The Future of UK Counterterrorism: A Case for Integrated Violence Prevention

The terrorism landscape the UK faced a decade ago, characterised by organised departures to join Daesh and relatively structured plots attributed to clearly defined terror groups, has shifted. What dominates now are acts of violence committed by individuals or small clusters of peers, driven less by clear and coherent ideologies than by personal grievances and vulnerabilities, often exacerbated online. The latest Prevent referral data confirm this point. The system, which was designed for the post-9/11 and 7/7 era, is no longer fit to meet the mix of threats we see today. The Independent Commission on UK Counter-Terrorism reaches a similar conclusion in their report, published this month, arguing for an integrated model that strengthens overall security.

Shifting Threat Profile

Fundamentally, RUSI’s Terrorism and Conflict team evidences the same findings, with the risk factors that drive ideologically motivated individual violence often substantially overlapping with those behind other forms of serious harm. Exceptionalising terrorism from the wider violence ecosystem makes sense for coordinated groups that often operate across borders. But lone actors and small groups of peers whose structure bears little resemblance to formal violent extremist organisations, are often more similar to the perpetrators of non-ideological violence (or violence motivated by ideologies that are not currently included in the UK’s definition of terrorism, such as misogyny) than they are, for example, to an al-Qaeda cell.

Why the shift? Several reinforcing drivers shape risk across all age groups, though they are often most visible among younger people: declining offline social interaction and rising loneliness; pandemic-era disruption; economic pressures that delay adult milestones; and, for many boys and young men, turbulence around status and identity. School-age gender gaps in attainment can feed grievance narratives well before workplace discrimination against women becomes visible to young men, creating a vacuum that misogynistic worldviews readily fill. In addition, the information environment with its instant access to conflict (Gaza, Ukraine, etc.) plus AI-generated false and deceptive content create a perfect environment for grievance, doomscrolling, conspiratorial ‘sense-making’ and polarisation to take place.

In contrast to radicalisation and recruitment pathways into violent extremism in the past, recruitment often is not ‘done to’ people anymore. Users often self-select into content streams and communities through search and recommendation engines. They find ‘manosphere’ influencers, whose initial ‘help’ in areas like discipline, fitness, money or purpose slides into contempt for women; diffuse transnational extremist subcultures that avoid prescription criteria by not openly embracing violence; and offline ‘active clubs’ that offer belonging and opportunities for personal development while laundering exclusionary worldviews. Hostile state actors also exploit these attention markets, often amplifying divisive narratives to erode trust and social cohesion and exacerbate identity grievances. By financing and boosting narrative campaigns around ‘traditional values’ and anti-rights frames, they often feed into domestic extremist ecosystems of hate and violent misogyny. This further increases the pool of people who are exposed to hateful narratives and exacerbates overall levels of hostility and identity-based hate that often contributes to lone actors engaging in seemingly ‘erratic’ acts of violence.

The consequences of this changing landscape of increasing exposure to hostility-filled online and offline environments are diverse. For many, nothing catastrophic happens; they consume content and move on. However, for a growing minority, we see problematic behaviours ranging from violent rhetoric to online hate that bleeds into hate crime, intimate partner violence and more. At the extreme end are serious harm events, from ‘random’ acts of violence to violence clearly motivated by identity-based narratives and hate. That entire spectrum of behaviours now flows into Prevent referrals. In the year ending with March 2025, referrals reached a record 8778 (up 27% from the previous year). The largest cohort of those referred was aged 11-15; over a third of cases flagged mental health issues or neurodiversity; and 56% had no identifiable ideology while another large share centred on extreme violence interest without ideological roots. Meanwhile, only a small fraction of those referred eventually translate into Channel support, which further confirms how broad and noisy the landscape has become.

Prevent's Future

This is where Prevent’s mission drift comes into play. When education, mental health support, youth work and other local services are thinly resourced, Prevent becomes the only available route for cases where ‘something is wrong’, even when there is no clear terrorism-related risk. However, the stigma associated with Prevent referral harms engagement while also diluting specialist capacity. The Commission’s proposed solution to this is to keep Prevent for terrorism-related risk while embedding it inside a single, locally-led multi-agency triage system that can route a range of violence-related concerns to the right support without attaching the counter-terrorism label to referrals or support provided. Evidence quoted in the report from Dovetail and local violence-reduction partnerships suggests that such an approach works to lower false positives, improve information-sharing and build trust.

What could this system look like in practice?

1. Providing a single ‘big front door’ led by local authorities. One access point, following the Multi-Agency Safeguarding Hub model, takes all referrals for violence-related concerns, from ideology-linked risk to violence fascination, exploitation, to harm in the home (domestic and GBV) and on the streets (knife crime, etc.). Counter-terrorism police are at the table for triage but Prevent/Channel only gets involved when terrorism-related risk is present. This would reduce securitised labelling, particularly for children and for neurodiverse or mentally unwell individuals, without leaving those who do not display terrorism-related risk without support.
2. Building on what already works. The proposed system could build on Violence Reduction Units and existing local partnerships running public health style interventions on knife crime, youth violence and violence against women and girls, in combination with community cohesion and safeguarding work. If done right, this could provide the baseline for an integrated intervention system tackling factors such as belonging, identity, mentoring, family-based support, digital literacy, mental health support and bystander skills. The aim should be to strengthen protective factors without having to reinvent the wheel (or expand the scope of Prevent). Crucially, such a shift to a multi-agency triage model would also mean that resources are not only unlocked when a terrorism threat is identified, but are available for a less clearly defined, open-armed response to a wider range of concerns – so that referrals do not default into Prevent simply because no other funded option exists.
3. Building gender- and identity-aware practice. Boys and young men are consistently over-represented in Prevent referrals and violence cases more widely. An integrated system should be aware of gendered dynamics and treat misogyny, grievance and status-anxiety as enabling factors across multiple harm pathways. RUSI’s research across contexts has shown that harmful gender norms, racialised grievances, and identity-based marginalisation often intersect in the pathways to violence. An effective, integrated prevention system must therefore acknowledge these factors as central to how violence risk manifests without securitising gender or other identity markers.
4. Offering credible alternatives. If young people are searching for advice on fitness, finance, work and meaning and end up finding mainly problematic online communities and influencers, then better alternatives have to be provided and promoted. This should include high-quality educational content on these issues, positive role models and resources promoting positive masculinities, well as mentoring and offline spaces that offer belonging and social interactions without sliding into hate. Providing these types of alternatives would contribute to reducing the case load for Prevent as well as reducing overall violence risk.

None of this suggests side-lining or de-prioritising terrorism. While the current terrorism landscape is looking different from what it looked like a few years ago, that does not mean that violence committed by organised terror groups is no longer an issue of concern. However, an integrated system that captures the grey zone – where online misogyny, thrill-seeking, violence fascination, grievance and ideological fragments come together and are exploited by state and non-state actors – will reduce noise and leave terrorism specialists to focus on cases where clear terrorism risk exists. Fixing the mission drift of Prevent therefore should not mean expanding its scope until it becomes indistinguishable from general safeguarding, nor does it mean discarding Prevent altogether. Instead, it means refocusing Prevent on the terrorism-related concerns it was designed to address, and surrounding it with adequately funded services and partnerships that meet people where they are, before problematic behaviours translate into violence.

© RUSI, 2025.

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