Start The Conversation Episode 7 Transcript

John [00:00:05] In some of the most detailed studies of school shooters in the United States. There is evidence of behavioural leakage, in some cases even up to 90 or greater percent of cases. So fear was the reason why people were reluctant to report to authorities. But we need to figure out ways to educate without alarming or scaring. If you see something you need to act on as you don't keep it to yourself.

Simon intro [00:00:32] The violent extremism landscape is fluid and complex and it can be difficult to navigate. This podcast series has been developed as a means of providing listeners with some thought provoking topics within this context personal insights and journeys, as well as helpful information that could assist someone who is vulnerable to being involved in violent extremism. The Engagement and Support Unit services focus on early intervention, awareness and resilience against violent extremism. They consult with and support the local community with this information to help mitigate the drivers of violent extremism and raise awareness of the complex factors and vulnerabilities that contribute to these ideologies. Before we begin, we would like to acknowledge the traditional custodians of the lands and airways on which we are meeting and broadcasting today as we share our learning. We also pay respects to elders past and present. It is their knowledge and experiences that hold the key to the success of our future generations and promote our connection to country and community. Please note that views expressed are not necessarily representative of the New South Wales Government. Episodes may contain depictions of violence or sensitive topics that some people may find distressing. For further information, please view our episode notes.

Heather [00:01:53] Hello, I'm Heather Jackson, Director of the New South Wales Countering Violent Extremism Engagement Support Unit.

Rebecca [00:01:59] And I'm Rebecca Shaw, Communications and Community Engagement Manager. And this is Start the Conversation. Today we will be chatting with Dr. John Hogan. John is a distinguished university professor of psychology at Georgia State University, where he directs the Violent Extremism Research Group. His research examines terrorist behaviour and is one of the world's leading experts on terrorist psychology. His work is widely published in his most recent book, Terrorists Minds The Psychology of Violent Extremism from Al Qaeda to the Far Right, is published by Columbia University Press. Recently, ESU and Home Affairs are lucky enough to have John as keynote speaker for our CVE in Practice Conference in Sydney. Here he reflected on recent progress across the CVE landscape before identifying and exploring new challenges and new perspectives facing scientists and practitioners alike. Of particular interest to us today and an area that John is currently focusing his research on is school shootings and the critical disconnect that happens where offenders leak their intent but no one reports to an adult or authority. We'd like to delve a little further into this and what we can do in the intervention space to ensure that the warning signs are not ignored. So thank you so much for joining us today from the other side of the world, John, incredible that April this year was your first visit to our shores. We hope to see you back here again soon. And to give our listeners some context can you tell us a little bit about the evolution of countering violent extremism or how we got to the focus being on the intervention?

John [00:03:37] Sure. And thanks so much for having me. I had a wonderful visit to Australia and it was just so great to be able to hang out with so many practitioners. And this is a sort of a roundabout answer to your question. I think for a long, long, long time, people a small group of academics have been studying terrorism. I started studying it when I was 18, 19. And so this would have towards the late stages of my undergraduate degree, getting what you do need to be in the mid 1990s that are maybe six people in my country studying it at the time. And just to see the evolution of that subject between then and now is incredible. It's now a proper serious subject that's both taught in universities and taken by students to PhD level. And we've seen just so much really terrific research develop over the past 20 years that we now have a very rich body of knowledge where the CVE part of it came. It's actually a far more recent development. So, you know, on the one hand we had all of this academic research and knowledge, but it was sort of sitting there. I mean, academics, I mean, it's what we do. We just we generate knowledge and we generate more knowledge, which is on top of that. But because of my background in applied psychology, I've always learned that there's no point to doing research unless you are trying to fundamentally make the world a better place unless you're giving research away. And one of the most important turning points in my development as an academic in my career was just being in the same room with practitioners and in my case with counterterrorism practitioners in Ireland, in the UK and more recently of course in Australia, because that's where I was fortunate to be able to interact with people who have the unenviable job of actually preventing terrorism or preventing violent extremism or school shooting or whatever it is. That is not a job, quite frankly, that I would ever want to have. But being around those practitioners makes me a better researcher because it gets me to think about what I can bring to the table as far as prioritising some of the things that I do. One of the great, great things about being an academic is that we can study whatever we want to study, and that's both a blessing and a curse, right? Because I'm one of those nerds that finds all of this stuff interesting, but a practitioner doesn't have that luxury. They don't have the luxury of sitting and thinking and reading. They have to respond to what's going on. They have to somehow anticipate the threat that might be coming around the corner. Well, listening to practitioners and learning from practitioners about the kinds of realities that they face, that can help me as an academic think, okay, what can I do to better help that person in what they do, it's a sort of a two way street because I think we can really benefit from learning more from what each other does.

Heather [00:06:42] I absolutely agree, John. And I know talking with you and talking with other academics at the conference and in out of other sessions as a practitioner, we've found that to bring great comfort to our work in terms of are we doing this right? Are we on the ball of, say, emerging risks and feeding that into that relationship? And having read your book and it is a great help to practitioners because it does sort of give you that opportunity to sit there and process as the steps through violent extremism and then counter terrorism. And it's an easy book to read. So thank you for that, because you're right, we don't have a lot of time. But it was interesting in the conference, you talked about the golden age of research and terrorism. And I found that a really interesting term of phrase. Can you talk a little bit about that, what that means.

John [00:07:29] Back in the day, pre 911 era. So you're talking, you know, to 1999, 2000, early 2001. You know, there were only really a handful of academics who were doing this kind of research as their full time endeavour. And I can't tell you how many mentors of mine said, you know, you're wasting your time with this stuff. You need to go off and become a proper psychologist because this stuff isn't going anywhere. Again, just sort of speaking to how, you know, events and how the world has changed has given rise to this now being a flourishing area for research. There has been so much growth. You know, when I started off in this field, there were only two dedicated journals that focussed on terrorism research. Now, by my count, there is at least 11 So these are periodicals that, you know, they showcase primarily terrorism research. We have courses of study at universities. We have such investment at the graduate level now, people doing masters degrees and PhDs on us. We have practitioners going back to university to get a solid scientific grounding in how science can inform the practice of counter terrorism and policing. So there's never really been a better time to study terrorism because we have this flourishing area where, you know, it really was a barren landscape not too long ago. So I feel that it's a golden age, and that's not a term that I came up with. My colleague in the UK, Andrew Silk, came up with this term and he actually a question mark after it saying are we there? I think we absolutely are. But, you know, I think we also need to be careful because we may be at a golden age in terms of research. But again, sort of speaking to that academic practitioner intervention engagement, the research on its own is no good. We have to figure out a better way of transforming or translating that research into what practitioners actually do. So if we want to sort of, let's say, extend the analogy of, you know, the golden age or the golden era, I think we need to get from the golden age to the age of enlightenment, which is basically my term for the age of intervention. Let's figure out a way to better take the best research that's out there. Let's get that research into the hands of practitioners so that they can be better informed about the evidence that can guide what they do and how they do it. Because I think if we can do that, if there can be an evidential base to how counterterrorism is done, then we're really on proper ground here. There are some minor course corrections we need to put in place for us to make that happen, but I think that's well within our reach.

Heather [00:10:08] And that was going to be my follow up question, John, because when I talk to academics and I read some of their papers and I sort of say to them, What do you need from us? They say, I need access. And, you know, from a practitioner's point of view, and I understand that because, you know, there's certain papers that people have read and some people have scoffed that this academic has never talked to a terrorist in their life. You know, and it's all sort of very sort of in a perfect world, you would do this. But they're not dealing with the different dynamics that you talk about. How do we do that in a trusting environment, I think is the real sort of push pull factor. How do you sort of hand over your information and data that's so sensitive and so small in a trusting environment?

John [00:10:49] It's a great question, and I think that probably raises a broader issue of, you know, sharing information is wonderful. And I also think that's a very high bar to reach. So we sort of step back for a second and think, okay, well, what's the first and most important step? Because we're often talking about academics who forget about not talking to a terrorist. We often have academics who have never talked to a counter terrorism practitioner before. Yeah, I remember when I was starting out in this area, I had, you know, rightly or wrongly, but I probably had a very incomplete view of what counter terrorism practitioners actually do. And I surely would have thought that they have accessed certain things that I don't have access to. But over the years I've realised that I don't necessarily want, nor do I necessarily need access to that kind of data. You know, I think there's often a presumption there that practitioners have a better quality of data than academics do. That sometimes is the case. It's often the case at all. And it's that particularly people who work in the intelligence communities collect that data using different kinds of tools, different kinds of methods, very different sorts of circumstances. And it's that process which needs to be kept sensitive, needs to be subject to very, very stringent oversight. So I think some. Simply learning from each other about the rules of the game, if you like. And I think, you know, for so long, the reason that academics and practitioners never really were in the same room together had to do with issues of control and politics and things like that. I think we're well past that now. I think the first step is really just learning about what we respectively bring to the table. So academics were very good at writing papers and we love to write books and we love to write 10,000 words on something, you know, where where you might want a page. But the things that academics bring to the table as far as the study of terrorism are concerned, has to do with things like evidence and reliance on certain methods. You know, we collect our data in certain ways. We are gauges. Collection is falsifiable. So everything we do is subject to very, very, very rigorous methodology and action and so forth. I think realising what each other brings to the table and to these discussions is the first step to figuring out what we need from each other. We often just start from the wrong position that if only practitioners would open up their vaults, that would somehow answer their the Holy Grail questions that we have. And that's just, you know, for the most part, it's not the case. Yeah.

Rebecca [00:13:24] John, I might bring it back to your keynote at the conference this year, which is kind of our topic for today, the subject of school shootings, which is obviously a pretty grim one. But you did mention a lot of stats that kind of floored us in the room. And so can you share with our listeners what the key findings were from your 2011 study looking at I think it was 119 lone active plots from open source data.

John [00:13:49] Of course. So back around 2009 or 10, I was at Penn State University. I was working with my then postdoc, al Gill and others, and we won a grant from the Department of Homeland Security in collaboration with the UK government. And we were tasked with basically taking a crack at the lone actor terrorist problem, what others call lone wolf terrorists. We sort of popularised the charm lone actor terrorist because lone wolf sort of, you know, makes them sound a little bit too cool for their own good. But we decided, let's look at lone actor terrorists and let's try to figure out what we can from open sources. So again, sort of going back to the previous question about, you know, academics needing access to certain data points, we found way more information than we thought we would find in the public domain. And after several months of a lot of digging and checking and double checking and triple checking, we built up a very, very big database of these 119 lone actors. We didn't expect to necessarily find some sort of behavioural or psychological profile that united them all. Shocker. Nor did we. But what we did find was far more interesting when we shifted our focus from who they were, who these lone actors were on to, what their behaviour looked like, you know we were on to something much, much more valuable by looking at their behaviour before, during and after their attacks or attempted attacks, we found that certain behavioural patterns emerged. Don't want to be here all day talking about what all the findings were. But the most striking finding we found was that approximately two thirds of our sample it was nearly 70% exhibited evidence of what we call behavioural leakage. That was they expressed not just their grievance, but they actually expressed their intention to a sort of a trusted bystander that was a friend, a family member, a co-worker, a peer. And for reasons that to this day we still don't fully understand why why would people hellbent on committing a violent extremist attack. Why would they actually share their intent with someone? We do know that they do share this intent. So we were really intrigued by that. And then to back to your point about the more recent findings on school shooters, what we found in two thirds of a sample of 119 lone actors has since been replicated in several other samples, including school shooters across the board. So in some of the most detailed studies of school shooters in the United States, there is evidence of behavioural leakage, in some cases even up to 90 or greater percent of cases.

Heather [00:16:37] It's a slide that's really stuck with me and it's something that you've just touched on, is that this data has leaked, the perpetrator has indicated intent. And when we're looking at school shooters with a friend, another child friend, etc., and no one told an adult. And I mean, we work with young people. We work with vulnerable young people that have similar thoughts or grievances. And it's just something that strikes fear into me. And I'm sure it does with the community that someone held this information until after the event. Do you have any sort of research or reasons into why?

John [00:17:16] The short answer is yes. We looked into this and a follow on study after the lone actor study concluded, and we found that the main reason why young people were reluctant to report, but actually thought that it had to do with hatred or dislike of the authorities, especially the police. And it turns out there wasn't anything like that at all. Fear. Fear was the reason why people were reluctant to report to authorities. We were able to further tease that apart. Some of it was about, you know, being afraid of being wrong, afraid that maybe my friend was joking and maybe this might get them into trouble. Maybe it'll get you into trouble. Maybe it will make me look like a snitch. Maybe it will bring the authorities down on you, etc., etc.. All of us need to do a far better job of not just sort of illustrating these dynamics and not just in known some of these case studies because God knows we've seen enough of those over here in the United States where there has been leakage in the run up to school shootings and so many high profile school shootings here in this country. And people haven't reported and there have been cases where these sort of the recipients of this information will go back to the source, to go back to the person and say, hey, what are you talking about? Are you really going to do this? Are you joking? But they will typically not report to authorities.

Rebecca [00:18:36] And just to follow on from that, John, I think on a similar slide, you said that 100% of the school shooters exhibited concerning behaviour prior to the attack. Can you tease that out a little bit for us? Like what does concerning behaviour look like?

John [00:18:50] Concerning behaviour might look like, Hey, Bec in ten days from now I'm going to go to the school and I'm going to do something. You probably shouldn't go to school that day. It might be something like I turn 18 tomorrow, I'm going to buy an AR 15 and then everyone is going to know who I am. It might look like in 30 days from now I'm going to be famous. Those are verbatim quotes from some of the mass shooters that we've studied. And, you know, and I've seen text message exchanges. Sometimes the friends will come back and say, hey, what are you talking about? Are you really going to go are you going to go shoot up a school? And the answer could be no. So I'm talking in this case specifically about Uvalde, a shooter in Texas from two years ago where he was in touch with at least I think it was around 12 or 13 friends, none of whom reported this to the to the authorities.

Rebecca [00:19:44] This is something that comes up in a lot of our work as well. It's sort of thrown around a lot in the media, this sort of concept of salad bar or sort of overlapping mixed ideology. When we talk about young people and their grievances, did you discover that there were mainly personal grievances or a broader ideology? And what does this mean for people listening in and does the category even matter when it comes to these attacks, when you consider the interventions?

John [00:20:11] It's a frustratingly varied answer, I'm afraid. I wish I could give you a sort of a simple, it unfortunately doesn't look like that. So there's a few things going on here. School shootings and many mass shootings, I would say, tend to be born out of individual grievances or personal grievances. I suppose when we contrast that with violent extremism or terrorism, where there is a sort of a an ideological dimension to it, that's sort of the defining feature of it. There tends to be an aspiration to a bigger, broader social or political change. So there may well be individual grievances, but they're framed in terms of wanting to effect a bigger, broader picture that's out there. One of the ways in which mass shooters try to make sense of their actions both to themselves as well as to others, is by leaving a statement or a manifesto. Not everybody does that. We've seen this very dramatically here recently with the attempted assassination of Donald Trump. There doesn't seem to be any effort or interest on the part of your friend or in explaining his motivation to the rest of us. In some of those same manifestos. And this applies to ideologically motivated shooters and non ideologically motivated shooters. Increasingly, we see a pattern that has been hard to make sense of. In the past, where we might have, let's say, characterised an attacker as left wing or right wing or religious or something else. These days, we're more likely to see a smattering of different ideologies. So it's a little bit of left wing liberalism. It's a little bit of right wing conservatism, it's a little bit of religious stuff thrown in. It's a little bit of single issue stuff thrown in. It's a smattering of different things. The challenge for us as academics and as practitioners is, well, how do we make sense of that? Is it that we need to sift through it to try to find evidence of, let's say, maybe there's one underlying ideology that we just haven't found yet. Or maybe there's just some overall thread that sort of, you know, pulls it all together. Some would say there's an ideology to it. I might say, well, maybe the common thread here is the fact that this is a vulnerable person who, for a wide variety of reasons, is spending 12 hours a day online and they're just putting down all kinds of stuff from 4chan or 8chan or something else. And it's all going into this gobbledegook personal journal or a diary. We're trying to make sense of it from a very, very different perspective. So I think we need to be careful about placing too much emphasis on on trying to fit these attackers into sort of, you know, one ideological bucket or another. There might be something else going on here that isn't really necessarily about ideology at all.

Heather [00:23:01] Yeah. It's a natural response for people to ask, why? Why did they do this? What was their purpose?

John [00:23:07] I get it. Yeah, we are we are hardwired to answer those questions. And it is frustrating when we don't have an answer. It sort of fits into that.

Rebecca [00:23:16] And just touching back. You mentioned manifestos, John. And I think they'll be a lot of people out there that don't actually know what a manifesto is. And I guess also, how do they relate to interventions when we're talking about committing acts of violence? What's the relationship?

John [00:23:33] Sure. Manifesto is probably a grandiose term for what we're talking about here. But some mass shooters and certainly some lone actor terrorists will leave behind a statement of sorts. It could be a video statement. It could be an online diary, a journal. Sometimes it's a written article or even even in a book, believe it or not. But what it is, is a document that rationalises and justifies their actions both to themselves and to us as the audience left to pick up the pieces and make sense of what they've done. The challenge for try to make sense of these documents is to figure out what are they genuine? Is this something that the person really did believe in, or are they just trying to adopt a perspective? We're still in the very early stages in terms of trying to make sense of these documents, but we know that they are increasingly popular. So it is common for mass shooters to leave behind some kind of explanation for why they did what they did. Like I said, those can range from anything from I've seen one shooter in Texas, in El Paso, Texas, who was motivated by the great replacement theory. He left a four page document. I've seen Elliot Rodger, who was sort of the patron saint of violent Incels from from many years ago now. He left a almost a 200 page document. So these things widely vary in terms of size and scope and ambition and all the rest of it. And what we typically find there was a remarkable study done a couple of years ago now where a few researchers looked at the relationship between posting manifestos online and the subsequent execution of an attack. So the logic was, well maybe if we can figure out how, where and when these manifestos are posted online, we can, you know, engage in some sort of early intervention to step in and prevent these attacks. There's an average of about an hour and a half before something is posted online and when an attack happens. So it leaves it pretty unlikely that that, for example, I think a point that I made at the conference was if we are going to try to rely on social media companies to be our first line of defence here, we're absolutely wasting our time.

Heather [00:25:48] And I think that's a really important point, John. And when we talk about data leakage, I know the first time that whole concept was after a school shooting and I'm sorry, I can't place which one it was. There's been too many unfortunately. But they were talking about what the person was posting on Instagram and online. And then there was that huge reaction as there always is when it comes to social media about, well, what is social media doing about this? What can we do to prevent that? But that sort of statistic makes it, as you say, almost impossible to sort of counteract.

John [00:26:22] It does. And, you know, and I go back to the point I sort of a little bit flippantly made earlier about, you know, not ever envying the position that counter terrorism practitioners are in here, because part of my language is so much of what's called shit posting online, where young people will just sort of they'll joke and they'll use humour and they'll fake outrage at something. And so there's so much joking that goes on that it can be very, very hard to to disentangle the signal from the noise and to really fully determine what's a viable threat. Does the person have the opportunity? Do they have the means? Do they have access to weaponry for, for example, that would make an attack a likely as opposed to just, you know, a sort of a flight of fancy?

Heather [00:27:08] I think we're all from Australia. We all watch in horror and I think probably a little bit more desensitised now when we saw Columbine shooting and we saw not only the horrific actions on the CCTV and then we've seen other horrific incidents predominantly happening in America, I have to say. And we're just so grateful that it hasn't yet happened in Australia. Why do you think it's predominantly America? Are they more angry? Do they have a broader sense of grievances? Or is it, as you sort of illuminated to, more access to guns? And it's that simple.

John [00:27:47] Widespread and easy access to high powered weaponry. So it's not just about access to guns. It's easy access to the most devastating weaponry known to humanity. I mean, that that's what is available here. I mean, it is it is so easy to buy guns. I live in the state of Georgia where we don't even have waiting periods. So if I want to buy an AR 15 tomorrow morning, I can start I mean, anywhere from about $200 up and I can walk out within about 20 minutes. That's how long it takes me. I'm a gun owner and I have guns. And that's typically how long it takes to to buy a gun. It's not that anger is more prevalent here. It's not that there are more grievances. No, there's there's no evidence for that whatsoever. All other factors controlled. And this is well-established by by criminologists in this country. Guns, widespread easy access to firearms is the factor that makes the difference.

Rebecca [00:28:45] Sounds like they need to be made more expensive.

John [00:28:47] Well, you know.

Heather [00:28:48] I just find it fascinating that that's the only differentiating factor is the access.

John [00:28:55] I mean, guns are part of the culture here. And, you know, in that or, you know, access and and the right to bear arms is enshrined in the US Constitution, which I you know, it's hard to keep keep telling people from from other countries especially. But we have a fetishisation of weaponry and in particular, you know, a very disturbing trend I see among school shooters and especially among juvenile mass shooters is how they do research on other school shooters and other mass shooters. And they want to emulate others. They look at how other mass shooters have behaved. They look at their weaponry. They look at the choices that have gone into the preparation and the execution of prior attacks. So emulation on the one hand, but also distinction. And we often see this in the writings of juvenile mass shooters. They'll talk about wanting to copy somebody else, but also wanting to do something a little bit different. And for some, that's about what some people call a gamification. So sometimes it's about getting the higher score, killing even more people. For some, it's about doing something even more shocking the Uvalde shooter, for example, was very, very deliberate about wanting to kill school children as opposed to just killing people. There's sort of a subculture even within juvenile mass shooters. Is this sort of a world all unto its own and and the sort of the fetishising of guns and gun choices is all part of that.

Heather [00:30:20] And in your research of that, are you finding when you're talking about exactly that, the fetish, the wanting to be better than x person, is that playing out online in chat? Is that or is it sort of more internalised? Is it like, you know, we talk about Incels, where they're all online talking about these sort of different sort of aspects. Is that for school shooters? Is that happening amongst other like people and then encouraging each other?

John [00:30:48] It's a little bit of both, you know, and I will say a point that's often misunderstood about Incels. I mean, the overwhelming majority of incels, you know, sort of gross and inhuman. The dialogue is among Incels and Incel forums, and the vast majority of them will never engage in an act of real world violence. And some will talk about it. Some will signal their intent in advance. Others won't. Others will engage in subterfuge. They will lurk. And they might have slurs. You know, there might be some sort of partial engagement with a forum or with other users. For some attackers, there will be plenty of evidence of leakage, leakage. For others, there will be almost next to nothing. Right.

Heather [00:31:27] And so it's school shooters is there a little community online that sort of people seek out or that they really sort of just internalising it and plotting in their bedrooms?

John [00:31:37] I don't know that there's a sort of a community of school shooters out there, but there are forums dedicated to the glorification of prior school shooters, no question about that. I mean, the Columbine shooters to this day are hailed as heroes among several school shooters. Yeah, you often see this sort of deification of prior figures. And and we see that just in the school shooter realm, but also in in violent extremism. So, you know the name Brenton Tarrant will obviously be  familiar to you to you both, he as a figure, is still rarefied among many right wing extremist juveniles here in the United States who talk about wanting to commemorate his actions by doing something equally, if not more, shocking here in the United States. So so, yeah, there is this glorification of past figures that that is a fairly common process.

Heather [00:32:30] And global, it seems.

John [00:32:32] It is, yeah.

Heather [00:32:32] Which brings us to turning the corner. I mean, what we've talked about is rather frightening and macabre but it needs to be discussed because we are seeing more young people engaging in grievance based activities or wanting to engage in grievance based activities. And I think we need to turn the corner of how can we help and how can we look at these factors and who is the best people, do you think, to see these indicators and to understand, you know  between normal teenage depression and moodiness, etc., And what are some of the more indicators that stand out a bit more in terms of some abnormal outlooks?

John [00:33:10] Gosh, a lot to unpack there. So so if I if I leave something out, jump in and tell me. So I think the answer to the question, you know, who who is best positioned to spot these changes? The answer is pretty equivocal their peers, I mean, peers of these people. They are best positioned to spot changes in baseline behaviour. We used to think that it was, you know, parents, caregivers, guardians, teachers, etc. They are positions, yes, but they are not best positioned to spot these changes. So we certainly need to do a better job of educating young people about, you know, the difference between, you know, fooling around versus potentially developing dangerous behaviours. Now what that might look like is probably going to differ slightly from jurisdiction to jurisdiction. So for example, here in the United States, there's an awful lot you can do. And because of our freedom of speech and because of how that's enshrined in the Constitution, also, there's an awful lot you can say without necessarily being seen to cross a line and raising alarms about wanting to do something violent. So. So here we draw a line between, you know, saying something off verses, you know, is the person making preparations to to commit a violent act. Are there behavioural indicators that they are preparing to do something violence as opposed to just talking about it and even talking about it with their friends. But if you want to sort of think about broad general principles here, we clearly need to do a better job of educating parents, teachers, peers about, well, when we talk about radicalisation, what are we actually talking about here? And radicalisation too, to find extremist, what are the kinds of behavioural changes we're talking about? Changes in mood, changes in behaviour, changes in language, changes in everyday appearance in some cases. Again, you know, I'm not trying to make this too complicated, but some of those changes might vary from ideology to ideology. You know, you might say better late than never, right? But we are we are very late in our willingness to have those conversations, but we clearly need to have them. There's no one person or group or agency that's going to solve this problem. I mean, this is clearly a case of, you know, where we do this better when we do it together. Yes. But we need to figure out ways to educate without alarming or scaring. You know, god knows teachers have enough to be concerned about without us saying, hey, by the way, here's another problem you have to think about. But this is one of the projects we're engaged in right now. So my school psychology colleagues, which is we know that school settings are increasingly interacting with mass shooters and violent extremists. Well, how do we how do we tackle that. Even in a country like the United States, where we see way too many of these incidents, I mean, they are still relatively rare, thank goodness. How do we begin that process? How do we better educate parents, teachers, peers to these issues? And the point that that's sort of near and dear to my heart is, well, it's one thing to educate people about these things, but how do we then say, if you see something you need to act on as you don't keep it to yourself. We also need to do a better job of telling people what their reactions to some of these cases actually are. You know, friends and colleagues in law enforcement and elsewhere saying, well, you know, but we're restricted by privacy. I understand that. With a little bit of creativity, you know, guess what? We can actually anonymize a case. We can talk about these things in the abstract. We can figure out ways to teach case studies of what happened in Uvalde or what happened in and now in several cases in Australia. This is not rocket science. We should be able to figure out ways of talking about these cases, highlighting the fact that, look, 13 of this person's peers knew about this, none of them came to the authorities. And, you know, and at least one of them said a year later, if I had known then what I know now, I know I should have gone to the authorities. I should have said I shouldn't have kept it to myself. Those are the kinds of stories we need to be telling, and those are ones to be, you know, collaborating with with our media colleagues to tell we need to tell these stories.

Rebecca [00:37:35] I know you sort of answered my next question, which was going to be what your what your recommendations or a possible solution could be. But I know that's a really hard one. And the answer, as always, is, you know, education and awareness. I would like to just quickly go back to who is best placed to notice early signs of individuals considering acts of violence. And that's obviously the peers, even though they may not be best placed. But why are they so reluctant to reach out? And I know you said fear in a previous response to a question, but is it just fear? Is it is it as simple as that or is there more to it? It's more complex.

John [00:38:09] Well, the short answer is we don't know. I mean, we have a few studies that point to fear being the main reason that comes out in interviews with  peers. But like I said, that fear is sort of cuts across a variety of issues. So it's fear of getting it wrong fear of getting my friend into trouble because I might have gotten it wrong. Kids will say things like, well, you know, maybe they're just screwing around here. Maybe they're just joking. Maybe they're just, you know, they're they're they're high or they're buzzed or whatever, and they're just sort of, you know, talking nonsense. Well, what if I call the FBI or what if I call the cops and they come in here and you know what's going to happen? So sometimes it's just dismissed as, you know, loose talk or idle talk or somebody messing around. So there clearly is a barrier to reporting and fear of getting it wrong. Fear of the consequences. Fear of the consequences for me. Am I going to be revealed as the source? Am I going to be am I going to get my friend into trouble? But fear is the the underlying motivation that we are hearing about the reluctance to report. The other issue here as well, of course, is that not everyone necessarily knows where to go to report. And that's a that's a that's a big issue as well. You know, we have you know, here we have our emergency number is 911 I mean, is that who you call when when you see something like this? But the point is to tell someone, to tell someone who is trusted and that trusted person could be a teacher. It could be a parent, It could be a police officer. We can we can't afford to have these kinds of discussions in silos. It's not about teachers talking to teachers or at least talking to other police. We have to have these conversations somehow together so that individual communities have that trusted network where individuals can reach out and say, hey, I'm not entirely sure what I have here, but I, I heard something and I don't want to take any chances. I need to talk to somebody about it. Is this real? Do you think there might be something going on here who can step in and intervene and have a conversation just so we can all sleep easy tonight? Those are the critical things that need to happen because we've also seen so many cases where teachers, for example, did see troubling behaviour. Those same teachers reported it to their principal, but the principal decided, nope, this is nothing. We don't need to worry about this. The principal didn't go anywhere with it And then, you know, a horrific event happened. And so it wasn't that it wasn't reported. It's just that the, that ultimate gatekeeper, if you like, did nothing about it.

Heather [00:40:38] And I think that's a criticism everywhere. I mean, we've seen it when there's been reviews in the UK about siloing information. You know, one area knew something and and the other area didn't or someone escalated it, but people wanted to manage it in-house. And as you say, John, sharing that risk, sharing that issue that we know works because we know.

John [00:41:02] That that's I put on my researcher hat here for a second, Heather. So I mean, that's one of those big gaps in our knowledge to go back to sort of, you know, one really valuable way in which academics and practitioners could work together among a million different things would be to figure out, well, when things went wrong and how, why and where did they go wrong. It's not about blaming people. It's not about saying you didn't do your job. But we need to be able to figure out where the cracks are in the system so that we can plug them, because that's we can wax lyrical all day long about the need to report and to somehow circumvent individual fear that people might be feeling. So, you know, okay, well, if they want to pick up the phone to be given a text based solution or something like that, we can talk about that stuff all day long. But unless we document the failures and talk about them and share more about them, you know, and we can anonymize them, we're just going to be going around in circles.

Heather [00:42:02] I completely agree. And it's one thing I consistently say is unfortunately we learn more from our values than we do from our successes, because it exposes the cracks that need to be filled because no one wants this to happen again. So when we're talking about community engagement and community reporting and talking to someone, you know, John, you and I have talked about our Step Together helpline, which is whilst it's a it's a government sort of helpline, it's very much sits outside law enforcement. I agree with you, John, to go from seeing something and then ringing emergency services is such a leap. And it feels sort of rather obscure because, you know, you sort of use emergency services when there's something imminent happening for help. And it's just sort of talking about you have the Parents for Peace Helpline in the States, which I just thought was so great because, you know, it's something that from a Step together helpline, we haven't sort of really found anything similar globally. But so it's the nation's first and only free confidential intervention helpline for addressing extreme beliefs and behaviours. And I was just noticing there was a really powerful picture on the website of a former KKK member hugging the Parents for Peace, executive director and helpline founder. So is it a service that's having an impact and what factors do you think contribute to the success of realising their mission statement, which is to break the cycle of extremism by building resilience, which is something we've both got in common?

John [00:43:29] Yeah. So so Parents for Peace is one of several organisations in the US that's engaged in, in, in not just sort of primary prevention but also tertiary prevention. So it's a, it's, it's an organisation where it is seen as a very valuable trusted organisation because it has, it has that grassroots history, it has, it uses it, it engages people who have themselves been involved in violent extremism. They're able to walk the walk and talk the talk and they, they are able to, you know, empathise with people who are at risk of or who are trying to get out of violent extremism. This is very, very hard work. It's intensive work. One of many reasons why parents for peace is so effective at what they do is because they are not a government organisation. I've also seen I mean, I just I've just come back from an extraordinary trip to Germany where I've seen disengagement and de-radicalization and rehabilitation efforts there that are run from a very top down perspective by the German government. And, you know, and one of the things we talked about last week was, was sort of comparing different types of interventions in different countries. It's very hard to do that because the way things work in the US is very, very different to how they might work in Germany. So, you know, non-governmental organisations like Parents for Peace have been incredibly successful here. Parents for Peace is a very small organisation run by just a handful of individuals. But Germany and Australia are very, very different countries, so we all have to figure out what works best for our individual systems and what will be most effective.

Heather [00:45:11] One of the issues and constant struggles that we have, and I use struggles poorly, but it is engaging the community. It's engaging them in this discussion. You know, we're very, very grateful that violent extremist events are very small in number, but have a big collateral impact. But the issue this there's a lot of not in my backyard sort of approach as well. It's like I'm not sure why you're here to talk to me about this. This doesn't happen. And where we know it's it's an issue that's happening across Australia in regional and remote and metropolitan areas. How did you find people to engage and get the community to engage with you one on your Parents for Praise project?

John [00:45:55] I think community engagement is critical. The language of CVE has changed here in the United States for for for a bunch of reasons. And now, you know, people you'll hear practitioners talk about TVTP, you know, sort of targeted violence and terrorism prevention. One of the reasons for that is that's, if you like CVE 1.0 was seen as little more than profiling Muslim communities in the wake of 9/11. And so that gave rise to justifiably gave rise to immense distrust between communities across the United States and the US government, where there was a, you know, a very clumsy effort to counter violent extremism by essentially saying, hey, you know, these people are coming from your community, you figure it out and that. So that was, you know, never going to work. And one of the keys to effective community engagement is, quite frankly, going into these communities and not talking to them, listening to them, listening to what kinds of problems they have, listening to some of the concerns they have about not just violent extremism, but other things as well that's already gave gives rise to doing these things properly means you can you have an opportunity to educate these same communities about the dangers of violent extremism, about the ways in which their children are being targeted, groomed, radicalised online in ways that they might not even be aware of. And this is particularly important where government actors will go into communities where where these cases have actually taken place. So sometimes people will say, well, not in my backyard, it's not happening. They will genuinely believe that. And other times it's pure defensiveness. But this is why it's so important to tell stories of where, how and why these things have actually happened. And it's a clichéd thing to talk about, you know, education, education, education. But there's a million different ways in which we can sort of tell these stories. And we need to get far better at.

Rebecca [00:47:57] Normalising the conversation around violent extremism. I mean, we've done a great job in Australia of normalising the mental health conversations around mental health and making that like a normal conversation to have with people. But it's not the same with violent extremism, is it Heather.

Heather [00:48:12] No, but it is about starting that conversation and having that conversation. But I think to your point, John, I think it's what we need to be doing more, though, is listening and hearing about what the community is happening in their local community and not telling them what should and shouldn't be happening. And I think that's something that we're all trying to adjust to. How do we get this messaging out?

John [00:48:33] Not to sugarcoat it, because, you know, it's easy for for me as an academic to say, well, yeah, you should be doing this, but it's very labour intensive work. And that is and that's hard. And, and it's, you know, I know. And it will spread widely limited resources you already have even thinner, you know, we know the old expression about, you know, an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure, building trust in these communities is essential if you want people from those same communities to come to you if in the wake of, you know, god forbid, an actual a mass attack or a violent extremist attack, and because that's where that's where and how the trust is measured by someone being willing to pick up the phone and say, okay, you know, we need to call this helpline, we need to report this some, you know, and it might be that something is imminent or it might be that where people are specially reluctant to report is when something is in the very, very early stages where, you know, well, maybe this person is just messing around, maybe it's not really serious. Well, it's never too early to intervene.

Heather [00:49:32] I mean, we really are about that early diversion, early prevention, and not only for the community, but for the young person or the person involved in it. You know, these people that are getting involved in violent extremism or even have these singular grievances are very unhappy, very unhealthy, unhappy individuals. And we don't want that for that person or our community.

John [00:49:52] And because they are unhealthy, unhappy, at risk for a wide variety of reasons, there are multiple things that they are at risk of getting into. So it's not just, you know, I mean, I think people think terrorism or violence. I mean, that stuff, fortunately, is still is statistically very unlikely. But it is just as likely that that young person might end up in a gang or engaging in so-called ordinary crime or trafficked as a victim of the sex trade or, you know, god knows what. So, yeah. So there are all kinds of reasons as to why early intervention and off ramping is such a vital tool.

Simon intro [00:50:37] You have been listening to Start the Conversation, a podcast series produced by the New South Wales Countering Violent Extremism, Engagement and Support Unit. For more information please see the episode notes or visit www.steptogether.nsw.gov.au.