Abstract
Prevent, a UK counter-extremism programme that affects thousands of young
children and teenagers throughout Great Britain every year, is both a policing and a
surveillance programme. Despite Home Office portrayals of the programme as
concerned with ‘safeguarding’, we show that the police are using Prevent referrals
as a way to gather ‘intelligence’ – in fact, Fixed Intelligence Management Units
(FIMUs) have primary responsibility for the Prevent process within individual police
forces. The government has told us that most people referred to Prevent are never
notified of that fact.