In its effort to promote a strategic, long-term approach to prevent and counter terrorism and the violent extremist ideologies that underpin it, the Global Counterterrorism Forum (GCTF) has launched an initiative on juvenile justice in a counterterrorism context to address the emerging questions regarding children involved in terrorism, and the different phases of a criminal justice response, which include prevention, investigation, prosecution, sentencing, and reintegration. GCTF’s Initiative to Address the Life Cycle of Radicalization to Violence (Life Cycle Initiative) and its Memoranda (Neuchâtel Memorandum) recognized the need to prevent violent extremism through a comprehensive strategy grounded in international law and human rights. Critical to such strategy, the need to understanding the conditions conducive to and effectively addressing the recruitment of children, and their potential radicalization to violence.
With an aim to help close existing knowledge gaps and inform responses as underlined by the GCTF ́s Life Cycle Initiative and the Neuchâtel Memorandum as well as by several experts, states, and agencies, the CRTG Working Group is developing a research portfolio that identifies systemic issues and factors driving children into terrorist and violent extremist groups. Through PREVENT, the CRTG Working Group introduces new methods of creating a thorough understanding of the challenge of terrorism and violent extremism involving children, which will further help to ensure awareness of the threat and violence against children (VAC) at the hands of terrorist and violent extremist actors, allowing for better discussion, approaches to prevention and resource allocation.
The CRTG Working Group developed an articulate analytical framework that allows for a holistic understanding of the multifaceted drivers leading children and youth into the fold of terrorist and violent extremist groups, the context in which this issue emerges and its methods, thereby providing the necessary foundation for the formulation of informed policies, strategies, and intervention measures.
The CRTG Working Group recognizes that terrorist and violent extremist organizations do not adhere to a standardized strategy to recruit, use, and radicalize children, that children ́s adoption of violent behavior is non-exclusively ideological but multidimensional, and that the dynamics of violent extremism in conflict-affected settings and fragile environments are especially fluid and complex. For these reasons, this research adopts a macro-level analytical approach that identifies the conditions conducive to violent extremism involving children and the broader exogenous factors that enable violent extremist insurgencies, including conflict, political and social dynamics considerations.
In addition to illuminating causes and motivations, the CRTG Working Group points to the importance of understanding the processes of recruitment, types of violent extremist activity and their potential reach as these form part of the calculus in designing effective interventions. In this respect, this research initiative dissects terrorist and violent extremist organizations ́ strategy punctuating child recruitment, use and radicalization, and produces a set of tailored analyses for each group including trajectory and evolution, ideological stance, methods of child targeting, military training and child exploitation disaggregated by gender, and sexual and gender based violence.
This analysis of child recruitment and radicalization by Al-Shabaab is developed as a pilot for the CRTG Working Group´s PREVENT initiative. It draws from the analytical tool designed by the CRTG Working Group and aims at testing the feasibility, validity and effectiveness of this line of research by the CRTG Working Group and set the foundation for the subsequent stages of the PREVENT initiative.
Together with other assessments of the Islamic State, Boko Haram and Al-Qaeda, it forms part of an open-source repository of data providing a nuanced and context-specific understanding of child involvement with terrorism and violent extremism. This pilot employs a multi-layered approach including both quantitative and qualitative methods, and it relies on desk research to allow for a systematic exploration, analysis, and synthesis of existing knowledge derived from an extensive array of primary and secondary sources.
