Legal Responses to Childhood Radicalisation: Reflecting on a Decade of Family Court Involvement

This Chapter looks back and reflects on a decade of family court involvement in response to the issue of childhood radicalisation. It argues that the counterterrorism legal landscape is now much more extensive and far-reaching due to the incorporation of the family justice system into its fold. After excavating and outlining the new legal landscape that has been established because of the involvement of the family justice system in counterterrorism, the Chapter then highlights and discusses several important themes, issues and questions that have emerged from this interaction, focusing on some of the more problematic implications of this incorporation, arguing that family court intervention is not just potentially dangerous from a rights and open-justice perspective, but also rather unnecessary. The Chapter then concludes by contending that the fact that we have not, as of yet, seen any family justice responses far-right extremism and terrorism, despite the clear involvement of children and parents in both, underscores the potentially discriminatory dimensions to the radicalisation cases in the family courts.