Who Will Be a Violent White Supremacist? Part 3: Alternatives

[Today’s hint: Universal education for development and critical thinking are better ideas than Countering Violent Extremism (CVE) programs.]

Chad Brown* with youth at the Owyhee River in southeast Oregon. This file is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license. Author:Bureau of Land Management Oregon and Washington from Portland, America

by Alice LoCicero

If communities want to help youth to evolve into responsible, self-sufficient, and non-violent adults, they have a variety of scientifically supported programs to draw from. These do not have to be fancy, expensive programs. Big Brother/Big Sister programs have been shown to be effective.

Indeed, numerous programs and approaches oriented toward youth development and critical thinking are well-supported ways to assist youth in the transition to responsible adulthood. But: they must be available universally, not targeted to some community chosen on demographic, cultural, or religious grounds. 

Perhaps most important, the application of these scientifically supported types of programs must be education-based, not enforcement-based.

Law enforcement at all levels has potential to help communities (although the record of law enforcement in relation to communities of color is abysmal).  Unfortunately, even the best law enforcement professionals have only a few options at their disposal—all of them involving accusation, criminalization, and punishment, and thus all of them are useless for the purposes of promoting the developent of socially-responsible adults. 

Students must have the opportunity to think a wide variety of thoughts—none can be criminalized—while coming to their own commitment to a point of view. Criticism of the status quo—long encouraged in adolescents–must not be criminalized or reported to the police. Rather, kids who make intelligent critiques of the status quo must be helped to find active, non-violent ways to effectively create change. 

We cannot predict who will become a violent white supremacist, but we can, and should, help all kids to transition successfully to becoming thoughtful, responsible, effective, and non-violent adults. 

Alice LoCicero, Ph.D., is past president of the Society for the Study of Peace, Conflict and Violence, Division 48 of the APA. In Print: .Creating Young Martyrs: Conditions That Make Dying in a Terrorist Attack Seem Like a Good Idea (Contemporary Psychology (Hardcover)) Online: Personal Website

*Chad Brown explains, ‘I came from a broken home…I ended up going down a bad path, I got involved with gangs.’ He credits a police officer from the Big Brothers and Big Sisters Program with putting him on the right path to college and service in the military. After his service concluded and his education was complete..the symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) began to manifest themselves. Then, Brown said, a friend took him fishing. He was hooked [and]…got the idea to start a non-profit. Soul River Inc. was born—an organization that seeks to employ U.S. veterans as mentors to inner city youth and to connect them both with the outdoors.” Story & Photos by Larry Moore, BLM. From Wikimedia Commons.


Who Will Be a Violent White Supremacist? Part 2: Programs that are bound to fail

Global Information Society Watch 2014 – Communications surveillance in the digital age. This file is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license. Author: Association for Progressive Communications (APC

by Alice LoCicero

Why do so many resources go into counter-terrorism programs that are bound to fail? Here it’s important to distinguish between research programs and community programs that are implemented to identify potential homegrown terrorists. While I think it’s unlikely, for many reasons, that researchers will be able to identify future terrorists anytime soon, well-intentioned people can reasonably disagree on that point. Research done ethically and openly (without deceit) may be justifiably funded.

But when it comes to implementing programs, such as the DHS sponsored Countering Violent Extremism (CVE) programs funded throughout the US and overseas, they are not only based on deceit and junk science, they are also apt to be harmful in several ways:

  • They increase bias.
  • They cause disruption and harm in communities.
  • They blatantly encourage providers such as teachers, doctors, and mental health professionals to violate their professional ethics by spying on their students, patients, and/or clients. 
  • They target specific communities based on demographic factors. 
  • They deceive the participants and the public.
  • They criminalize normal adolescent development.
  • They criminalize thought.
  • They encourage a colonialist attitude, assuming that communities cannot help themselves, but need mainstream professionals and authorities to design ways to assist them.

After reflecting on the deadly events in Charlottesville, Christchurch, El Paso, Pittsburgh, and other places, many Americans are starting to wonder why the government is spending so much of its resources on spying on Muslim communities. They wonder if it would be better to apply these funds to counter the rise of alt-right extremists. The answer is a loud, “No” for all the reasons above. 

The CVE type programs are in violation of science, human rights, understanding of adolescent development, and the right to explore thoughts and conversation without being criminalized. 

Who Will Be a Violent White Supremacist? Part 1: We Cannot Predict.

Global Information Society Watch 2014 – Communications surveillance in the digital age. This file is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license. Author: Association for Progressive Communications (APC)

by Alice LoCicero

It may come as unexpected bad news to many readers, but even “the experts” who propose what seem like logical programs to predict who will engage in violence against civilians for a political cause cannot do that. The idea has its appeal–predict who will become violent and intervene to prevent it before they get too close to acting. But, in fact, no one can predict, on an individual level, who will become violent in the future.

That is not to say that we don’t know anything—we know, for example, that men are more likely to engage in physical violence than women. But nothing we know can be relied upon to predict whether a specific individual—male or female⁠—will act violently in the future. 

There are multiple articles advocating programs (almost all of which reflect implicit or explicit bias against Muslim youth) intended to identify youth who are apt to become terrorists. Appropriately, these articles generally include a disclaimer saying there’s no consistent pattern to help us actually predict who might become a terrorist. That is, no one knows what the path to terrorism might look like; it’s impossible to predict, for any individuals, whether they will engage in violence against civilians for political purposes. 

Telling it like it is, here’s a quote from a 2017 article in the American Psychologist, by terrorism researcher John Horgan: “Though terrorist profiles exist in a broad sense, no meaningful (i.e., having predictive validity) psychological profile has been found either within or across groups.”

Given the lack of a solid scientific foundation for predicting the development of terrorists, many scientific and professional articles on the “terrorist threat” suggest that more research is needed–a reasonable suggestion. However, terrifyingly, others recommend programs and interventions based on conjectures, hypotheses, and theories about 1) who in the community might be helpful in predicting potential terrorists, and 2) how we might get them to inform the authorities of their suspicions about their friends, neighbors, and/or family members.

Just think about this: Here we have “professionals” making the outrageous assertion that, since neither researchers nor clinicians know who will become violent, we should get members of the community to inform on other members of the community, and assume that they’re correct.* 

Ask yourself: What are the implications of getting family, friends, and community members to inform police if they think someone may be on the path to committing terrorist acts? Some authors even suggest that teachers and/or care providers should report if they have some reason to think someone is at risk for developing into a terrorist. Some even have lists of risk factors. But the lists do not stand up to scientific inquiry.

It’s a House of Cards, and an expensive one at that. 

*Readers might wonder about the “duty to warn”—i.e., clinicians’ legal duty to inform potential victims and law enforcement if a patient threatens imminent harm to an identifiable person or persons. The differences here are: duty to warn involves 1) Imminent harm and 2) patient report. That is, if a patient–or anyone– tells a clinician that they’re about to do harm, the obligation is to believe them.  But the programs proposed for predicting future terrorists are not oriented to self-reported imminent actions, but to scrutinizing kids to guess which ones are likely to become terrorists in the future.  

Reprinted, lightly edited, from an article published Aug 30, 2019, on the Psychology Today website.

Alice LoCicero, Ph.D., is past president of the Society for the Study of Peace, Conflict and Violence, Division 48 of the APA.

  In Print: Creating Young Martyrs: Conditions That Make Dying in a Terrorist Attack Seem Like a Good Idea (Contemporary Psychology (Hardcover)) Online: Personal Website

Exposé! Exposé! Exposé! Speaking truth (bitingly) to power

by Kathie MM

Just about everybody loves a good movie–a movie that makes them laugh or cry or feel inspired or want to become engaged. This week, Engaging Peace will feature three short (about 5-6 minutes!) films that “tell it like it is” quietly, movingly, engagingly.

These three films, starting with “Block this caller!” (we’ve all wanted to do that now and then, right?) were created by award-winning filmmaker, director, actor Jonny Lewis to to convey his message regarding “the horror and stupidity of war.” Jonny has won 7 awards as a filmmaker for his antiwar comedy shorts, which were screened at the 2018 Veterans for Peace national convention. He was recently honored as a role model for peace by the US Peace Memorial Foundation, which publishes the U.S. Peace Registry.

Thanks and a tip of the hat to Michael D. Knox and Alice LoCicero for introducing me to Jonny Lewis’s work.



Note from Kathie MM: Pegean says, “I’m with those guys. They got it right: Just say No to the war mongers, and we’ll all sleep better.”

And another request from KMM: Please send comments on the videos, and tell us, What will help you sleep better?