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Article

Abstract

Countering violent extremism (CVE) intervention programs are often designed as non-punitive approaches to reduce the likelihood of youth joining terrorist groups through offering social, family, mental health, and/or practical supports. Since public support is crucial for determining whether a CVE intervention program is implemented or successful, we conducted two online vignette-based experiments to examine how factors such as political orientation, the youth’s ethnicity, and the public’s perspective-taking with at-risk youth can alter their support. Across both studies (U.S. online sample N = 153, U.K. online sample N = 760), participants generally reported less support for a CVE intervention program aimed at at-risk youth than a similar gang intervention program, although in the U.K., conservatives supported both programs the same relatively lower amount (compared to liberals). This effect was partially explained by participants reporting less perspective-taking with an at-risk youth considering joining a terrorist group than considering joining a gang, which in turn led to lower public support of the program. This suggests that CVE intervention programs face barriers, even among the more liberal-leaning members of the public, and that helping people to take the perspective of at-risk youth may be one pathway for increasing public support.

Comments

Note: This is the preprint version. The final published version of the article can be found here: Lacasse, K. & Campbell-Obaid, M. (2022). Investigating factors that alter public support for countering violent extremism intervention programs for at-risk youth. Behavioral Sciences of Terrorism and Political Aggression. https://doi.org/10.1080/19434472.2022.2127834

Creative Commons License

Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License

Identifier

facultypublications-1943447220222127834

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