The children taught at home about murder and bombings
Radicalisation is a form of child abuse, and the authorities must have the power to intervene
It must have been dreadful for the family of Drummer Lee Rigby to listen to the ravings of his killers as they were finally hauled away to the cells and, one hopes, to a lifetime of incarceration. If those relatives have one consolation, it is that they were just about the last words those men will ever pronounce in public; the last time we will have to hear them pervert the religion of Islam – and the most important question now is how we prevent other young men, and women, from succumbing to that awful virus: the contagion of radical Islamic extremism.
Every day in London and other big cities, there are thousands of counter-terrorism officers doing a fantastic job of keeping us safe. They have to work out who are the most vulnerable young people, who are the most susceptible – and they have to stop the infection of radicalisation before it is too late. That will sometimes mean taking a view about what is happening to them in their homes and families – and I worry that their work is being hampered by what I am obliged to call political correctness.
There is built in to the British system a reluctance to be judgmental about someone else’s culture, even if that reluctance places children at risk. Look at the case of Harriet Harman. You may ask yourself how on earth this relatively astute politician could have allowed her organisation to be affiliated to a body that brazenly called itself the “Paedophile Information Exchange”. The answer – which Harman would do well to admit – is that back in the Seventies she got into a complete intellectual fog.
The National Council for Civil Liberties was avowedly in search of minorities to protect, and they came to suppose that paedophiles must be victims of their own urges and that it was therefore not their fault that they were so widely abhorred. They mushily decided that the paedophiles must have some sort of “protected group” status – like other minorities; and the victims, of course, were the children who were groomed and abused by these emboldened perverts.
Or look at the appalling failure of this country to tackle the evil of Female Genital Mutilation (FGM). This practice is utter savagery. It involves the excision of the female exterior genital organs, including the clitoris, so as to minimise the possibility of sexual pleasure. The mutilation can cause infection, death, or constant pain.
Both Britain and France banned this barbarism in the mid-Eighties; and yet the French have been much more effective in tackling it than we have. They have jailed about 100 people, and started proceedings against a dozen doctors. We have thousands of victims in Britain, thousands of girls being cut every year, and yet we have managed not a single prosecution – let alone a conviction.
Again, there is that fatal squeamishness about intervening in the behaviour of a “protected group” – in this case ethnic minorities, often but by no means always from the Horn of Africa. There are still Left-wing academics protesting that the war on FGM is a form of imperialism, and that we are wrong to impose our Western norms.
I say that is utter rubbish, and a monstrous inversion of what I mean by liberalism. On the contrary: we need to be stronger and clearer in asserting our understanding of British values. That is nowhere more apparent in the daily job of those who protect us all from terror – and who are engaged in tackling the spread of extremist and radical Islam.
We are familiar by now with the threat posed by the preachers of hate, the extremist clerics who can sow the seeds of madness in the minds of impressionable young people. We are watching like hawks to see who comes back from Syria, and the ideas they may have picked up.
We know that the problem of radicalisation is not getting conspicuously worse – but nor is it going away. There are a few thousand people in London – the “low thousands”, they say – who are of interest to the security services; and a huge amount of work goes into monitoring those people, and into making sure that their ranks are not swelled by new victims of radicalisation.
What has been less widely understood is that some young people are now being radicalised at home, by their parents or by their step-parents. It is estimated that there could be hundreds of children – especially those who come within the orbit of the banned extremist group Al-Muhajiroun – who are being taught crazy stuff: the kind of mad yearning for murder and death that we heard from Lee Rigby’s killers.
At present, there is a reluctance by the social services to intervene, even when they and the police have clear evidence of what is going on, because it is not clear that the “safeguarding law” would support such action. A child may be taken into care if he or she is being exposed to pornography, or is being abused – but not if the child is being habituated to this utterly bleak and nihilistic view of the world that could lead them to become murderers. I have been told of at least one case where the younger siblings of a convicted terrorist are well on the road to radicalisation – and it is simply not clear that the law would support intervention.
This is absurd. The law should obviously treat radicalisation as a form of child abuse. It is the strong view of many of those involved in counter-terrorism that there should be a clearer legal position, so that those children who are being turned into potential killers or suicide bombers can be removed into care – for their own safety and for the safety of the public.
That must surely be right. We need to be less phobic of intrusion into the ways of minority groups and less nervous of passing judgment on other cultures. We can have a great, glorious, polychromatic society, but we must be firm to the point of ruthlessness in opposing behaviour that undermines our values. Paedophilia, FGM, Islamic radicalisation – to some extent, at some stage, we have tiptoed round them all for fear of offending this or that minority. It is children who have suffered.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/politics/10671841/The-children-taught-at-home-about-murder-and-bombings.html
Topic: Boris Johnson: Children at risk of Islamic extremism should be taken into care