Security or safeguarding? Counter-terrorism professional and NGO actors’ accounts of repatriating British children associated with ISIS

Drawing from interviews conducted in 2022 with NGOs, thinktanks and counter-terrorism professionals, this article asks: how should British children presumed to be associated with ISIS or Daesh be treated by the UK government? Using a critical race lens, it explores the detrimental impact that predominant security agendas have had on traditional safeguarding and humanitarian spaces, what I term the ‘safeguarding/security bind’. Unprecedented use of citizenship deprivation powers has prolonged children’s detainment within unsafe camps. ‘ISIS-associated’ children experience a shift in treatment from victims of conflict within the Children and Armed Conflict (CAAC) agenda to security threats through CT responses, institutionalising Islamophobia. British children are subjected to a policy vacuum concerning repatriation, meaning their futures remain insecure amid ongoing instability in the region. The article develops analyses of spatio-temporal logics of (in)securitisation experienced by children at different stages: prior to leaving the UK to join ISIS-related territory, their detainment within northeast Syria camps, and repatriation decision-making concerning their possible return to the UK. It makes a normative argument that failure to repatriate does not make Britain safer but, rather, undermines legal process and violates human rights. I call for a reassessment of ethical values which centre children’s rights within CT/security actions/framings.