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Infants reported hundreds of times to UK's 'Prevent' anti-terror scheme, including by police (www.newarab.com)
submitted 1 week ago by to c/nottheonion@lemmy.world
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Infants in the UK have been referred to the government's controversial Prevent counter-terrorism scheme hundreds of times since 2016, in what monitoring groups say has been a means of intimidating and scaring parents into engaging with officials.

Through a series of Freedom of Information requests by Hyphen, it was revealed that babies under the age of two were referred to Prevent 86 times between 2016-17 and 2023-24, with over two-thirds (59) of these referrals over so-called “Islamist” concerns. At the same time, children aged two to five were referred to Prevent a further 500 times.

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[+] -16 points 1 week ago (5 children)

reasons given for a referral include safeguarding concerns like the child’s environment, returning from a conflict zone, or the parent's extreme mindset

Sounds legit to me, there's concern for the child and not of the child

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  • [–] 26 points 1 week ago (3 children)

    “[The police] use Prevent coercively because it basically means that you have a reason to try and intervene in that person's life and to put pressure on them to try and engage with you.”

    “If they put pressure on a family, it's through their children. That's the Achilles' heel of every parent is their baby. Fear of losing their child and the fear of Prevent turning up.”

    They're abusing the law to intimidate Muslim families. There's no concern at all about or on behalf of the child, any more than the people reporting random Latino's to ICE have.

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