Children downloading terrorism content online face Asbo-style orders

Children caught downloading terrorism content online face Asbo-style orders to force them to undergo psychiatric treatment.

The youngsters would be required by the new orders to seek help or face jail under the proposals drawn up by Jonathan Hall, the independent adviser on terrorism legislation.

They would be targeted at children involved in lower-level offences such as downloading or possessing terror-related material and who may have mental health problems that could be better treated without going through the criminal justice system.

The new measures come amid a 67 per cent rise in the number of children arrested for terrorist offences in the past year.

Children aged 17 or under accounted for one in five (19 per cent) of the 200 arrests in the year to March 2024, up from 14 per cent in the previous year and 2.4 per cent a decade ago.

The rise has been fuelled by growing internet use and an increase in terrorist propaganda available online, with children as young as 13 being arrested.

Matt Jukes, the head of counter-terrorism policing, revealed at the weekend that children as young as under 10 were being referred to his officers because of concerns by teachers, youth workers, parents or carers about their online activities.

In an interview with The Telegraph, Mr Hall said that civil orders could provide a route to faster action to divert children away from terrorism.

Instead of putting them through the criminal justice system, which could take months, they would be required to get help including mental health and psychological support.

The new measures would be targeted at those who counter-terrorism police believe pose little threat of staging an attack but who may have broken the law by downloading terrorist material online.

They are less likely to have any strong commitment to an ideological cause but have mental health or other vulnerabilities that make them more susceptible to falling for terrorist propaganda.

Previous research by Mr Hall found a “staggeringly high” number of young autistic people were referred to the Government’s anti-radicalisation Prevent programme. It was often combined with an unstable family background and additional cognitive difficulty.

He said they were previously unlikely to be involved with any terrorist activity but were now vulnerable to such influences because of their access to the internet, for five or six hours a day, with extremist content driven to them by social media platform algorithms.

“The good news is that in my experience over the last five years, police have realised that risk management can only be done with a wider range of partners. There is a good understanding that they cannot arrest their way out of this,” said Mr Hall.

“Some of the people they are arresting are, on examination, not really the sort of people that the criminal justice system or counter-policing networks are capable of dealing with. They are better with health, social services or family interventions.”

‘We need to find alternative solutions’

Mr Hall said the civil orders would not be a way to enforce the Prevent deradicalisation but would be designed for those liable to be prosecuted under the Terrorism Act 2006 for possessing terrorist material such as instructional manuals. Any breach of the order would result in a criminal prosecution.

“We need to find alternative solutions. There should be orders to divert children away from the criminal justice system but which has teeth. It can require them to do things with dramatic consequences if they don’t,” he said.

“My concern is that we are still getting to grips with the online phenomenon. In my experience as reviewer, it’s completely changed the way in which the terrorist risk manifests itself and how we think about terrorism evidence when there are people following ideologies and views that can only be found online.”

The Online Safety Act requires social media companies to prevent and remove illegal terrorist content from their platforms but, said Mr Hall, it was often reactive after it had been posted and there was no perfect system for blocking it entirely.

“Once you accept the internet will be a clear danger for the foreseeable future, then you have to ask: ‘What do we do about it given the latent level of risk?’” he said.