Risk of What and Why? Disaggregating Pathways to Extremist Behaviours in Individuals Susceptible to Violent Extremism

Abstract

Best practice in violent extremist risk assessment and management recommends adopting a Structured Professional Judgement (SPJ) approach. The SPJ approach identifies relevant, evidence-based risk and protective factors and requires experts to articulate hypotheses about a) what the person might do (risk of what), and b) how they've come to engage in the concerning behaviour (and why) (Logan 2021) to inform who, needs to do what, and when. Whilst the field continues to move towards adopting an SPJ approach, there remains a gap between what is known empirically and what is needed in practice. We apply psychometric network modelling to a sample of 485 individuals entered into Channel, the UK's preventing and countering violent extremism (P/CVE) program. We model the system of interactions from which susceptibility to violent extremism emerges, providing data driven evidence which speaks to risk of what and why. Our research highlights a way to generate evidence which captures the multifactorial nature of susceptibility to violent extremism, to support professional decision making in the context of an SPJ approach.