Childhood radicalisation and the Law in the UK: assessing a decade of family court involvement

This article reflects on a decade of family court involvement in response to the issue of childhood radicalisation, focusing on the UK. After excavating and outlining this new family law-focused landscape of counter-terrorism, the article highlights and discusses several important themes, issues and questions that have emerged from this legal development, focusing on some of its more problematic implications from the perspective of human rights, children’s rights and the principle of open justice. The article also contends that the fact that we have not, as of yet, seen any family justice responses to the far-right racist riots that took hold of English cities and towns in the summer of 2024, despite the clear involvement of children and parents, underscores the racialised dimensions to the family court involvement in the realm of counter-terrorism. Drawing and building on critiques of the securitisation of welfare, the article ends by maintaining that the British state has essentially relied on and even weaponised children’s welfare (or the “best interests of the child” principle, as it is known in international and domestic law) to facilitate the expansion of its counter-terrorism regime into the family home.