The Euro-Arab Foundation held this Friday the in-person phase of the second group of its Training Course on the Prevention of Radicalisation. The course is aimed at professionals of the Granada City Council who work with children and young people, as well as with groups vulnerable to the risk factors of radicalisation and violent extremism.
The initiative responds to growing processes of social polarisation and the rise of violent extremist groups of various kinds. In this context, the radicalisation of children and young people, whether around political ideologies, religious beliefs or other issues, is an increasingly worrying phenomenon. Although there is no single profile of radicalisation, childhood and adolescence are stages of particular vulnerability to recruitment or indoctrination. For that very reason, they are also the ideal time to build barriers that protect against these risks, and frontline professionals play a decisive role in this.
The course, developed from the ARMOUR project and based on empirical research and prevention practice, gives participants useful tools to incorporate prevention into their everyday work. The project has studied and developed seven sets of skills and competences capable of generating and consolidating protective factors and resilience. To work on them, workshops known as experiential labs have been designed, tested and validated, which professionals will be able to run with children and young people once they have completed the training.
A two-phase training programme
The 30-hour training is blended, with an in-person phase covering three blocks: radicalisation and violent extremism (concepts, risk and protective factors, explanatory models); the prevention of radicalisation (plans and strategies, multilevel and multi-agency approach, resilience-building programmes); and the identification of radicalisation processes (characteristics of radicalisation among minors, indicators and warning signs, with practical work on case studies).
This is followed by a second, online phase on the Euro-Arab Foundation’s virtual classroom, focused on intervention models with minors, psychosocial preventive approaches, the development of individual, psychosocial and institutional competences, resilience-building methodologies, and the design of workshops for working with children and young people.
A teaching team with experience in preventing radicalisation
The training was delivered by Javier Ruipérez Canales, Director of the Projects and Research Department at the Euro-Arab Foundation, where he is also Principal Investigator in the area of Prevention of Radicalisation and Violent Extremism. He is also Director of Strategic Communication of the European Commission’s EU Knowledge Hub on Prevention of Radicalisation.
He was joined by Daniel F. Pérez García, researcher and project coordinator at the Foundation. His work focuses on research and on coordinating teams of EU-funded projects in the field of preventing radicalisation and violent extremism. He is also a researcher and strategic communication expert at the EU Knowledge Hub on Prevention of Radicalisation.
The team is completed by Eva Jiménez González, PhD in Psychology and forensic psychologist, with extensive international experience in the field of radicalisation and terrorism. She is a European Union Team Leader and Senior Key Expert on Radicalisation and Terrorism for the European Commission, the Council of Europe and the United Nations.
