According to the DOVE model, these protective resources should focus on three risk levels:
• Diminishing youth’s unaccountable times and unobserved spaces (the times when adolescents and young adults are not answerable to parents or other adults and are in spaces where they are out of the sight of adults).
• Diminishing the perceived social legitimacy of violent extremism (perceptions of the appropriateness and necessity of violent extremist ideology and actions).
• Diminishing contact with recruiters or associates (adolescents and young adults interacting directly with either recruiters or companions who facilitate their increased involvement in violent extremism).
The U.S. government, state and local law enforcement, and local communities have been trying to organize prevention activities to address these and other risks. In Pres. Barack Obama’s Sept. 24, 2014, address to the United Nations, he stated: “There is no military solution to the problem of misguided individuals seeking to join terrorist organizations.” He supported a strategy called countering violent extremism, or CVE. This strategy is concerned with preventing violent ideologies from taking hold of people in the first place, and intervening and dissuading people from crossing the line toward actual violence.
The DOVE model supports the basic claim of CVE that government can’t do it alone, and it is going to require changes in communities. Meaningful preventive responses to radicalization must originate from within communities. One promising example is the Safe Spaces Initiative, a community-led preventive intervention developed by the Muslim Public Affairs Council. Safe Spaces leaves it up to communities to intervene with young people who might be getting involved with radicalization but have not yet entered into criminal space. It calls for communities to form Critical Inquiry Teams that include the participation of mental health professionals.
Role of mental health professionals
Incorporating mental health into CVE holds significant potential for enhancing both intervention and prevention capabilities with adolescents and young adults. In the United Kingdom, a national strategy called Prevent includes Channel, a multiagency program aimed at providing support to people at risk of being drawn into radicalization. One key component of Channel is for mental health professionals to be involved in assessment and support, but in order for mental health, law enforcement, and communities to be able to work together on radicalization and recruitment in the United States, we are going to have to invest in developing, implementing, and evaluating new collaborative models.