Combating Violent Extremism: From Policy to Practice

 

Interviewer: Avery Moore Kloss

Participants: Ghayda Hassan and David Yuzva Clement

Length of Interview: 35:47

 

[Introduction Music] 00:00

Avery Moore Kloss 00:07

 Welcome to CRSP Talk. A podcast for the Center for Research on Security Practices at Wilfrid Laurier University. I'm Avery Moore Kloss. For better or worse, we live in a time where the digital threads of social media weave together communities, but those online communities can very easily become a battleground for ideological conflicts. The guise of community and the veil of anonymity online, can embolden people across the globe to engage in hateful conduct, which leaves an opening for violent extremist groups to recruit new members. For this episode, CRISP Associate Director Dr Bree Akesson, invited two experts on violent extremism who are working in research and public sector policy in Canada to discuss the layers of complexity in preventing and intervening in violent extremism. And so, please meet our guests for today's discussion.

Ghayda Hassan 00:58

So, Hi. My name is Ghayda Hassan. I'm a psychologist and a professor of psychology at UQAM University in Montreal, and I come from a background of working on the prevention of violence, so I'm very passionate about preserving peace and preventing violence in society.

David Yuzva Clement 01:16

Hi, my name is David Yuzva Clement. I currently work at Public Safety Canada as a research advisor at the Care Center for Community Engagement and Prevention of Violence. And I bring to the field of countering violent extremism a social work lens, a critical social work lens, which I think is very important in this field. And I look forward to discussing this and doing this podcast here with Ghayda, as well.

Avery Moore Kloss 01:40

This discussion with Ghayda and David really highlights the partnership between research, practice and policy when it comes to fighting violent extremism in Canada, both online and offline. This episode is recorded live on campus in our podcasting studio at Laurier Brantford.

[Background Music] 01:57

Avery Moore Kloss 02:04

Well, welcome. Thank you both for being here. It's a pleasure, honestly, to do this in person, to be in studio on our Laurier Brantford campus. And we're so glad to have you part of this episode. So, I wonder, just to start off, can you give us a little bit? And I think we'll start with Ghayda, and then we'll go to David. Tell us why this topic of preventing and kind of countering violent extremism is so important today and in this current lens we're living through.

Ghayda Hassan 02:30

I think it's a necessity today, because we live in a world that's characterized by a lot of social polarizations, which are connected to many of the rising injustices socially, and we are also exposed to a lot of messages on the online space that can be messages that breed and fester hate. And so there are rising vulnerabilities to extremism and to hate and then to acting violently on those aspects, and this is why it's really becoming, for me, at least a priority, in order to preserve social peace, as I said, because we really want to work to reduce divisive social issues and “us versus them” rhetorics and hone on the importance of being, living in solidarity, in a common social space for everyone?

Avery Moore Kloss 03:25

Yeah, absolutely and David, what about for you?

David Yuzva Clement 03:27

Yeah, I think I fully agree with Ghayda Hassan. I think for us at Public Safety Canada, we are really in a position where we see that the current violent extremist landscape in Canada is increasingly shaped by social polarization and really hybrid and plural or pluralistic threats, including from violent incel milieus that are mostly gathering online, as well as violent white supremacist or violent far right groups, which are also very active in the online space. So, we need to understand these phenomena critically, and then to assess how to prevent and how to intervene with individuals, or sometimes groups, that are at the risk of radicalization to violence. We have a lot of research and evidence in Canada now available that tells us that and shows that the threat landscape is evolving, is ever evolving, and is increasing. We have research, for example, by Dr Barbara Perry that indicates that around 2015, we had around 100 far-right hate groups, and now her team are speaking of more than 300 violent far-right groups in Canada. So that is alarming, and we have all a role to play in assessing, preventing and countering that environment.

Avery Moore Kloss 04:46

The thing that comes up for us, the most, especially post-COVID, when we talk about polarization, is social media. We saw how that played out through 2020 and beyond. And so, I wonder, you know, what role does social media, and also kind of just the internet at large, play in this role in that rise of violent extremism?

Ghayda Hassan 05:05

To say it in simple words, I think we can think of internet and social media as catalyzers, so they speed up certain processes, in the sense that, first of all, they increase the outreach, so a person that may prolifer, extremist, violent ideologies or intentions before internet and social media had a much lower impact and outreach. They could maybe outreach people who live in their social, immediate social environment. Today we can be in a completely different space and outreach to people across the globe. So, the outreach is an essential component, but also the catalyzing impact by the fact that the internet and social space provide belongingness, a sense of community. They also can teach people techniques, so they can provide the “ways”, the “how to”, and they can also motivate and mobilize the violence. And interestingly, we do have evidence today, through a systematic review that we did at the Canadian practitioner’s network for the prevention of violent extremism that I lead; We do have evidence that shows that exposure to hateful content online actually increases risks, not only of propagating hate online, but most importantly, of enacting violence offline. So, in the world we live today, there is no separation between the online and the offline space. The link is there, and this gives even more reason to do prevention activities, both in the offline space, but also, most importantly, in the online space, to invest in the strengths also and the advantages that the internet provides us.

Avery Moore Kloss 06:54

Yeah, absolutely. David, I mean, I'm sure this comes up all the time. It's like a constant conversation at Public Safety Canada, but what's that conversation that you're having about internet and social media, and how it's leading to this rise?

David Yuzva Clement 07:08

As you rightly say, we have multiple and different levels of conversations. So, we are very concerned with the exposure of children to violent extremist content online. That includes, sometimes children who are as young as eight, nine or even ten, eleven years old, who are exposed and view hateful messaging as well as extremist content, including on online gaming platforms or online gaming adjacent communities where young kids spend their time form[ing] social identities. As Ghayda said, children and teenagers are really omnipresent on social media. We have more research on teenagers and adolescents when it comes to their engagement in online communities, including in violent extremists many years. But again, when it comes to children, we see anecdotal evidence of children becoming involved. However, we need to provide more resources for researchers and to community organizations to better understand child exposure to these trends, as well as how to work with parents and families and children and including with teachers and early childhood educators and social workers, because, again, we stress a whole of society approach. But a trend that we are seeing is child exposure, and we are yet at the beginning to really understand what that means and how to best prevent and who should be there to support that approach.

Avery Moore Kloss 08:29

Now, David, when you talk about that idea of “what can we do”? If we're thinking about countering obviously, like Ghayda it is saying, when you have social media, there's this sense of community and belonging that's being used towards the extremism side. Is there a future or a tool with which you can use social media to counter that same thing? Because you do have access, like you said to children eight to ten, and that feeling of community and that feeling of “can that be used as an education tool to counter”?

David Yuzva Clement 08:59

Oh, absolutely. So, at Public Safety Canada, we have the Community Resilience Fund, which is a grant and contributions program through which we fund prevention innovation, and we apply the public health model to understand how, and where, and in which context to prevent and to intervene. So, when we speak about early prevention, so that is targeted services or targeted programming to, when we talk about children, to children in schools, or even in primary schools, to increase their digital literacy skills, their critical thinking skills. So, and that also expands to working with teachers and social workers. So, to really create an awareness and a capacity in this population to expand their critical thinking now, so this is within the early prevention space. So, when we talk about children and teenagers that are at risk of engaging in violent extremism, or maybe sometimes have engaged in violent extremism. So, for example, think about a young teenager that is liking sharing a terrorist content online, right? And is a teenager that is sending into his social media world messages that have terrorist content or extremist content. So, that is someone who is already engaging in that more narrow space. So, how do we reach a person who is engaging with terrorist content or extremist content online? So, what we do at Public Safety Canada is we have, we are providing funding to an organization that is called ‘Moonshot’, and maybe Ghayda, you can also speak to this later, but maybe just to quickly summarize. So, Moonshot is a UK-based organization, but they're also working in Canada and in many other countries, and they have developed intervention tools of how to reach those at risk of violent extremism online. So, when they work, for example, recently, have expanded to work in Google and as well as YouTube to reach individuals that are searching or being exposed to certain algorithms to this extremist content, and now what we do is, instead of simply providing what we call “counter narratives”, we actually provide counter engagement. Moonshot has developed with three civil society organizations and CPN PREF as well. They send ads or messages to these individuals suggesting to engage in psychosocial supports. So, it's this idea to provide services to these vulnerable individuals and provide them with social support so that they can reach out to an intervention program?

Avery Moore Kloss 11:36

Yeah, absolutely. And Ghayda, from your lens of a clinical psychologist, obviously, you know, I'd love to hear your reaction to that. Is that an approach that works and what do you have to do specifically with I mean, teenagers. Their frontal lobe isn't even fully developed, and they're taking in this content. What is the opportunity when you have that social reach to try and counter it?

Ghayda Hassan 11:58

Yeah, absolutely. And I think, you know, the internet is not all bad, like nothing is all bad. And then we can use the advantages and the strengths that the internet provides us to reach out to people and to do positive interventions. The most basic principle of help is to go to where people are. You know, the proximity of services. And today the internet is, I think, the most intimate and the most proximal, the closest space. So, doing a lot of initiatives in the online space to offer support to individuals who need it, and David, you talked a lot about children and youth, and I'd like, you know, to say that actually, many of those who actually commit violent acts are older. And so, we cover the entire spectrum, regardless of a person's age and regardless of a person's other characteristics. I think it's important that we also concentrate on the older individuals. And there are a lot of initiatives online. There are even many initiatives now that are starting to think about the gaming environment and how we can role model positive discourse in the gaming environment, and offer alternative understanding and more supportive communities. So, there are really, really many, I'd say, creative, innovative experiences that need to be evaluated, of course, for effectiveness. The key issue, I think, remains the importance of the online to offline. So, our main objective is actually to be able to reach out to individuals at risk in the online environment, but in order to be able to transit them to the offline environment, because this is where their real social life is. Nobody can just live out of relationships online. They need to live in the social space, and they need to go to school. They need to find decent housing. They need to create a real, close, supportive social support system. So, what we're working on very hard is really how to ensure that a person can also move from the online help space to the offline help space.

Avery Moore Kloss 14:14

And how steep of a climb is that? I think we also have a generation of young people, right, who are more connected than ever in an online way. It's a real struggle to get younger people to live in community in real life. And so, I just wonder, when you look at that challenge, and what the research says, how steep of a climb is that to get to that, you know, like that sense of belonging and community in a countering realm, but also to bring that into real life?

Ghayda Hassan 14:40

I think it is a steep step. I think it is a challenge, but I think it's a challenge that we really must fight in all our capacities, because what mounting evidence for many, many years of psychological and social work research shows us is that positive mental health and positive social adaptation, is connected to the real-world connections that we have. Now I'm not saying that the online friendships and connections are not good connections that we have, but they may often fail in the 24-hour day to provide us or to provide an individual with a supporting environment. So, the metaphor that comes to my mind is, if we only focus on or develop relationships online, we have the impression that we actually have a group of belonging. But in reality, we're a little bit like little islands in oceans. We're actually separated. So, I think we need to go back to some basic principles of mental health and well-being, and we need to reduce the time that people spend online, particularly children and teenagers re-engage them in the interpersonal, I'd say, kind of real-world relationships. This is really essential, because we want to reduce the dislocation of solidarity. I mean, the more you create those silos between individuals, the more you reduce their interpersonal abilities, and the more actually you reduce the solidarity between people, the more you create division. So, it's exactly the thing that we want to fight. And the other important reason, I think, is to understand why people are going online, and actually, what is the online space satisfying in terms of needs? And we find out that people go online because they're not finding positive relationships offline so, you know, in the first place, they're looking for those relationships. And so, we need to provide that back.

Avery Moore Kloss 16:53

Now you're kind of pre-empting talking about what we're here talking about, which is research always, right? This is a research-based podcast. So, Ghayda, I wish I wonder if you could give me a sense of what kind of research methods you're using to get that data about what is actually going to work to counter and prevent, and then for David after that, I wonder if you could just give us a sense of how important that research is to the work that you're doing?

Ghayda Hassan 17:15

Yeah. So actually, one of the things that we do that is, in part, funded and supported by Public Safety, is a collaboration with Campbell Collaboration, which is an institution recognized to support systematic reviews. One of the main objectives that we have at CPN PREV is really to be able to tell practitioners who don't have time to read 1000 research papers, or even the larger public, of “what is the evidence they can trust?” So what we do is actually we conduct systematic reviews, which are a very robust methodology of reviewing all the evidence that exists out there on a specific question, rating the quality of that evidence, introducing quantitative and qualitative methods, and then coming out, really with a kind of synthesis, the conclusion that tells the wider public and the practitioners, this is evidence you can trust, and from there, we can extract recommendations for practice. And I think this is really essential in the practice space, because it really helps, very rapidly, make research understandable from a practitioner perspective of “what does that mean to me when I'm facing my client in my day-to-day practice?”  So, this is really a methodology that I like a lot, and I find very useful, especially when we connect to Delphi methodologies for generating consensus and generating practice guidelines for practitioners at least focused in Canada.

David Yuzva Clement 18:53

So, at Public Safety Canada, we rely on research that is produced by Ghayda Hassan and her many colleagues at the Canadian Practitioners’ Network through the Campbell Collaboration. It's very important for us to fund prevention work so to ground this prevention innovation and evidence, simply put, because the field of preventing and countering violent extremism is a young field of psychosocial intervention and also within the broader space of criminal justice, or crime prevention, or violence prevention. So Public Safety Canada has established the Canada center in 2017, so we had to respond to, you know, the ever-evolving threat environment. At the same time, we have provided funding to through the Campbell Collaboration and to the Campbell Collaboration research teams to conduct those systematic evidence reviews. At Public Safety Canada, we take this, this evidence, very seriously, because we know that in the past, our field had, there were a lot of negative developments and there were a lot of especially around community, stigmatization, securitization of, especially racialized and Muslim communities that our field has produced. So, when we have put program evaluation and research investment at the forefront, to ground prevention and intervention programs in evidence. And as Ghayda Hassan said, we don't have a lot of evidence, so we need to engage in these research programs, and to disseminate the evidence to policymakers as well as clinicians and frontline practitioners. Now, as a researcher myself, I am very interested in the question of how social workers respond and engage with clients who are at risk of radicalization to violence. So previous research I have conducted in Germany was to interview social workers who work with clients who are at risk of violent extremism. And I've seen a lot of stigmatization from practitioners onto clients, and this is something that our field is struggling with. To reflect on biases and practices of othering that practitioners who don't have awareness and capacity in this space portray onto clients. So that's a big challenge that our field is facing with and many of our programs in Canada that we are funding and that work with clients have difficulty of getting their clients into therapy or into housing, for example, because our clients are receiving a lot of stigma back from the community due to their previous engagement and violent extremism. So that is something that we're very concerned with. So, and then we turn that into research and into training of frontline practitioners such as social workers and teachers, for example, to allow for these critical discussions. To yes, on the one hand, learn from our past mistakes, but on the other hand, to also address current challenges.

Ghayda Hassan 21:50

One key issue sometimes, even sometimes, I ask myself, why aren't we doing most of the work, or all of the work, with the victims of hatred or violence, of extremist violence, and why are we investing time, energy, finances in working with the perpetrators? But I think this binary thinking is not helpful, because many of the perpetrators have been victimized through their history. But also, even just from a practical point of view, a perpetrator can make many victims. And so, assisting a perpetrator in getting out of that is actually saving big numbers of victims. So even from a kind of practical point of view, we need to put our energies into this.

David Yuzva Clement 22:39

And maybe just to add, I think what is very important is that we are relying on those psychosocial theories and intervention models. So, you mentioned trauma. So, one thing we always stress, and many of our clinicians, if not all of the clinicians, really are trained in trauma-informed therapy and trauma-informed care. So, to really understand, how did that person become so engaged in hate, and what motivated that person to even go further and engage in violent extremism? That is a key concern for all of us, especially those at the front lines, the clinicians, therapists and social workers, to understand these phenomena from trauma trauma-informed perspective.

Ghayda Hassan 23:20

And maybe just to end on the importance of research, I think that one of the key strengths in this domain, and this is something at CPN, we try very, very much to do, is to break the silos between researchers, policy makers and practitioners. And really to have them work together in first of all, thinking about innovative research topics, for example, today we can think about AI, the issues of deep fake, misinformation, disinformation, gaming as innovation, research. Think about the challenges of doing research using the internet and the online space, and the ethical questions that these poses. So, by having practitioners, policymakers, and researchers think, for example, about the do's and don'ts of doing research on the online environment is very interesting and can provide very interesting and new methodologies as well. And I think the fact also, of stressing the importance of doing evaluative research. This is something that is central in our field, because so many practices were publicized while they were actually inefficient or even caused harm, and now with introducing and stressing the importance of evaluation or data collection around the clients that we work with, is really important because we get to understand the Canadian landscape, but we also get to understand actually what works, with whom, in what contexts, and then keep on evolving in terms of our practices, but also in terms of our policies.

Avery Moore Kloss 24:52

I wonder, based on that you know, when you reflect on what research you have done so far, what's the most surprising thing for each of you that has come out of that research?

Ghayda Hassan 25:02

I have two surprising things. So, one, research that was led actually by a colleague, Dr. Cecile Rousseau in Quebec, who leads also a research group on prevention of social polarization and a clinical group was a five-year longitudinal study in colleges around determinants of violent extremism. And it's actually surprising to see that some of the tendencies that were starting to appear in the longitudinal study, such as, for example, the reduction of age, are actually happening today. It was almost like it was longitudinal and kind of predictive of the future. So that provides some very interesting, interesting and strong findings that are localized in our Canadian context. There are a lot of other interesting things in those set of articles that came out from the research. So if people are interested, I really encourage them to like that out. And the other thing that surprised me was actually the very recent systematic reviews we finalized on the impact of exposure to online harms, online hate. I really did not expect to find such negative consequences. You know, we do research in social sciences and humanities, and it's often very difficult to kind of prove an effect, and unfortunately, we found even causal effects between exposure to hate online and the perpetration of ‘hate’, but also the reduced trust in the other and trust in institutions. And so, to find such strong evidence relationship between exposure to online hate and negative impacts on individuals and community was really a surprising result to me, and it kind of pushed me to really want to do much more in terms of prevention, in terms of work in the online environment, more specifically.

David Yuzva Clement 27:13

For me, maybe at a more structural level, I spoke earlier to children and their exposure as well, and I've recently conducted a round of expert interviews with policy makers and researchers and frontline clinicians, and a big gap that they have highlighted was the lack of cognitive behavioral, as well as childhood psychology scholars in this space. So that means that we have a lot of scholars that have a criminology background, perhaps a security background, but not so much in the in Ghayda, you just mentioned the humanities, the social sciences and psychology. So that is something that we're still struggling with to really create an interdisciplinary community of scholars that is beyond the typical sort of preventing and countering violent extremism scholars. So, bringing in those early childhood scholars that teach at colleges, we need professors in developmental psychology to understand how children and teenagers as well, are vulnerable, and how we can work with them. So that's one surprise, how in some respects, still narrow the interdisciplinary scholarship is in this space. The other gap that we are still seeing, and that is still challenging, is the relationship between clinical support services and law enforcement. When there is a case that is crossing into a criminal space, law enforcement is a very important partner to mitigate the risk of harm and the risk of violence. So, a gap that we're trying to address is to build a better relationship and to use ethics from social work and from psychology to form a mutual understanding between law enforcement and psychosocial intervention teams. And that work has in Canada led to quite positive outcomes.

Avery Moore Kloss 29:04

This research you're doing obviously has an impact at the clinician level, right when they're working directly with clients. What's the impact on policy like, you know, wide-ranging policy when these research findings come out? What do you think is the power there as far as it comes to policy change?

David Yuzva Clement 29:22

So, for example, our government has recently introduced the “online harms bill”, and in February last, last month, in fact, and to respond to, as Ghayda Hassan was saying, to respond to the online harm. So violent extremist and terrorist content is part of seven online harms. Other online harms are child pornography or sexual violence against minors, for example. So, it is important to, at the policy level to respond to this increasingly toxic and dangerous environment and to enact legislation that can hold social media companies accountable. The Government of Canada is proposing to establish a Digital Safety Commissioner that will, if come into power, then would work with social media companies, big and small companies, to ensure that they are implementing online safety measures to protect children, teenagers, but also adults from dangerous conspiracy theories, online hate, as well as many of the other online harms.

Ghayda Hassan 30:22

And I think what's interesting, really, is that when we bridge the gap between practice, research and policy, then I think we bring policies that make sense, that basically are coherent, and that are not perceived as countering in a nonproductive way, the work of practitioners and researchers. And we can take the online safety bill, but we can take other examples where actually the Government of Canada has, in terms of the prevention of violence, more generally; has always constituted consultation committees, and those consultation committees include practitioners and researchers. These are not opinion consultation committees. These are consultation committees that are actually bringing evidence into the table. Reliable, valid evidence that the government then we when we provide that evidence, we can also push on policy and the government and make the government accountable to provide us policies that actually take what we are discovering into accounts and give us as practitioners what we need to work. So, those policy frameworks are important, and I can say from my experience that there has been an effort, a consistent effort, over the past five years, from the main, let's say, governmental institutions, to take into account the voice of practitioners and researchers.

Avery Moore Kloss 31:51

The last question on this podcast is always the same one, and I don't think I prepped you for it, so I'll give you a second, but I'm sure this will be an easy answer for both of you, and we'll start with David. Is, you know, you talked about how we're early on in this field, right? What's on your wish list? If you could have a research wish list of the things that you still, that you're really interested in knowing the results to or gaining insight from, what's on that list for you of knowledge that you still are seeking?

David Yuzva Clement 32:24

Yeah, thanks for that question. On my wish list is to have more PhD students in the humanities and in the psychosocial domains that come into this space. We see in this space, and it's great, a lot of criminologists, scholars from fields such as international relations or criminology political science. But because our clinicians are from more from the psychosocial academic disciplines, we need scholarship in these areas too. So, scholars such from social work, psychology and psychiatry as well. So, we need to build a new generation of master's and PhD students that can take on this challenge.

Ghayda Hassan 33:02

Two words, social justice. Because many of the violence comes from grievances, whether perceived or real, and grievances come from injustices. So, I don't want to simplify it, but also, I want to bring it back to where I think the key is. It's our governments our societies need to think very hard to reduce social injustices, to reduce stark economic differences between people, to reduce racism, discrimination, marginalization, to reduce poverty, to increase free access to services. Many of our cases would have easily gone well if they arrived sooner in our services, but people have a lot of difficulty in accessing. And it's really not being romantic that I'm saying this. It should be the guiding principle of every single person who works in the politics and the in the economic sector of our societies.

Avery Moore Kloss 34:09

I think that's probably the most poignant place we could end. So, I really want to thank you for being here Ghayda and David. That was really eye-opening for me. And I think a really interesting conversation where, you know, even if you're not well read on this work, I think a really good primer on what's happening in your research area. So, thank you for being here.

Ghayda Hassan 34:27

Thank you.

David Yuzva Clement 34:28

Thanks for having us.

[Background Music] 34:29

Avery Moore Kloss 34:35

Thank you for listening to CRSP Talk. A big thank you to Dr. Bree Akesson and Dr Toyin Kareem for their help with this episode. And thank you to our guests who joined me in the studio on the Laurier Brantford campus. Ghayda Hassan is a psychologist and professor of psychology at UQAM University in Montreal. She comes from a background of working on the prevention of violence. She is passionate about preserving peace and preventing violence in society. David Yuzva Clement is a research advisor at the Canada Center for Community Engagement and the Prevention of Violence at Public Safety Canada. He brings a critical social work lens to the field of countering violent extremism. You can find a link to any research mentioned in this episode in the show notes. CRSP Talk is a production from the Center for Research on Security Practices at Wilfrid Laurier University. For more research stories, listen to past episodes of this podcast. For more information about the work we do at the Center for Research on Security Practices, please visit our website at CRSP.online. Thank you for listening to CRSP Talk. We'll be back again soon with more research to uncover. I'm Avery Moore Kloss.

[Outro Music] 35:39