A risky time for Muslim families: Professionalized counter-radicalisation networks.

In July 2015, a new statutory duty was sanctioned in the UK for a range of professional practitioners, including social workers, to pay ‘due regard to preventing terrorism’. The duty has contributed to a shifting of social work practice and decision-making from the fields of advocacy and promotion of ethics, social justice and human rights, toward risk-work more analogous to that of the security services. Social workers are caught up in pre-emptive risk-work, operating in a pre-crime space. Further, an ‘ethic of silence’ has emerged because social workers are not speaking back or challenging the duty due to the ensnared nature of the dominant securitized discourses, which prevent counter-discourses from emerging. Utilising an auto-ethnographic approach, this paper shows that the new duty is re-organising and re-arranging new networks of practitioners with securitisation a dominant feature, and this significantly affects practice decisions. Latour’s actor network theory (ANT) helps us to examine the ethical and practical implications for decision-making. Shifting notions of ethics, rights and as yet unforeseen consequences of PREVENT concern us. This being said, humane and socially just social work practice within the duty is possible; strengths-based risk practices provide practical and ethical ways forward and these are discussed.