Public Safety Minister Ralph Goodale has been making the rounds to talk about an anti-radicalization program. This should be a no-brainer. Who really believes that building ever-larger police forces is the solution to home-grown terrorism? Surely, a better strategy is to prevent radicalization from happening in the first place.But if prevention is a seductively simple idea, it also tends to get bogged down in a tangle of causes and effects. An ounce of prevention may be worth a pound of cure, but only if it connects the right causes with the right effects. Goodale's biggest challenge may be getting the public to understand how that trick is done.When most people think about crime prevention the root cause metaphor comes to mind. To stop a thing from happening, goes the theory, you must cut it off at the root. That's how to really defeat crime, illness, terrorism, racism, poverty, and so on.The metaphor is appealing because it conveys the need to dig deep and find the real causes behind these issues, but it is also misleading. People regularly speak of finding “the” root cause, as though we were digging up a carrot or a turnip. In fact, root causes are more like the fibrous branches of a weed.These branches correspond to the underlying conditions that cause issues like radicalization or racism—what experts call the “risk factors.” While lots of progress has been made identifying the risk factors behind different issues, the public still seem confused about how root causes work.For example, a 2014 Red Cross investigation found that immigrant detainees are often mistreated in ways that may contribute to radicalization, such as being held in provincial jails or police facilities alongside suspected gang members and violent offenders.Goodale uses this example to explain how an anti-radicalization program might work. We could stop putting detainees in jails and create separate spaces for them, he muses. For their part, reporters and commentators seem to think he means that every time we improve a detainee centre we're a step closer to ending terrorism. This misses the main point about root causes.Risk factors are interdependent, not independent. Each one is part of a single system of causes that interact to produce an overall effect, such as radicalization. Risk factors are not meant to be treated in isolation any more than a dish can be prepared from a single ingredient in a recipe.Looking at causes this way makes a huge difference when designing a program. For instance, we see that differences between cities, such as their size or ethnic composition, can significantly affect how the risk factors interact. As a result, an anti-radicalization program for Montreal will be different from one for Halifax. In keeping with this, Goodale rightly insists that these programs must be developed and delivered at a local level, rather than from Ottawa.Further, as an anti-radicalization program progresses, it will change how the risk factors interact—sometimes in unexpected ways. For example, the individuals responsible for recruiting youth into radical movements may suddenly change their recruitment techniques to avoid the effects of the program.Finally, the most important factor in radicalization (or obesity, racism and so on) is human motivation. And to be frank, we really don't know much about how these risk factors combine to influence people's choices. But we know they do. There's much to learn here.Not so long ago, Stephen Harper ridiculed Justin Trudeau for “committing sociology” because he talked about finding the root causes of terrorism. Harper was right about one thing: sorting through how risk factors work is a complicated undertaking, but he was wrong to think that is a reason to give up on prevention. On the contrary, it's long overdue. Goodale should take the time he needs to get it right and really move the yardsticks here. A few key guidelines are already clear:
- An effective plan to prevent radicalization must examine and respond to the risk factors as a single system. Dealing with them in isolation achieves little.
- Good programs require continuous monitoring and analysis of how the risk factors are interacting and new patterns are forming.
- Adjusting to changes in these patterns calls for speed, flexibility and nimbleness on the part of program managers.
- A successful program requires a continuous flow of high quality data.
- The interpretation of the data requires a sophisticated understanding of the social, cultural, economic and environmental circumstances around the community and its issues.