Caught in the Web: ‘Prevent’ databases and the policing of children

16th January 2025

On 16 January 2025, Rights & Security International releases Caught in the Web, an investigative report uncovering new information about how the UK government collects and shares vast amounts of personal data about children and others under Prevent. Prevent is a counter-terrorism strategy that forces teachers, NHS workers and others to report suspected extremism under vague criteria, and it mainly impacts children and young people.

In the report, we conclude that Prevent is a surveillance programme aimed at compiling large dossiers of information about children, and that this information is shared with a wide range of public and private bodies including immigration authorities, intelligence agencies and potentially foreign governments.

While the government has long maintained that Prevent referrals are only stored on policing databases temporarily, we find that in practice, the personal data from these referrals has a long life and could cause lasting harm. For example, a Prevent referral could cause someone to be unsuccessful in their application for British citizenship, lose their place at university, or lose their job.

The personal data from a Prevent referral includes a wide range of sensitive information. In many cases, it includes the persons race or ethnicity (using labels put on them by the referrer), their religion, their immigration status, and their actual or perceived political opinions. Especially for children, it could include sensitive information about their families. There is no guarantee that this information is accurate, and in fact there are few safeguards to stop inaccurate information about people from getting into the system and persisting there forever.

Prevent referrals impact thousands of people every year: there have been 58,127 referrals since 2015. Even potential referrals can result in police records.

Our key findings include:

• • Prevent is not a consensual process, despite frequent government claims to the contrary. In fact, the government has told us that most people referred to Prevent are never notified of that fact. The police even have specific processes in place for when they wish to avoid telling someone about a referral.

• • Data from Prevent always goes to the police, and we conclude that Prevent is a policing programme. It is not as the government has historically claimed about safeguarding.

• • While personal data from an initial referral including the referral of a child will go to the police for storage on dedicated Prevent databases, this data does not stay under lock and key. Instead, the data ends up in numerous other databases that the UK government uses for a wide range of purposes, including immigration.
  • Policing databases are automatically synchronised, meaning that once Prevent data is entered into one policing system, it easily spreads to others.Other government agencies, such as the UK Border Force, UK Visas and Immigration, and HMRC, have direct access to policing databases, or some other form of access to records stored on them.This mass data-gathering and sharing on children and others stems from three interrelated practices:
    • Police duplicate records across their databases, meaning that a case initially entered into a designated Prevent database ends up in other policing databases and can be used for other policing purposes.
    • We found written evidence that police have permission to try to undermine the status or credibility of someone referred to Prevent and limit their activity, regardless of whether they believe that the person may have broken the law an approach that treats children like criminal masterminds and raises concerns about potential undercover policing of both children and adults. The government has given the green light to this practice in spite of intense public controversy over unethical undercover policing in the UK.
    • Police have permission to use a full range of investigative powers against a person following a Prevent referral, such as gaining access to their mobile phone location records and phone data downloads, as well as collecting information about their online footprint.

• • We also reveal the haphazard and inconsistent storage of data related to protected characteristics such as race, religion, disability and sexual orientation that currently makes it impossible for the police or the Home Office to conduct any fact-based equality assessment. In other words, the governments data collection processes are so poor that it cannot know whether police and other Prevent practitioners are engaging in discrimination.

    This apparent failure to consider the equality impacts of Prevent has persisted despite long-held and often-expressed concerns among academics and human rights groups about potentially racist and Islamophobic patterns in referrals, as well as concerns more recently expressed by parents and others about the potential impact of Prevent on neurodiverse children.

Jacob Smith, who leads RSIs Freedom of Expression and Belief programme and authored the report, said:

This investigation confirms what communities and parents in Britain have long feared: Prevent is not a safeguarding programme, but rather is a way for the police to create secret dossiers of information about people particularly children.

The widespread data-sharing and hoarding we have uncovered violates the Human Rights Act, and the government is obligated to end this law-breaking.

The government must also stop saying that Prevent and Channel are consent-based: they are not.

These programmes have been misguided damaging from the start, and the government should scrap them altogether. The UK needs and deserves violence prevention programmes that are based on facts, not gut feelings, and designed to protect everyone.

Download the report below and download all annexes of the report here.

• Caught in the web