‘What is the headspace they are in when they are making those referrals?’ Exploring the lifeworlds and experiences of health and social care practitioners undertaking risk work within the Prevent Strategy

Abstract

The 2015 Prevent Strategy policy of the UK Government places a legal duty on a wide range of professionals to assess risk regarding radicalisation and counter terrorism. By doing so, it expands the risk work required of these practitioners into an area seemingly unrelated to their usual professional remit. In this article, I analyse data from in-depth interviews undertaken in Spring 2017 with 15 practitioners working in the fields of family support, social work and healthcare in London, exploring how these participants experienced the risk work required by the Prevent Strategy in the context of their everyday work. In doing so, I employ Habermas’ lifeworld as a sensitising conceptual basis to explore lived experiences along three dimensions; levels of familiarity, areas of consonance and dissonance with other aspects of the practitioner’s role, and impact on identity. The findings were characterised by participants’ awareness of the Prevent Strategy, which was significantly lower than suggested by both government rhetoric and opposition campaign groups. Furthermore, it was narrated as largely consonant with other types of risk work. Tensions did, however, emerge for some participants regarding, for example, the likelihood of encountering radicalisation within their work and the potential negative consequences for society. These tensions were often ‘bracketed off’ in various ways, enabling participants to pragmatically continue undertaking their role. By exploring practitioner experiences, this article aims to ‘write the practitioner back in’ to sociological understandings of risk and, in doing so, to problematise predominant understandings of the Prevent Strategy.