Digital cultures and concerns of Canadian parents regarding the susceptibility of young Canadians to radicalization and its impact

• In Event: Navigating challenges in education: exploring technology, activism and suppression in diverse contexts

Proposal

In today's world, digital cultures have greatly changed the experiences of young people, offering them various opportunities. These include connecting with peers globally, accessing a wide range of educational resources, nurturing creativity, and expressing themselves freely. However, alongside these opportunities, there are also significant moral hazards that require careful consideration. Young individuals are constantly exposed to fake news, advertisements, marketing tactics, and consumerist influences in both private and public spaces, including educational institutions. Additionally, the digital world exposes them to cyberbullying, trolling, public shaming, and the spread of misinformation on social media platforms, presenting challenges that were not as prevalent in the past (Yacek et al., 2023).
The challenges mentioned above place young individuals in complex moral dilemmas (Yacek et al., 2023). These dilemmas are making young individuals more susceptible to radicalization compared to older demographics. This is primarily due to their lack of life experience and extensive engagement with social media platforms (Alava et al., 2017; Ghosh, 2023; Hassan et al., 2018; Miconi et al., 2023). In our increasingly social media-driven world, extremist organizations have shown increased proactivity in targeting young individuals through online platforms (Hutchinson et al., 2023; Preston, 2023). Parents may find it challenging to help their children navigate these situations, as young people often face conflicts with their ethical values, life choices, or religious beliefs, compared to those of their parents (Yacek et al., 2023). Moreover, parents may be unaware of their children's social lives due to a gap in accessing and using online platforms as well as getting accustomed to digital culture.
This roundtable presentation aims to address and discuss how Canadian parents perceive their children's vulnerability to violent extremism in the digital age. Recent years have seen a growing number of extremist groups targeting young Canadians. According to Public Safety Canada (2017), this is a worrying trend, and in 2020, Canadian police reported 2,669 criminal incidents motivated by hate (Carr, 2022). Between 2019 and 2020, police-reported hate crimes driven by right-wing ideologies surged by 80%, increasing from 884 to 1594 incidents (Wang and Moreau, 2022). The majority of these incidents were related to xenophobia, anti-Semitism, and Islamophobia (Aziz & Carvin, 2022; CBC, 2022).
This round table presentation will share insights from an SSHRC-funded broad study on countering violent extremism through education in multicultural Canada. It explores how Canadian educational actors, parents, and students understand violent extremism and make meaning of their lived experiences with this phenomenon. For this study, teachers (n=28), students (n=35), and 26 parents (n = 26) were interviewed either one-on-one or through focus groups over seven years (2015-2022). This presentation highlights the views shared only by parents (n=26) we interviewed. Parents indicate that they are highly concerned about the impact of various forms of Extremism, such as Islamophobia, Racism, and Xenophobia, that have increased in recent years.

Authors

• Helal H Dhali, Bishop's University

• Maihemuti Dil Dilimulati, McGill University (Montreal, CANADA)

• Ratna Ghosh, McGill University