by Emma Schubart, The Critic
Islamist networks are increasingly targeting children, and the British state refuses to acknowledge the problem.
There is a national security crisis unfolding in Britain and our leaders are too squeamish to speak plainly about it: Islamists are targeting children. Perhaps the most disturbing development in Britain’s Islamist problem is the descent of radicalisation into ever younger age groups. In the year ending March 2025, 11- to 15-year-olds made up 23 per cent of all Islamist referrals to Prevent, but 34 per cent of the Islamist cases serious enough to require formal intervention. That means that children in this age group were, relative to their referral rate, disproportionately likely to be involved in Islamist cases severe enough to warrant escalation.
This is happening across the West. In 2024, teenagers were involved in nearly two-thirds of Islamic State-linked arrests in Europe. That same year, the state security service in Belgium described the Islamic States and its branches as “the most important threats to our country” not least because one in three individuals in Belgian terrorism cases that year was a minor, and three-quarters of those minors “were motivated by a radical version of Sunni Islam.” Europol similarly reported that of 449 suspects arrested for terrorism-related offences in 2024, (64 per cent of which were linked to jihadist terrorism) 30 per cent of suspects were aged between 12 to 20 years old. Extremist networks have always understood that the surest way to secure the future is to recruit the young. What has changed is how early they start and how refined their methods have become.