth groups, such as isolated youth, child returnees, youth growing up in extremist families, or refugee children (e.g. RAN Rehab working group meeting on Returning FTFs and their families, 2021).

During these meetings, first-line practitioners identified different challenges and topics to address when it comes to working with youth on P/CVE:

• Post-Covid consequences affecting youth, such as isolation and the lack of the development of social skills among all youth who missed interactions with peers and educators during the pandemic. These skills are important for the resilience to radicalisation. The challenge of how to engage with youth who were and might be isolated and their lack social skills need to be addressed within RAN (RAN Y&E working group meeting ‘Youth isolation: how to get them out of it?’, 2020).
• In light of always protecting the well-being of the child, practitioners highlighted the difficulty of preventing stigmatisation of child returnees in the classroom (RAN policy & practice event ‘Building resilience among young children raised in extremist environments – specifically child returnees’ 2018), and gaining access to the families of children growing up in extremist environments (RAN Y&E working group meeting ‘Transgenerational Transmission of Extremist Ideologies – learning from adjacent fields: Cults and Gangs’).
• Practitioners discussed the challenges of ensuring the wellbeing of child returnees with imprisoned parents (RAN PRISONS working group meeting ‘Multi-agency cooperation in dealing with female returnees in prison and protecting the rights of incarcerated parents’ children’) and their reintegration (Study visit to Helsinki: the management of child returnees; FC&S Multi-meeting on Dealing with returning children and their mothers from Daesh, among many others).
• Within the scope of RAN Rehabilitation, practitioners recently discussed challenges related to engaging radicalised or at-risk youth in voluntary counselling and/or exit and deradicalisation processes (RAN REHAB Working Group meeting on Rehabilitation in an open setting, June 2022). Key challenges include pathways to building first contact (incl. online) and trust and to foster motivation to participate in complex and long-term processes (see also RAN Rehabilitation working group meeting on Motivation, 2020).
• RAN events on topics related to children have addressed the role of education and youth work, the importance of a shared pedagogical approach in neighbourhoods, building schools as labs of democracy, digital youth work, youth work through sports, holding difficult conversations and discussing controversial sensitive topics, as well as young women (and men)’s targeting on social media. Recent RAN Practitioner publications on youth highlighted the need to look into the quality of online content youngsters are consuming online, as opposed to the quantity of time spent on platforms (RAN Paper Hybrid youth and social work, 2021) and the need to facilitate debate about sensitive issues as a means to building resilience to extremist ideologies (RAN Paper Developing resilience as an approach to dealing with the influences of problematic informal and non-formal education in schools, 2022).

The focus of this thematic event is on approaches for practitioners working with youth (below the age of 18 years old) on all three levels of prevention, with the aim to foster protective factors which will build the resilience of  youth to radicalisation, and reduce risk factors that make them more vulnerable to radicalisation.

revention interventions are commonly divided into three categories: a) primary prevention targeting broader public audiences so as to strengthen resilience and raise awareness of the phenomenon of radicalisation, b) secondary prevention focused on persons or groups at risk or exhibiting early signs of radicalisation, and c) tertiary prevention targeting radicalised persons and their immediate social surroundings so as to trigger disengagement, deradicalisation and rehabilitation.

This thematic event will also address two cross-cutting issues, namely gender aspects (the role of gender in extremist ideologies, but also gender-sensitive P/CVE work), as well as the significance of the online dimension in relation to youth (in extremist recruitment and narratives and in digital/hybrid P/CVE work).  

Goal of the meeting

This thematic event serves as an opportunity for practitioners from different RAN Practitioners Working Groups to exchange their working methods and address the key challenges related to working with youth on all levels of prevention.

Practitioners from RAN Y&E, RAN MENTAL HEALTH, RAN FC&S, RAN C&N, RAN PRISON and RAN Rehab will be asked to present cases related to the topic from their daily work. On the basis of these cases, which will be selected so as to display a variety of experiences, the practitioners will conduct joint analyses and formulate lessons learned per case as well as overarching recommendations and point to remaining challenges and practitioners’ needs. The outcomes of the meeting will be shared in a conclusion paper and infographic.

Call for participants

If you are interested in participating in this meeting, please answer the questions in this form.

Please also indicate if you have relevant experiences, examples that could be presented as a case study to present during the meeting. These cases will be further discussed in the meeting during break-out sessions (you can find more info about this in the registration form).

Deadline

Please fill in the form before 20 August. We will invite participants (and contributors) based on the answers given in the survey. Please keep in mind that we can only invite a limited number of participants to this meeting to ensure valuable exchange and interaction, so participation is not guaranteed.

If you have any further questions, please don’t hesitate to contact RAN Staff members alexandra [dot] kornviolence-prevention-network [dot] de (Alexandra Korn) or b [dot] broedersradaradvies [dot] nl (Boy Broeders).