Worried a Young Person Is Being Drawn Into Extremism?

Something has shifted. He has gone quiet about who he talks to online, he has firm new opinions he will not explain, and you cannot tell whether you are watching a fifteen-year-old work out who he is or something you are supposed to report. This page is about how to tell the difference, and what actually happens when you say something.

Please note: this is general information for carers, not legal advice and not a risk assessment for any individual child. Correct at October 2026. See the Home Office’s Prevent programme factsheet and the statutory Prevent duty guidance. If you are worried about a particular child, speak to your supervising social worker. If it cannot wait, the police ACT Early support line is 0800 011 3764, open 24 hours.

The hard part is that it looks like being fifteen

Our own training notes say this plainly, and they are right to. The signs of radicalisation are genuinely difficult to separate from ordinary adolescence. Teenagers go distrustful of authority. They test where the edges are. They adopt a cause with total conviction in March and cannot remember it by June. They become secretive about their phone, which is close to a developmental milestone. So if you are waiting for a sign that is unmistakable, you will be waiting far too long, and if you treat every strong opinion as a warning you will be in a shouting match by Wednesday. What you are looking for is not one symptom. It is a pattern, and more than anything it is a pace.

What tends to change

These are the things carers notice first. Read them as a group rather than a tick list, because almost every item on it has an innocent explanation on its own.

• Going quiet, or secretive about who he is talking to and what he is watching
• Very firm views on something he showed no interest in two months ago
• Views that sound scripted when you ask about them, as though they arrived fully written
• Being unwilling to explain where a view came from, or not actually able to
• Hostility or contempt aimed at people of a different race, faith or sexuality
• A sense of being persecuted, that the world is organised against people like him
• New friends, and old friends dropped along with the hobbies that went with them
• Speaking warmly about an extremist group, or trying to bring someone else in

Now the caveat that matters most, and our factsheet is right to put it in bold. That list is also the warning list for sexual exploitation, and for county lines. A young person who has gone secretive and acquired older friends and a second phone might be being groomed into anything at all. Your job is not to work out which. It is to notice that something changed and to say so, which is also the whole of the advice in our piece on behaviour that is hard to handle.

Belonging is the offer, so build a better one

People who radicalise young people are not really selling an argument. They are selling significance: you have been overlooked, we can see you, here is a place where you matter and here is who to blame. That lands hardest on a young person who has already moved house three times and has reason to believe that adults leave. The counter to it is much duller than the threat, and it works: being wanted at a particular table at a particular time, by people who were also there last Tuesday. That is most of what fostering a teenager consists of anyway.

Let him argue with you

The instinct when a young person repeats something ugly at your dinner table is to shut it down hard. It is an understandable instinct and it is the wrong one, because the conversation does not stop when you refuse to have it. It moves to whoever will have it, and that person has an agenda. Give him somewhere safe to disagree with you, then disagree back properly.

• Ask what he thinks before you say what you think
• Ask open questions, and ask where he heard it rather than only what he heard
• Be respectful about the view and then challenge it on the facts
• Listen like you mean it: phone face down, television off, no interrupting, let him finish badly

Children will also bring you questions about whatever is on the news, and they deserve a straight answer in plain words rather than a lecture or a brush-off. The events themselves are frightening enough without a running commentary. Our guide to communicating with a child in your care goes further into the sideways conversations where this sort of thing actually gets said.

What Prevent really is, and what it does not do

This is the part that frightens carers most, usually because nobody has explained it. Prevent is not a criminal process. The Home Office describes it as working “in the non-criminal space”, and its 2026 factsheet is unambiguous: “A Prevent referral does not lead to a criminal record.” A referral is assessed by specialist police officers, and most do not go any further than that. Where support is offered, it comes through a multi-agency panel called Channel, and Channel “is voluntary and consent based”. For anyone under eighteen, consent comes via a parent or guardian.

The numbers are worth knowing, because they are more reassuring than the word Prevent sounds. In the year to March 2025, children were the majority of all referrals in England and Wales: 4,715 of 8,778. Of those child referrals, 79% were closed without progressing through Prevent at all, and 71% had no clear ideology attached to them.

Two honest points to set against that. The Children’s Commissioner for England looked at children in Prevent in August 2026 and concluded that for most children without a clear ideology it is not the right door, and that decision-makers largely treat it that way already. Prevent now has an Independent Prevent Commissioner, Tim Jacques, appointed in April 2026. It is a system being reformed, and saying so is more useful to you than pretending otherwise.

One last thing, and it takes the weight off you entirely. The statutory Prevent duty does not sit on foster carers. It sits on organisations, and the guidance names them: “The Prevent duty applies to those bodies, which include children’s homes and independent fostering agencies.” That is us, not you. Your part is to notice and to tell us. The assessing and the deciding are ours.

What to do, roughly in order

• Tell your supervising social worker, the same day. You do not need to be sure, and you do not need a theory. “This changed and I do not like the shape of it” is a complete report.
• Write down what happened, not what you think he is. Date, time, the words he used, what you saw on the screen. Keep opinion out of it, or mark it clearly as opinion.
• Lower the opportunity before you raise the stakes. Your broadband provider can filter extremist and adult content before it reaches the house. Put parental controls on devices, and remember the games console is an internet-connected device with strangers talking on it. Agree screen hours and sites together rather than imposing them overnight. Filters buy you time; it is disclosure that keeps a child safe, which is the same point we make about online safety.
• Do not interrogate, and do not set traps. A search of his room on a hunch, or a screenshot taken behind his back, buys you one piece of information and costs you the thing you actually need, which is that he still talks to you.
• If something is happening now, call 999. If it is a worry rather than an emergency, ACT Early on 0800 011 3764 is answered by specially trained officers, 24 hours a day.

You won’t have to do this alone

No carer is expected to assess a young person for radicalisation, or to decide whether something crosses a line. If a child coming to you has already been identified as at risk, your supervising social worker will tell you what the risks are and what is in place before he arrives. If the worry starts with you, in your kitchen, on an ordinary Tuesday, you ring us and we take it from there. That is what the out-of-hours line is for.

Our carers are paid a single weekly fee of £479.50 for a child under 11 and £507.50 for a young person aged 11 or over, per child while they are with you, with an enhanced fee of roughly £100 to £200 a week more where needs are higher. Ofsted inspected us from 21 to 25 July 2025 and rated us Outstanding in all three judgements. We are a small agency, which means the person you call already knows the child you are calling about.

Frequently asked questions

Will a Prevent referral give the child a criminal record?

No. The Home Office’s own 2026 factsheet states that “a Prevent referral does not lead to a criminal record”. Where support is offered it comes through a panel called Channel, which is voluntary and consent based, and for a child under eighteen that consent comes via a parent or guardian. In the year to March 2025, 79% of referrals about children were closed without progressing through Prevent at all.

What if I am wrong and it was only teenage opinions?

Then you were wrong, and that is a perfectly acceptable outcome. The system assumes as much: 71% of child referrals in the latest year had no clear ideology attached, and the great majority went no further. Deciding is not your job. The police ACT Early line puts it better than we could: you will not be wasting their time. What you will be judged on, by us, is whether you told us.

Do I have to monitor everything a young person does online?

You cannot, and trying will cost you more than it earns. Filtering at the broadband level and parental controls on devices and consoles are worth setting up. But every filter can be got round from a friend’s house, so treat them as a way of buying time rather than a solution. The thing that actually keeps a young person safe is being able to tell you what he saw without the roof coming off.

Where can I read more without involving anyone yet?

Educate Against Hate is the Government’s own site for parents and carers, with a guide to protecting a child from extremism and a myth-buster on Prevent. The NSPCC helpline on 0808 800 5000 is there for any adult worried about a child, and Childline on 0800 1111 is there for the young person themselves, at any hour.