Student Not Suspects

This Islamophobia Awareness Month (IAM) the NUS Black Students’ Campaign alongside the NUS Women’s Campaign, FOSIS, the Students Not Suspects network and the Educators Not Informants network are hosting the national Students Not Suspects tour on PREVENT, Islamophobia and the erosion of civil liberties.

The government’s PREVENT initiative to ‘counter extremism’ was first introduced in 2006, and has continued to attract widespread criticism across the education, civil and political sectors for its overwhelming focus on Muslims and for eroding civil liberties for all, being used a tool to silence dissent.

Based on discredited ‘science’ and models, and fuelled by Islamophobia, PREVENT has stoked paranoia around Muslims and Muslim students.
Meanwhile its elastic definition of ‘extremism’ has been used to delegitimise stances in opposition to the government’s domestic and foreign – with PREVENT targeting Anti-fracking, Anti-war, Pro-Palestine and Free Education activism.

In the last 11 years PREVENT has ballooned into a massive network of surveillance, bleeding into the policing and immigration system to monitor our communities and our campuses – turning students into suspects and educators into informants.

The 2015 Counter-terrorism & Security Act made PREVENT obligatory on public bodies including colleges and universities under the so-called ‘Prevent duty’, and has seen thousands of children being put through the ordeal of PREVENT referral and interrogation, an ‘army’ of educators being trained to spy on their students, and the space for dissent on campus being suffocated out.

Students have been at the forefront campaigning against PREVENT, and in an era of rising racism and xenophobia, and increasing government repression – the need to combat racist, anti-democratic measures like PREVENT is clearer than ever.
Come join us to learn about PREVENT and the Prevent duty, how they bolster other forms of state violence including policing and immigration measures – and how to organise on your local campuses and communities to end PREVENT!

For more information about the tour contact the NUS Black Students’ Campaign:
[email protected]
Facebook.com/nusbsc
@nusbsc