Friends of the Forensic Science Club, this week we present the paper “Radicalization in Adolescence: the Identification of Vulnerable Groups”, by Schröder, C. P.; Bruns, J.; Lehmann, L.; Goede, L. R.; Bliesener, T. and Tomczyk, S. (2022), in which authors carry out a study to identify the risk factors of radicalization in young people.
One of the issues that has most concerned criminal experts in recent years has been that of violent radicalization.
This is understood as a process that begins early in life and that can lead to extremism, including terrorist acts. It is characterized by the complex interaction of many individual and social factors, and is manifested in different ideas, attitudes and behaviors.
Since the beginnings of radicalization are often observed at young ages, many experts have focused their analysis and work on adolescents. In addition, adolescents are the group that is most interesting to study, because they are at a special stage in their development, since it is in adolescence when people are more vulnerable.
From an evolutionary perspective, adolescence represents a particularly relevant period for the development of identity, as well as a series of norms and a value system.
Adolescents are, therefore, especially vulnerable because they also begin to seek to belong to a group, obtain recognition and thus strengthen their identity. All this happens when they are 14-16 years.
They also tend to seek adventures, emotions, provocations… And these years are also especially relevant for political socialization and the development of related attitudes that generally remain stable throughout life.
Therefore, there are many risk factors related to radicalization that play an important role in this stage of life.
Many theoretical models and empirical studies on radicalization have focused on extremist Islamism because jihadist terrorism has been the greatest terrorist threat to Europe in recent years. However, it is closely followed by far-right terrorism.
Right-wing extremism is therefore a very important social problem and represents a great threat to minorities as well as to democracy itself. Far-right ideologies are often behind hate crimes, which are highly problematic because they are a consequence of ideologies of inequality, exclusion and violence, representing anti-Semitic, xenophobic, homophobic or sexist attitudes, among others.
The objective of this article is, therefore, to analyze this type of extremism by examining the conditions of origin and other associated risk factors.
What happens is that, to capture the complexity of attitude patterns, statistical analyzes are not enough. Experts support the idea of using people-centered methods, which would be more helpful. For example, latent class analyzes can examine the different “constellations” of xenophobic or anti-Semitic attitudes within a population.
The authors’ study focuses, therefore, on the far-right attitudes of a sample of adolescents, using a latent class analysis.
A total of 6,335 young people aged between 13 and 19 participated in it, although the vast majority were between 14 and 15.
The basis of the study was a quantitative online questionnaire that lasted approximately 90 minutes, which included questions about various topics; for example, political attitudes, religion, social environment, leisure activities, online activities, etc.
More than half of the adolescents in the sample belonged to a class (or group) characterized by strong disagreement with all attitudes related to the extreme right.
However, the group labeled as “the extremists” (that is, the people who did show extreme right-wing attitudes) showed some characteristics: the vast majority were predominantly male and had very high feelings of social deprivation. This would be consistent with some previous research. Strong feelings of political deprivation and a tendency toward violent crime also appeared for this class.
The “anti-authoritarian” group was characterized by very low levels of political deprivation and very little propensity for violent crime.
These ideas lead us to understand that prevention approaches that target all groups are not effective, since each one has its own special needs.
It seems necessary, therefore, to have different prevention objectives for specific groups, in addition to taking into account the gender problematic, since it has been seen that young men are at greater risk.
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