RadicalizationBrainwashing and radicalization don’t explain why young people join violent causes
Why do young people from Western societies join ISIS? Terms such as “brainwashing” and “radicalization” are typically and casually invoked to explain the phenomenon. Suggestions of brainwashing or radicalization imply that the object of such efforts has been profoundly diverted from their usual, reasonable way of thinking. The instigators of this mental trickery are implicitly credited with considerable psychological skill, while the target is simultaneously assumed to have some mental insufficiency or vulnerability. The young are commonly deemed to be easy prey for those seeking to enlist them for a “radical” cause. The problem is, it’s just not that simple. Arguing that a 15 or 16-year-old is able to make a reasoned choice about engagement in hostilities risks exposing that young person to the full force of the law – but using loose, inadequate concepts such as brainwashing and radicalization to explain young people’s engagement in political violence carries its own risks. It severely limits our ability to understand why young people are mobilized in support of a group such as Islamic State, and hinders intelligent debate about the wider changes needed to prevent them doing so. Moreover our efforts to reintegrate them once they come back are likely to prove desperately inadequate.
On the morning of 24 September 2014, 15-year-old Yusra Hussien left for school near her home in Easton, Bristol. She then disappeared. News reports surfaced a few days later that Yusra and a 17-year-old friend from London had reached Istanbul, fueling speculation that the two young women were heading for Syria to join Islamic State.
Terms such as “brainwashing” and “radicalization” were repeatedly and casually invoked to explain Yusra and her friend’s actions. Understandable enough; how else to explain the uncharacteristic folly of a model student who was described by her teachers as “calm and collected”?
The problem is, it’s just not that simple.
Weasel words
Suggestions of brainwashing or radicalization imply that the object of such efforts has been profoundly diverted from their usual, reasonable way of thinking. The instigators of this mental trickery are implicitly credited with considerable psychological skill, while the target is simultaneously assumed to have some mental insufficiency or vulnerability.
This may be a lack of agency, an inadequate understanding of the issues at stake, or just “weakness of mind.”
The young are commonly deemed to be easy prey for those seeking to enlist them for a “radical” cause. Indeed, children and young people’s engagement in oppositional politics has often been explained away by reference to their supposed psychological immaturity.
Outside of state-sanctioned exceptions (such as allowing 16 and 17-year-olds to vote in the Scottish referendum), political engagement by minors is liable to be dismissed as the product of mental or physical coercion, the incapacity associated with immaturity, or a combination of both.
The response from police, educators and political figures to protests by school students at the planned invasion of Iraq in 2003 illustrates the assumption of immaturity. Rallies held in various cities around the U.K. and in Parliament Square were uniformly depicted as the acts of “truants” who lacked “the experience to really understand the full ramifications of what they are talking about.” But the same truants’ reflections ten years on suggest these rallies were profoundly meaningful events for them, offering a real expansion of their political outlook and experience.
Similar, equally lazy assumptions still inform much of the debate around child soldiers, which has been raging since the late 1990s.
