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Caroline Fourest is a French feminist writer, film director, journalist, radio presenter at France Culture, and co-founder and editor of the magazine ProChoix. She has been a columnist with Charlie Hebdo and Le Monde and has written several influential essays on the political and religious right in France and the US. She is the author of a biography of the far-right politician Marine Le Pen and of a number of books including In Praise of Blasphemy: Why Charlie Hebdo is Not ‘Islamophobic’, Brother Tariq: the\ud Doublespeak of Tariq Ramadan and most recently The Offended\ud Generation.

This paper seeks to critically explore the construction of the Prevent counter-terrorism initiative within Social Work in the UK, and to consider the implications this has for Social Work. We begin by discussing the conceptualisation of ‘radicalisation’ in the work of Arun Kundnani, one of the leading critics of Prevent, pointing to the limitations of this as a means of grasping the nature of Salafi-jihadi groupings. We then move to a discussion of the development of counter-terrorism policy in the UK, looking at the way the 2015 legislative guidance has re-situated radicalisation from a ‘security’ issue to a ‘safeguarding’ issue. We see this as significant for the way it has facilitated Social Work being directly drawn into the orbit of Prevent, with radicalisation being re-constructed as part of Social Work’s concern with the vulnerability of children and young people involved in wider forms of exploitation, including Child Sexual Exploitation. We consider the reception of this shift within Social Work as well as look at evidence into how this is working in practice. We then consider challenges to this ‘safeguarding’ paradigm, which argue that this has involved Social Work being drawn into the ideological monitoring of Muslim communities: a ‘surveillance’ paradigm. We conclude by arguing for a critical defence of a safeguarding approach based on the harms which fundamentalist violence clearly represents to children and young people.

Much of the literature on critical thinking focuses on the ways in which human beings develop the capacity, through complex cognitive processes and skills, to evaluate or make sense of information. While these insights are very important, a narrow focus on what might be termed the “science of learning” can negate the question of the end and purpose of critical thinking. In this chapter we seek to explore this question from the perspective of Critical Pedagogy, looking particularly at the concept of the Brazilian educationalist, Paulo Freire, considering the relevance of his ideas to Higher Education today.

Few today doubt that English Higher Education (HE), like the wider world in which it is located, is in crisis. This is, in part, an economic crisis, as the government response to the current recession seems to be that of introducing the kind of neoliberal ‘shock doctrine’ (Klein 2007) or ‘shock therapy’ (Harvey 2005) that previously resulted in swingeing cuts in public services in Southern nations. Our aim in producing this volume is that these contributions help develop a collective response to the seeming limits of these conditions. We view the strength of these contributions in part as providing palpable evidence of how we and our colleagues are acting with critical hope under current conditions so that we might encourage others to work with us to build, together, more progressive formal and informal education systems that address and seek to redress multiple injustices of the world today.

This chapter outlines Paulo Freire’s immense contribution to critical pedagogy for social work. The chapter begins with a brief review of Freire’s life and early work which shaped his understanding of the world and formed the basis of his pedagogical and practice philosophy. The account includes how his first-hand experience of the ravaging effects of poverty and social disadvantage had informed his work in education with marginalised groups and classes. The chapter focuses on Freire’s critique of the banking model of education and the philosophy of education that he propounded. Noting how the banking model serves to entrench unequal social relations and the subservience of oppressed peoples, Freire argued for the critical interrogation of traditional education and the radical rethinking of education toward an emancipatory, problem-solving approach that enables the poor and disadvantaged to reclaim their humanity and free themselves from the shackles of oppression and domination. His influence extends well beyond the traditional bounds of education and touches on various forms of social work across the globe. The chapter ends with a note on the applications of Freire’s critical pedagogy in social work

Few today doubt that English Higher Education (HE), like the wider world in which it is located, is in crisis. This is, in part, an economic crisis, as the government response to the current recession seems to be that of introducing the kind of neoliberal ‘shock doctrine’ (Klein 2007) or ‘shock therapy’ (Harvey 2005) that previously resulted in swingeing cuts in public services in Southern nations. Our aim in producing this volume is that these contributions help develop a collective response to the seeming limits of these conditions. We view the strength of these contributions in part as providing palpable evidence of how we and our colleagues are acting with critical hope under current conditions so that we might encourage others to work with us to build, together, more progressive formal and informal education systems that address and seek to redress multiple injustices of the world today.