Islamophobia in the National Health Service: an ethnography of institutional racism in PREVENT's counter‐radicalisation policy

Abstract

In 2015, the UK government made its counter-radicalisation policy a statutory duty for all National Health Service (NHS) staff. Staff are now tasked to identify and report individuals they suspect may be vulnerable to radicalisation. Prevent training employs a combination of psychological and ideological frames to convey the meaning of radicalisation to healthcare staff, but studies have shown that the threat of terrorism is racialised as well. The guiding question of our ethnography is: how is counter-radicalisation training understood and practiced by healthcare professionals? A frame analysis draws upon 2 years of ethnographic fieldwork, which includes participant observation in Prevent training and NHS staff interviews. This article demonstrates how Prevent engages in performative colour-blindness - the active recognition and dismissal of the race frame which associates racialised Muslims with the threat of terrorism. It concludes with a discussion of institutional racism in the NHS - how racialised policies like Prevent impact the minutia of clinical interactions; how the pretence of a 'post-racial' society obscures institutional racism; how psychologisation is integral to the performance of colour-blindness; and why it is difficult to address the racism associated with colourblind policies which purport to address the threat of the Far-Right.