Child protection and parents with extremist beliefs

• In Event: EXTREME Panel 3. Preventing and countering violent extremism

Abstract

In recent years, Dutch child protection agencies have increasingly had to deal with families in which at least one parent holds extremist views. For a long time, this mainly involved parents who had travelled to IS-controlled territory, but recently families are coming into the picture in which a right-wing extremist or anti-institutional ideology plays a role. Although there are suspicions that an extremist ideology, or at least acting upon it, can be harmful to children, little or no empirical evidence for this has yet been found. The lack of an empirical base makes it challenging for professionals to deal with these types of child protection cases. Therefore, the purpose of this study is to gain more insight into the bottlenecks involved in working with these families and, in doing so, identify possible areas for improvement. The current study attempts to do this through interviews with professionals from across the child protection field. Preliminary study results indicate that as child protection professionals encounter a growing range of extremist ideologies, the challenges they face are also becoming increasingly complex. An additional complicating factor emerges in situations where it becomes impossible to get information on a child’s well-being because, for example, parents refuse contact with child protection agencies due to their institutional distrust or consider court decisions to be unlawful. The results will be discussed in light of current extremism developments in the Netherlands.

Authors

• Lisette Dirksen, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam

• Elanie Rodermond, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam

• Nadia Ismaïli, Universiteit Utrecht

• Catrien Bijleveld, Netherlands Institute for the Study of Crime and Law Enforcement