Autistics referred more often to UK terror prevent programme

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A “staggeringly high” number of autistic people are referred to the government’s anti-radicalisation Prevent programme, a terror laws watchdog will say, calling for discussion about terrorism cases in which the disability features.

Jonathan Hall QC, the independent reviewer of terrorism legislation, will say autism and terrorism has not received much public attention due to “a very real and respectable fear that making any sort of link will lead to stigma”.

But in a speech as part of the thinktank Bright Blue’s Ludgate lecture series online, he will argue that the criminal justice outcome may not always be the right one for autistic people and needs scrutiny.

Hall will say “autism plus” appears to be a relevant factor in many cases, meaning that for people on the autistic spectrum who are drawn into terrorist violence there tends to be some additional factor such as an “unstable family background or some other cognitive difficulty”.

He will cite four recent terrorism cases in which the defendants were autistic, including 17-year-old Lloyd Gunton who declared himself an Islamic State soldier, and was sentenced to life in prison for preparing a vehicle and knife attack in Cardiff in 2018.

In 2019, Jack Reed, who from the age of 13 had been involved in occult neo-Nazism, was jailed for nearly seven years for planning to attack Durham synagogues. In 2020, 17-year-old Paul Dunleavy was jailed for five and a half years for his involvement in attack planning in the West Midlands inspired by the far-right Feuerkrieg Division, and earlier this year a 16-year-old from Newcastle invited support for the neo-Nazi organisation National Action in the interest of creating a white ethno-state.

“My understanding is that the incidents of autism and Prevent referrals are also staggeringly high,” Hall will say.

“It is as if a social problem has been unearthed and fallen into lap of counter-terrorism professionals.

“From the point of view of counter-terrorism legislation, is the use of strong powers to detect and investigate suspected terrorism in children justified?

“I believe it is because of the potential risk to the general public. But is the criminal justice outcome the right one in all cases?

The Ministry of Justice (MoJ) launched a review at the end of last year into how many offenders are affected by neurodivergent conditions, including autism, with a view of improving support in the criminal justice system.

Clare Hughes, the criminal justice manager at the National Autistic Society, said: “The vast majority of the 700,000 autistic people in the UK are law abiding.

Recent observations from Jonathan Hall QC, the independent reviewer of terrorism legislation, suggest that “a staggeringly high” number of autistic people are referred to the UK government’s anti-radicalisation Prevent programme.

The comments come ahead of Halls’ upcoming lecture about whether the criminal justice system is the right avenue for dealing with autistic people on the counter-terrorism scheme. But rather than leading with an explanation for these high figures, recent reports on the terror watchdog’s observations have since suggested there is a link between autistic people and radicalisation.

These remarks and the coverage of the story are indeed staggering to me as a researcher of autism spectrum conditions – but not in the way the authors intended.

At present, there’s no empirical evidence to suggest that autistic people are significantly more susceptible to radicalisation or terrorism. Yet most coverage of the issue fails to discuss the reasons behind autistic people being disproportionately reported to the scheme and instead focuses on limited aspects of the data.

Better safe than sorry’ – but at whose expense?

There are a number of autistic features which, if observed out of context and without expertise, may appear alarming.

Studies show that autistic people are no more likely than non-autistic people to hold sympathetic views for violent protest or terrorism.

In fact, there is some evidence that terror networks are actually more reluctant to recruit people with any kind of mental health problem, perhaps due to societal stigma around mental illness and disability. The promotion of a link between autism and radicalisation is simply irresponsible.

Studies also show that two-way understanding is difficult between autistic and non-autistic people, and that the verbal and non-verbal communication of autistic people is often misconstrued by non-autistic listeners. One in particular suggests that safeguarding officials (for example, in education and the NHS) often adopt a “better safe than sorry” approach and flag up behaviours that don’t really warrant referrals to counter-terrorism units.

Worryingly, when it comes to generating national statistics, investigators often look purely at this biased sample pool, into which autistic people, and those with mental illnesses, are more likely to have been unfairly placed.

To think that the stigma caused by such statements can be offset with a little caveat – such as the one that appears at the end of the Guardian’s article – is naive because it doesn’t account for a crucial aspect of human psychology: our brains love a short-cut.

We live in a fast-paced world where we’re bombarded with information, so our brains use a lot of quick fixes, “rules of thumb”, so that we don’t have to think about everything so deeply. One of these is called the availability heuristic. When something has been brought to our attention, the memory of it stays close at hand, especially if it’s an emotive topic. Because of the availability of the memory, we then judge the phenomenon as much more common than it actually

In this case, when we think about autism, articles like these pop right back into our minds because they’re “available” to our brains, and we overestimate the frequency of radicalisation in autism.

Stigma against autism is ingrained from a young age and news articles only add to this. Non-autistic children view autistic peers as less friendly, and are less willing to include them. Though these explicit negative judgements taper with age, older children show implicit avoidance of autistic others. Adults, too, are less willing to interact with autistic people.

Stigma harms autistic people. They internalise it and experience low self-worth and poor mental health. It drives them to “camouflage” their autism, a process associated with depression, anxiety and even suicide.

My ongoing research suggests that over and above its association with depression, internalised stigma is actually associated with mental rehearsal of suicide plans. To put this in context, a stark reality is that autistic people are, by one estimate, three times more likely to end their own lives – and stigma is likely a contributing factor.

Terrorism is a real risk which concerns us all, but inflammatory, ill-informed headlines pose a silent, unjustified and very real danger to the autistic community.