Government proposals to combat the ‘radicalisation’ of young men at the hands of online influencers like Andrew Tate by categorising the potentially vague and capacious term “misogyny” as a form of extremism threaten freedom of speech, critics have warned.
Yvette Cooper, the Home Secretary, has announced a new approach to fighting extremism, and vowed to crack down on people pushing what she describes as “harmful and hateful beliefs”, including “extreme misogyny”.
The Home Office has commissioned a rapid review to inform a new government counter-extremism strategy that will consider tackling violence against women and girls in the same way as Islamist and far-Right extremism, amid claims from Labour that current Home Office guidance is too narrow and at least nine years out of date.
“Action against extremism has been badly hollowed out in recent years, just when it should have been needed most,” Ms Cooper said, adding that the rapid review “will underpin a new strategic approach to countering extremism from government, working closely with communities to build consensus and impetus for our plans.”
Proposals to include “misogyny” on the Home Office’s list of extremist ideologies could mean teachers being legally required to refer pupils they personally perceive as exhibiting some form of dislike of, or contempt for, or prejudice against women to Prevent, the Government’s counter-terror programme.
The Prevent strategy is part of CONTEST, the strategy for countering terrorism originally published by the then Coalition Government in July 2011. Based on four themes – Prevent, Pursue, Protect, Prepare – the Prevent strand aims to stop people becoming terrorists or supporting terrorism.
Following an Education Committee report into the Birmingham Trojan Horse affair, in 2015 the then Conservative Government took further action to strengthen the duties Prevent imposes on schools with the Counter-Terrorism and Security Act 2015 (CTSA), which effectively placed this strand of CONTEST on a statutory footing.
Under s.26 of the CTSA, schools and colleges are now subject to a duty to have “due regard to the need to prevent people from becoming terrorists or supporting terrorism”, with the most recent government guidance for schools instructing “all staff” to “look out for concerning changes in behaviour and report them to the designated safeguarding lead”.
The result is that teachers, healthcare professionals and local authority staff must now make a referral to the Prevent scheme if they believe someone is susceptible to becoming radicalised. Pupils referred to Prevent are then assessed by their local authority and the police to see if they need to be ‘de-radicalised’.
There are several extremism categories currently ranked by the Home Office as an area of “concern”, including Islamist, extreme Right-wing, animal rights, environmental and Northern Ireland related extremism.
Staff at schools and colleges are also told that learners who are at risk or susceptible to radicalisation into terrorism include those with an interest in “multiple extremist ideologies”, a fascination with “conspiracy theories”, and who “voice anti-establishment and anti-LGBT grievances”.
It is in this statutory context that, earlier this year, a 12 year-old schoolboy from Northumbria was investigated by counter-extremism officers after he declared there “are only two genders” and produced a YouTube video in which he stated: “There’s no such thing as non-binary.” Upon hearing about the boy’s behaviour, his teachers told the boy’s mother they would need to refer him to Prevent, amid somewhat implausible fears that her son, who is Jewish, was at risk of being radicalised by the Nazi-sympathising far-right.
Also included on the current Home Office list of extremisms is “incel” – an abbreviation of the term “involuntary celibate” – which refers to a male subculture that includes violent feelings towards women as a result of feeling rejected. However, government officials say this category no longer adequately captures other forms of “extreme misogyny” that have emerged on- and online in recent years.
The Home Secretary’s announcement that “extreme misogyny” may soon be added to the rapidly expanding list of “extremist” beliefs of “concern” to the Government comes after warnings from feminist campaigners that online influencers like Andrew Tate – the brash former kickboxer and self-proclaimed “misogynist”, who rose to global fame after appearing on Big Brother in 2016 — are radicalising teenage boys online.
“For too long,” she said, “governments have failed to address the rise in extremism, both online and on our streets, and we’ve seen the number of young people radicalised online grow. Hateful incitement of all kinds fractures and frays the very fabric of our communities and our democracy.”
Ms Cooper’s rapid review, which will be completed later this Autumn, will form the basis of a new counter-extremism strategy which the Home Office intends to launch early next year.
However, critics of the plan say the Government should quite easily enforce existing legislation to tackle violence against women and girls and warn that the new extremism policy, if poorly worded, could amount to little more than censorship of offensive opinions.
Speaking to the Telegraph, a senior female Conservative MP said: “There should be no place for misogyny, but Labour’s latest policy announcement feels very rushed and is deeply concerning on so many levels, not least, what does it mean for free speech?
“We have to tackle misogyny,” she added. “It’s endemic in some workplaces and I think lots of women have faced it. But what is misogyny to one person is not necessarily to another.”
Ann Widdecombe, Reform’s home affairs spokesman, concurred, noting that Ms Cooper’s plan was not necessary.
“If you commit violence against women and girls, that’s already a crime,” she said. “If you preach misogyny, that’s already a crime. What exactly isn’t a crime? They should enforce the existing laws and stop looking to create crimes, which is what they’re doing.”
Critics of the counter-extremism strategy adopted by successive governments have long argued that Prevent’s legal duty on teaching staff to report their suspicions was “fundamentally incompatible” with international human rights law, which protects freedom of expression.
Security officials have previously expressed fears that Prevent’s mission has become confused, sometimes under political pressure, and moved towards trying to capture those with unpopular extremist views who are not committing a crime.
In total, there were 6,817 Prevent referrals in 2022-23, with the highest proportion of referrals were classified under the broad category of “vulnerability present but no ideology of counter-terrorism risk”, at 37 per cent, followed by extreme Right-wing at 19 per cent and Islamist extremism at 11 per cent.
Last year, Amnesty International called for the abolition of Prevent, accusing it of encouraging a culture of “thought policing”.
The campaign group’s report, called This is the Thought Police, said the Prevent strategy “rests on the idea that there is a causal relationship between undefined ‘extremist’ views and ideas, which may be espoused by lawful non-violent groups, and ‘terrorism’… but the alleged link between the two is not clearly articulated, nor is it clear where legality ends and potential criminality begins.”
In this context, practitioners like school teachers “appear confused about whether there is a minimum threshold warranting a Prevent referral, and how significant the expression of extreme political or religious views is in meeting this threshold.
“As a result,” the report continued, “people are being referred to Prevent largely for expressing political views and opinions, and this is a violation of their right to freedom of expression.”
It added: “The breadth of discretion permitted in Prevent decision-making has resulted in a significant risk of discrimination… A disproportionate number of neurodiverse people and children also feature in Prevent referrals.”
Cases cited by Amnesty include Connor, a 24-year-old autistic man who was referred to Prevent in 2021, after his social worker noted a number of concerns, including that he was looking at “offensive and anti-trans” websites and “focusing on lots of right-wing darker comedy”.
