When, earlier this month, a 16-year-old boy became Britain’s youngest person to be convicted of terrorism offences, the British press responded with a mixture of disgust and incredulity, inquiring how someone so young could have become so fanatical. By all accounts, his career in violent extremism started at a remarkably early age: he joined a far-right internet forum when he was just 13. A year later, he had become a fully-fledged terrorist “mastermind” running a “Neo-Nazi cell” from his grandmother’s house in Cornwall. The teen, who can’t be named for legal reasons, had reportedly downloaded bomb-making manuals, spoke of his desire to launch a “white jihad” and had recruited a 17-year-old British neo-Nazi who was convicted of preparing acts of terrorism last November.
The case of Britain’s youngest ever terror offender is profoundly disturbing, reigniting serious concerns over young people and their vulnerabilities to radicalisation. But it also provides us with an opportunity to reflect on how we talk about terrorism, particularly in the highly politicised context of today’s post-Trump world.
In a saner time, I suspect we would hesitate to call a 16-year-old who has not actually committed any acts of political violence a terrorist at all. The boy in question was convicted under the “encouragement” and “possession” instruments in British terrorism legislation (two and ten counts respectively).As serious as this is, it isn’t terrorism as we conventionally understand it. It isn’t, for example, the same as carrying out a suicide bombing at a pop concert, or beheading a school teacher.
But even if one accepts that possessing bomb-making manuals and sharing violently hateful messages on WhatsApp is terrorism, one would surely hesitate to call a disturbed and misguided 16-year-old who didn’t realise he had recruited an undercover police officer a “terrorist mastermind”. My colleague Keith Hayward, a professor of criminology at the University of Copenhagen in Denmark, has a word for this species of rhetorical slippage: adultification – the application of adult categories to those who are not yet adults. (Interestingly, the term is commonly used by sociologists to describe the racial bias against black schoolgirls in America, where they are unfairly viewed as more mature and “less innocent” than their white counterparts.)
The sensationalisation of terrorism is, of course, nothing new. But the coverage of Britain’s youngest “terror teen” intimates at a decisive shift in reportorial protocols around terrorism. This shift doesn’t reflect any real changes in the behaviour and threat level of terrorists, but is instead a direct consequence of the ever-tightening choke-hold of progressive taboos around race and Islam in contemporary western societies.
These taboos demand that we talk about terrorism in two distinct ways: on the one hand, we catastrophise its far-right variant, ramping up the agency and vileness of its perpetrators; while on the other, we infantilise its jihadi incarnation, playing down the agency of its instigators and forbidding any discussion of the religious motivations behind their violence.
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