 All right, good morning everybody and welcome to USIP. We have a bit of a full house so I think there's still some people trickling in but we wanted to make sure that we got started. So thank you for joining us this morning. Today we have five incredibly accomplished panelists who are going to give us a wide range of perspectives as they walk us through some of the complexities involved with disengaging from violent extremism and reintegrating into local communities. For those of you I don't know personally, my name is Leanne Erdberg and I direct USIP's program on violent extremism. I have the pleasure of overseeing our latest efforts to focus on violent extremist disengagement and reconciliation. Here at USIP we also house the Resolve Network which stands for researching solutions to violent extremism which helps build the case for more rigorous policy informed research in order to improve efforts to address violent extremism. And at USIP as a peace building institute we see that peace building has a lot to offer violent extremism. Violent extremism is an expression of violent conflict and as we have seen around the world especially in the most fragile states it is only one of a host of violent outcomes that can result from a variety of different causes including group marginalization, trauma, social grievances and political grievances. Therefore we see that peace building tools and approaches can transform attitudes and relationships and structures that not only fuel grievances but also contribute to the dynamics that contribute to violent extremism. At USIP we are deeply committed to empowering people and empowering institutions to build peace. If you do this through events like this one thank you for joining us through published and empirical research and through equipping frontline actors with the best possible knowledge out there enabling them to impact their own communities. Disengagement from violent extremism is all about sustainability and disengagement programs that fail to conceptualize this phenomena as a product of a lived experience in a particular environment are going to be unsustainable. We have a long history of spearheading cutting edge research to champion evidence-based policy and effective and locally informed practice to build resilience to violent extremism and also sustainable peace. On this topic specifically USIP has been involved in the so-called foreign terrorist fighters for several years. In 2017 we published our first special report on the topic called the reintegration imperative and starting in 2018 we had the pleasure of partnering with the State Department and the Global Counterterrorism Forum to help develop internationally recognized good practices on addressing the challenge of returning families of foreign terrorist fighters which was adopted in 2018 on the margins of the UN General Assembly. Recently USIP has been engaging with five Central Asian countries on these issues especially as Kazakhstan has become a leader in the repatriation of its citizens who have traveled or lived or fought with ISIS. We've also hosted a number of well-received events which we hope this one contributes to that legacy including ones on the effects of trauma, the effects of stigma and bear and understanding specifically hearing from those who have disengaged from violent extremism. We also our most recent special report on the topic is called injecting humanity community focused responses for people exiting violent extremism. Our efforts have tried to keep up with this increasingly dynamic and complicated challenge that are facing governments and facing communities around the world. They're all seized with trying to figure out what to do when people who participated in violent extremism and the conflicts associated with them return home. As we saw in Norway yesterday this is a highly charged issue for governments and for citizens alike. With ISIS's territorial caliphate extinguished more than a hundred countries could face the task of not only having to reintegrate their citizens perhaps tens of thousands in all but also preparing their communities for a future with them living next door. The statistics remain staggering. Over 50,000 foreigners traveled from approximately 120 countries. Thousands of children have been born into the so-called caliphate and hundreds of thousands of Iraqis and Syrians are displaced. There are unknown numbers of fighters in prisons across Syrian Iraq and in dozens of other countries. And outside of Syria and Iraq there continue to be violent extremism related conflicts raging in the Sahel, in the Lake Ched Basin, in the Horn of Africa, in Afghanistan and elsewhere. Complicating this terrorism picture is the rise of white ring ethno-nationalist terrorism after seeing an increase of over 320 percent since 2014. Clearly we see a need to rethink strategies to prevent violent extremism and figure out how to successfully disengage people from violence. This is why starting this year USIP is embarking on a journey to unleash the role of peace building to help us do so. Violent extremism is a complex phenomena and the dynamics that contribute to it are manifold. But at the end of the day, it's social and any comprehensive approach to disengaging people from violent extremism must be equally social in nature. Conventional deradicalization programs focus on the rehabilitation of individuals. We see that peace building contribution to disengagement will engage more systemically with communities who are impacted by violent extremism and to foster the reconciliation and transform the dynamics between those disengaging and the communities themselves. Peace building sees the value of building relationships and social bonds and offers individuals a new identity that rejects violence and allows for a peaceful and prosperous future, one that is not solely defined by someone's past. As we work on this, I'm reminded often of the humanity of this. Even in the face of violence, over the weekend I was reading an article on the famous longitudinal Harvard study of adult development, which has provided a wealth of findings over the last 80 years. But one that struck me in conjunction with this event is that it found that embracing community helps us to live longer, be healthier, and be happier. This of course has obvious implications for our work on disengagement, but I also hope that it has implications for all of us here today. With that, I invite you to be part of our ongoing and continuing community on this topic. We hope you will join us on this journey and we look forward to sharing our findings with you as we progress throughout the rest of the year. With that, it is my pleasure to welcome you here to USIP and to hand it over to Chris Bosley, a senior program officer on my team here and our program on violent extremism who will lead us in this effort. Chris has been with USIP for nearly two years following over a decade of service in the intelligence community in the U.S. Navy. Chris is going to moderate today's discussion and introduce our very impressive speakers. Thank you and over to Chris. Thank you, Leanne. Thank you panelists for coming out. Thank you all of you for braving the cold and coming out and joining us here. So we're all here obviously to hear from our wonderful panelists, but first before I turn it over to them, I want to just take about five minutes, just kind of level set us all with some context and to frame the conversation a little bit. So over the past couple of years, we know that the world has really been seized with the challenge of returning foreign terrorist fighters. Leanne, you gave us some of the numbers we're talking about and some of them really are pretty staggering. Now I wanted to say at the top, I really hate the term foreign terrorist fighter. I feel like when it first became prominent in policy circles, it signaled a specific priority, a really counterterrorism priority. But today, I think after several years of watching this phenomenon, every single word in that phrase could be wrong or false in any given case. And it leads us nowhere when we're looking for solutions. More so, I think re-socialization is really key to disengagement and re-humanization is key for reconciliation. This requires not only working with the individuals to encourage help seeking and pro-social behavior on their part, but also working with communities in order to open spaces for sustained, positive, and inclusive interaction between those returning and community members and institutions. And stigma is a real barrier to this. It's a real barrier to open in those spaces. And so I'm really going to try to avoid using stigmatizing language like foreign terrorist fighter. Now, of course, justice is a really, really important facet of the challenge and by no means am I trying to minimize the importance of that. Let's not forget, ISIS is absolutely a genocidal organization. They deliberately targeted civilians. They've cleansed entire ethnicities. They enslave women. But prosecution is not always going to be possible and it's not always going to be appropriate. Children, for example, are victims. They were trafficked or born into conflict at no fault of their own. And many adults, particularly the women, are likely to be a really complex mixture of perpetrator and victim that justice systems are going to have a hard time grappling with. Moreover, evidence from a foreign battlefield is often difficult to collect in ways that uphold evidentiary standards. And so in addition to prosecution, many people are going to be reintegrating directly back into the communities. And so for those people and for those communities, there's an imperative to manage the risk and to invest in real disengagement programs that work. Now, I'm going to say something a little bit provocative here. We know how to disengage people from violent extremism. Many conventional de-radicalization, so-called de-radicalization programs, conveniently focused on an individual's ideology and their beliefs. But unfortunately, this kind of runs counter to much of the research that we have in several ways. One, it assumes that so-called radical beliefs precede violence, when in fact, such a causality is not so clear. We know that not all people with radical beliefs become terrorists, and we know that not all terrorists hold radical beliefs. So not only is it very hard to convince someone to change their entire worldview, but there's little evidence that changing that worldview would actually lead to disengagement in any meaningful or sustained way. Rather than ideology, then, it's important for us to look at behavioral approaches to disengagement. Two, conventional programs ignored decades of sociology, psychology, and criminology literature on how people voluntarily exit roles, including violent ones and ideological ones. Yet, because violent extremism is both ideological and violent, it's treated as exceptional. But there are threads that run through all of this research that among the most important facets of any disengagement program is forming social bonds and a sense of belonging outside of the violent extremist group. And then three, most people leave violent extremist groups not because of a sudden change of heart, but for more mundane reasons. Disillusionment with leadership, burnout, or just moving on. So the lack of a viable alternative group into which is to assimilate really prevents disengagement for those people. This is a two-way street. It's not only about re-humanizing society in the eyes of those who are disengaging. It's also about re-humanizing those who are disengaging in the eyes of society, which is why we're deliberately using the term reconciliation in our initiative on violent extremist disengagement and reconciliation. That's about enough for me. I'm going to introduce our panelists. Dr. Laura Smith is a senior lecturer in social psychology from the University of Bath. Her focus is on the psychology underlying social movements, collective active action, and socialization. Dr. Mary Beth Altier is a clinical associate professor at NYU. She studied extensively the reasons why people engage in political violence and has conducted government federal research on terrorist disengagement, re-engagement, and recidivism. Dr. Heidi Ellis is the director of the Refugee Trauma and Resilience Center at Boston Children's Hospital, over the course of a decade she's engaged the Somali refugee community here in the United States through community-based participatory research to understand trauma exposure, violence, and how the social contacts impact developmental trajectories. Dr. Ellis is also the co-developer of Trauma Systems Therapy, a treatment model for traumatized children that explicitly addresses the interaction of social environmental stressors with a child's capacity to regulate their emotions. Dr. Rebecca Wolfe, who we have joining us remotely, is a lecturer at the University of Chicago. Many of you may be familiar with Rebecca from her work with Mercy Corps. She has a background both in practice and in academia, researching and designing programs on political violence, conflict, and extremism worldwide. And then finally, Dr. Stephen Wein is a professor of psychiatry at the University of Illinois at Chicago. He has several decades conducting research with refugees and migrants in the United States and in post-conflict countries focused on mental health, health, and violence prevention. Recently, he's been heavily engaged in addressing Central Asian programs to rehabilitate and reintegrate people returning after having traveled to fight or live with ISIS. We're going to start with Dr. Laura Smith. Laura, violent extremism is the result of a complex interaction among cognitive, social, and structural dynamics. But this engagement needs to unwind that process while also addressing the experiences of a person during the period of radicalization. This requires understanding, of course, some of the dynamics that are involved with the violent radicalization process. And Laura will help us to understand that process a little bit. Thank you. And thank you for inviting me to speak today. So, yeah, I'm a social psychologist. So I specialize in the processes by which people become attached to particular groups and those processes that predict why group members decide to take violent versus nonviolent forms of action. So I'm going to talk about those processes today. I think I need to. So, first of all, some caveats. Today, I'm going to talk about the processes that are voluntary, so why people willingly join extremist groups. So I'm not talking about those people who have been coerced or joined against their will for socioeconomic reasons. I see extremism as a form of collective action and collective action is known in psychology as a group-based behavior. So people will engage in that behavior because they are a member of a group and that might be a psychological membership of a group rather than an official membership. So they can be psychologically attached to a group but not actually physically present with other group members. So if somebody engages in collective action that is a violent extremist action, we need to first ask why somebody is willing to join a violent extremist group. And the processes by which they become attached to that group. I'm going to start with an example. So you may be familiar with this example at the end of November 2019 as Mankhan was attending an event in London and he stabbed to death two people who were also attending that event. He was then pursued by members of the public out onto London Bridge. The members of the public took him down. He was then shot and killed by police. And it transpired that he was wearing a fake suicide vest. Now the reason I'm raising this example today is that he had apparently successfully completed two deradicalization programs. The first while he was in prison, he was in prison for terror-related defense. And then he also completed another deradicalization program after he left prison. And so in the media people asking questions like why was he still, where does he still go on to commit this terror, active terror, despite the fact that he'd been through these deradicalization programs. Why don't these programs work and why haven't they been properly assessed? Well, I'd like to put it to you that many policies on deradicalization focus entirely on the individual. So we know from research that there's a litany of reasons why a particular individual might be more open to radical ideologies. There's a whole list in the UK policy of risk factors or push factors that explain why somebody is open to violent extremism. So this might include perceptions of marginalization, social isolation, mental health problems, family breakdown. The list goes on and on. And most deradicalization programs try to address those individual level push factors to make an individual more resilient to violent extremism. However, if we are to understand engaging with violent extremist groups as a group process, then these programs need to address the group processes underlying attachment to those violent extremist groups and existing deradicalization programs, at least in the UK, don't address those group socialization processes. So these individual risk factors are important, but they're relatively distal to the motivation to engage in violent extremism. And the more proximal processes are the ones that connect those individuals to violent extremist groups. So if somebody wants to engage in collective action or violent extremist action, they do so willingly because they believe that there's something wrong with the world and they seek a social or political change. And so these individual level risk factors might make somebody more open to seeking other like-minded others, to seeking interactions with other people who share those views. And that is the start of the socialization processes that connects individuals to violent extremist groups. So the first stage of socialization occurs when somebody, with this perception that there is something wrong with the world that they want to fix, they want to change, that grievance reaches out subject to the necessary freedoms and opportunities, reaches out to like-minded others. And social interaction may involve face-to-face interaction with people who share their views or it might be online via social media. Or social interaction can be vicarious through finding websites, finding things that other people have written about their grievances. So they may be consuming communications written by others that align with their own views. Now that element of interaction is really, really important because we know that psychologically, once you interact with other people who share your views, it actually changes your psychology. So in particular, it's important that once you find like-minded others and once those people validate your grievances, once people agree with you on a particular issue, you can develop what we call a shared social identity. You become a group that shares a perception of what's wrong with the world and how to fix it. So then we see that the predictors of that person's behavior aren't necessarily individual level risk factors, but their identification, their affiliation with a group of others who share their views. So interactions can lead to the development of this group affiliation or sense of identification which is an emotional attachment to a group and internalization of that group into their sense of identity. And this means that the group becomes a self-defining part of who a person is. It's an authentic identity. So we need to recognize that violent extremist group membership is an authentic part of an individual that it's not pathological, but is actually self-defining. So then the question becomes why do groups decide that violent courses of action are the most appropriate in their perception? Well, we know that the way that people perceive their treatment by others is really important. So if groups talk about their grievances and talk about the fact that they've been treated as they perceive to be illegitimate by authorities or states, if they perceive that their sacred values or ideologies have been violated, like human rights have been violated, or if they perceive that there's no other action that's going to be politically efficacious, then violent action, violent norms, might be the ones that those group members decide upon. So it's that understanding of the societal context and people's perceptions of the societal context that's going to transform their individual level grievances through interactions with like-minded others into concrete norms for action. So we have to recognize that grievances can become collectivized through this process of engaging with like-minded others so that individuals no longer perceive their own, for example, experiences of discrimination as something that's happened to them personally, but that's happened to them systematically as group members. So with regards to attorneys, we need to understand how they perceive the context that they're returning to and whether they're going to experience the same kind of perceptions of the context like discrimination, like the violation of their values that radicalize them in the first place to join extremist groups. In some cases, things like discrimination or actions by other groups have actually got worse, have polarized over the last few years, so they may be returning to a more extreme version of the context that radicalized them in the first place. So adopting a socialization approach means recognizing that radicalized individuals may be physically isolated, but they're not psychologically isolated. And they share a psychological connection with others who share their understandings of their social world. So when people return, I advocate that we should acknowledge and recognize and respect people's social identities and group memberships as authentic rather than pathologizing them and treating them as some mental health problem that needs to be fixed. And that when they return, they should be able to engage with alternative voices of leadership within their own communities, so that is communicating with people who share their broad worldview but advocate different courses of nonviolent actions to address their grievances. And so the focus of contention in their communications and engagements in their community should be on the legitimacy and viability of nonviolent responses to grievance. Thank you. Thank you, Laura. I think it's really interesting to talk about and to think about violent radicalization as a collective acting process and I think to look at it as a question of socialization and structure as well really helps to highlight why peacebuilding, which focuses on structural and social issues, really has a lot to offer to this. Mary Beth, so if violent radicalization is an inherently social process, can you talk to us a little bit about what we know about the disengagement process? Yes, of course. Can I grab the clicker? All right. So thank you to Chris and Leanne and USIP for having me here today and thanks to you all for coming out. So as Chris mentioned, I'm going to be talking about the disengagement process and how that is inherently social and I echo everything that Laura said that our programs are really targeted towards the individual and that they do need to focus on reintegration into this broader context. All right. So I just wanted to start with a quotation. So this is a former nationalist terrorist that I interviewed and he said, when I was arrested, when the police were trying to interrogate me, they didn't realize that there was this Niagara Falls of Relief and my mind went into this cool zone of intense relief because as I was sitting there, my mind was thinking, my God, I've survived, I've been captured. I never expected to. People often don't realize that the terrorists they've captured may have been looking for a way out and this individual was deeply committed to the ideology for all the social reasons and grievances about the government, et cetera, that Laura mentioned, but he really was deeply disillusioned with his involvement in terrorism in violence and he wanted to give up that involvement in violence, but he just couldn't see a way out for himself. He didn't see a way of reintegrating into society and another thing that he mentioned to me was that if there had been some NGO he could have gone to and he said he would have served time, et cetera, that there was no problem, but he just didn't see a pathway out of the organization and he was in this group for three years just looking for a way out. So I think we need to also recognize that not everyone who is involved in terrorism, well, they may be some of them may be committed to the ideology. Many of them actually are trying to find a way out of involvement once they're there. All right, so what does it mean to disengage? I could talk about this for a long time, but I just want to point out here that it is a dynamic process. We shouldn't think about disengagement as a static event. It's not something that just happens at one point in time. If we look at literature on criminal assistance, this is best theorized as a dynamic ongoing process. In criminology, they look at decline in offending over time, for instance. All right, so what explains disengagement? So when I began studying this back in 2011, this is where the literature was at. It had basically, through interviews with small samples of terrorists, had identified different push-pull factors that explain people's reasons for disengaging. So these are different reasons why individuals said they disengage from terrorism. I think it's important to point out, I think most people in the audience would know, but just when we're talking about disengagement from terrorism, we're talking about giving up the behaviors or giving up those behavioral involvements in terrorism. When we speak of deradicalization, we're talking about giving up those beliefs that motivate terrorist behavior. So in terms of push factors, push factors are things about your involvement in terrorism that push you away, right? So things like a lot of things Chris had alluded to earlier. So disillusionment with the strategy or actions of the group, having trouble living underground, a clandestine lifestyle, burnout, often just not getting along with members. Disillusionment with your role. So you go to fight for ISIS and you want to be a jihadi on the front lines, but no, you have to peel potatoes and clean toilets, right? So that can make you deeply disillusioned. Pull factors on the other hand are things about your involve or things outside your involvement in terrorism that might lure you away. So the desire to marry the demands of having children, having positive interactions with moderates, amnesty, financial incentives. So this framework I found a little bit, you know, it's useful. It's a useful sort of heuristic, but I found it unsatisfying for a couple of reasons when I began studying this. One is that many individuals experience these push-pull factors and don't ever disengage. It also doesn't explain why some people experience these push-pull factors at one point in time and don't disengage and then later on in life maybe experience it again and do disengage. I also don't explain how they interact to affect disengagement decisions. So what I did is I turned to the broader literature that I thought could help inform our understanding of terrorist disengagement and as Chris mentioned, this isn't a new phenomenon. People leave all kinds of things. We quit our jobs, we leave our boyfriends, we leave our girlfriends. So it's not a completely new phenomenon. So I looked at the literature on criminal assistance on disaffiliation from new religious movements or cults, on voluntary role exit from sociology, so why people leave, for instance, the clergy on commitment from social psychology and then on workplace turnover. So why someone might quit working at USIP and go work, I don't know, for the Pentagon or something like that. So it's true, right? No one would ever quit working at USIP. Deeply satisfied. Okay. All right. So there were a lot of frameworks from these literatures that I found really useful, but there are just two that I want to highlight today. So the first is what's called Brussels Investment Model. So this is Carol Brussels Investment Model and there are social psychologists on the stage who are probably more well-versed in this than I. But she posits that one's commitment to a social role or to an organization is a function of three things. One is the satisfaction that they get from involvement and that satisfaction can come from different things, right? It might be financial gain, it might be the social bonds you get, it might be because you're deeply committed to the ideology and you love that you're, you know, engaging in violence on behalf of the ideology. But it's also a function of the investments that you make in the group, right? So I tell my students, like if you get a SWAT sticker tattooed on your face, that is a big sunk cost, right? That's a big investment you make in your involvement. And that affects your last thing which are the alternatives that you have outside the group, okay? And so someone's commitment at any point in time is a function of these things and these push-pull factors affect those different components. And just to highlight what we're talking about here today, alternatives are a very important part of that equation. So you can be deeply, deeply dissatisfied with your involvement. I've seen this time and time again in interviews with former extremists, but you just can't actually see a way out, right? You can't see those alternatives. They're just so low that you just remain in the group. The other framework that I found useful comes from industrial and organizational psychology and they posit three different types of commitment and I think this is useful when looking at individual terrors or thinking across groups how these different types of commitment might vary in terms of the membership of the terrorist group. So the first is effective commitment and that is an emotional attachment to your involvement. So you're there because you want to be there. You get warm fuzzy feelings or deeply satisfied. You're usually in if we're talking about the terrorism context you would probably be ideologically committed to the group. The second is continuous commitment and people with high continuous commitments have few alternatives and have high sunk costs, right? And so they're there for a different reason. They may be deeply dissatisfied but they just can't see a way out. So they have what we call high continuous commitment. And the third which I think is really important and speaks to some of the things Laura was mentioning is a normative commitment and that's why I put this framework on here. Normative commitment is that you are involved because you have a sense of duty. You feel you've been socialized in a way that you feel it is your duty to fight for this cause or to believe in this cause. And so when we think about reintegration and disengagement I think it's important to think about the communities that we're reintegrating individuals into and what the norms are and do people feel that they have a normative commitment and in some cases they may have very legitimate grievances that underlie their involvement. All right, so in terms of looking at why they leave and some empirical evidence I'm going to put a lot of data but I won't go through it I promise but just to show you that I did do diligence. So what we did is we looked at and this is research I did with Dr. Emma Leonard Boyle and Dr. John Horgan. So we looked at a sample of 185 engagement events and these were drawn from terrorist autobiographies. They cover over 70 terrorist groups and also as I mentioned a series of in-person interviews. And so one of the key findings we found is that these push factors as Chris mentioned are really, really important in driving disengagement decisions. Push factors much more commonly explain people's reasons to disengage than the pull factors. So not to say that the pull factors are important I know that's why we're here but and I'll get to that in a minute but in explaining why individuals actually leave a terrorist group most commonly it is these push factors. And the other interesting thing we found was that in only 16% of cases did the individual cite a loss of faith in the ideology as a reason for leaving. So most people disengage without ever actually de-radicalizing at the point of their exiting terrorism. In terms of the pull factors you can see here they occur less frequently but the interesting thing we found is that for the non ideologically committed they actually were cited as playing a role. So when we break our sample down and we look at individuals whose involvement wasn't motivated by audiological commitment what we found is that these pull factors were really important so having positive interactions with moderates having educational opportunities. So for individuals who maybe their involvement was motivated by social bonds or financial gain these pull factors really did matter for that small subset. Here are logistic regression so again we did our due diligence there. The other interesting thing with a paper coming out soon and this paper shows that the other thing that we found is that leaders and those in leadership roles and violent operational roles have a harder time leaving and the reason that we found when we broke the data down is because they do perceive fewer alternatives for them themselves in society. Okay so we will go back to Russ Bolt's equation it's really about a lack of alternatives because they do have higher some costs and fewer alternatives. So when we're looking at individual terrorists one of the things I think is important to note is that these individuals who are in these leadership or violent operational roles do you perceive that they will have a harder time reintegrating or that there's some alternative lifestyle for them. All right so I'm going to switch gears now and talk about why individuals go back so why they might once they're disengaged why they might reengage. There are a number of definitional measurement issues with measuring reengagement so you've probably all seen recidivism statistics from programs there are a number of issues with those one is that we don't have an adequate time horizon right so just because your de-radicalization program has a lower recidivism right now you know Uthman conference hasn't gone back to terrorism doesn't mean that tomorrow he won't attack London Bridge. So one of the ways that we circumvented this is we turn to these autobiographies because they do give us an individual's whole life course and they also give us what are called self-report data on reengagement so does the individual say that they went back to terrorism and these are this is really useful this is what criminologists say is sort of the gold standard is knowing if you have some self-report data on whether an individual went back it is important before I you know if I can go back or not but it is important to highlight that the individuals in our sample were not subject to the surveillance that we have in place today they weren't subject to very lengthy prison sentences so I'm going to go through these reengagement rates and they're much higher than what we see for current programs in place today and part of that is because we don't have the time horizon and part of it is because individuals are serving longer prison sentences and part of it is because they are subject to very strict surveillance measures but in cases where individuals voluntarily disengage from terrorism they just chose to walk away we have in our sample a 58 percent reengagement rate that is they went back to terrorism in cases where individuals came out of prison we have a 68 percent reengagement rate in cases where a group an individual's disengagement was part of the group voluntarily moving into politics or something like that we have about a 35 percent reengagement rate and then in the case of involuntary collective where a group basically is defeated so you can think about ISIS we have a 67 percent reengagement rate all right in terms of the risk factors and then I'll wrap up the risk factors what we did is we looked at risk factors again drawing on the criminology literature so I said you know let's start with what they look at when they look at criminal recidivism and in criminology in terms of looking at risk factors for reengagement or recidivism the most prominent is age right so we think that offending or reoffending declines with age others are in history of deviant family members or friends an individual social class of origin having antisocial attitudes or values and then also having antisocial associates okay so in the terrorism context this is remaining committed to the ideology or you know retaining ties with individuals involved in terrorism and then a really important risk factor for recidivism in the criminal context is pro-social bonds so if individuals the criminology literature shows quite clearly Samson and Loeb have a very nice review of this but it shows quite clearly that if individuals through marriage through employment through educational opportunities if they can establish pro what we call pro-social bonds with individuals who aren't engaging in criminal activity they are much less likely to return to crime and to reoffend so we tested all of these with our sample and the first thing we found is that the relationship with age holds so in our sample the likelihood of re-engagement in terrorism or recidivism being caught in a terrorist offense declines with age you can see it peaks about 28, 30 and then declines over time except there's one old guy there you can see the end who goes back and then with regard to the risk factors just to highlight that the two most common risk factors we found are the most important that had the largest effect on increasing the probability of recidivating were retaining ties to the ideology and retaining ties to individuals still involved in terrorism so what we found deradicalization wasn't important in causing disengagement we found it was a critical risk factor for re-engagement so if you retain those ties you are much much more likely to go back and if you retain your belief in the ideology we also found that those who came from a lower childhood socio-economic background were much more likely to return statistically significant effects there and I think that has to do with the lack of alternatives they don't necessarily have the same educational background the same networks and so they have a harder time reintegrating importantly we found that those pro-social bonds effects that are so strong in criminology don't actually increase the risk of re-engagement in the short term I'm not going to say why they matter so in the short term they don't actually increase the risk of re-engagement but I think they're actually fundamentally important so actually struggle when presenting this data because I think if we want to change going back to what Laura said if we want to change attitudes and we want to change connections in the long term they're fundamental right if you want to challenge people's ideas and beliefs right having a pro-social spouse or having you know and a job where you interact with pro-social people is really really critical to that process and I've seen time again with de-radicalization programs if you have a government telling you to give up your ideology right or you know some law enforcement professional right you're just going to dig in and so I do think that they're fundamentally important in the long term short term they're not going to reduce the risk if you have a radical person give them a job it doesn't mean tomorrow he's going to change right but down the line over time you know I think it's fundamental all right and so I just wanted to close with this quote and I think it really highlights that de-radicalization disengagement and de-radicalization are really long-term process and changing those ideas and beliefs really does require this you know focus on pro-social attitudes pro-social reintegration so this is a former Islamist extremist I interviewed over in in London and she says the process is now you've come out you're still carrying the narratives where do you get that tackled where do you find the alternative it's probably taking me 10 years and so she actually did enroll in employment courses she went online actually and read the Quran and challenged her own beliefs but it's taken her so you know so long to actually give up those beliefs and again I do believe that that's inherently social process so that's also thank you thanks Mary Beth really that's fascinating you know I was looking at some of the the dates on your citations and you had 1994 1998 1980 something I mean this is all research that we've had for decades and decades showing us that you know having a viable alternative social group or or having pros and cons is really really important and you know who are we to think that disengaging from bottom extremism is going to be that much different from disassociating from these other roles now of course there are a number of barriers that could prevent pro-social engagement with an alternative social group some of which are cognitive and individual nature including trauma so Heidi can you talk to us a little bit about trauma as a contributing dynamic to the violent radicalization and as a barrier to help seeking behavior or disengagement yeah and thank you Chris Leigh Ann for the opportunity to be here and thank you to all of you for sharing your time this morning and to my fellow panelists for I think providing some really thoughtful looks into how complicated this is from what we've already heard I think it's actually do I need to move through do I need to move through my whole thing? we'll get there there's a lot that's all more than I know how to talk about okay uh so from what we've already heard I think it's clear that people who spent time under ISIS in Iraq and Syria will need to overcome a number of challenges in the process of reintegration one of which is the horrific trauma that they are likely to have endured during their time there and for some of them also perhaps in their countries prior to departure when we talk about the trauma that kids living in ISIS-controlled territories endured we're talking about a multi-layered severe pervasive presence of trauma save the children conducted a study of kids who had lived in Al-Hul and had spent time in ISIS-controlled territories and here is some of what they found these kids were witnessed to daily acts of severe violence including killings they commonly saw dead bodies in the street there were bombs falling on their homes they experienced extreme deprivation the loss of loved ones sometimes this involved witnessing the death of their parents and really were part of a community that experienced a collective trauma which means that their caregivers the people who are most responsible for keeping them safe were also dealing with the fallout from their own trauma so unquestionably we need to grapple with this question what does this mean for successful reintegration and rehabilitation programming to answer this question I want to start with the basic neuroscience behind trauma then briefly present some of my own research on trauma and radicalization and then finally take a step back to think about how all of this relates to successful reintegration and rehabilitation programming while I'll be talking specifically about issues related to reintegration of children much of what I say will also be relevant for returning men or women as well okay so for the for the brain science our brains are exquisitely designed to promote survival in the face of threat that's why we're all still here the amygdala is the part of the brain that is responsible for helping us to respond to threat and it does so by activating our survival systems and that typically typically looks like fight flight or freezing so this is incredibly adaptive when we are faced with real danger but when a child lives an environment of chronic or severe threat the amygdala can become potentiated meaning that it begins to respond as if it is facing a true threat even in settings that are relatively safe what this means is that you can take a child out of an unsafe setting like alhol and reintegrate them to a much safer context but their brains may continue to respond to minor stressors in the environment as if their survival is at stake trauma can manifest in a wide range of ways impacting someone's emotions their behavior and how they even perceive and process themselves and the world around them over time you can get what are called developmental cascades if trauma is left untreated then disrupted functioning in any one area begins to affect the normal developmental trajectories in another area so you can end up with a cascade of disruptions across multiple domains so I'm going to walk you through one hypothetical cascade so you might start for instance with a traumatized child who experiences intense fear hypervigilance and nightmares that might look more like what we call PTSD but over time that means when they go to school they have trouble paying attention their learning becomes disrupted they start socially withdrawing from others around them once that takes root they experience loneliness lagging social skills because they don't have the opportunity to practice them poor self-esteem they start struggling with school failure this continues on in a developmental cascade potentially where there's family conflict parents are angry that the child is failing at school the child might experience depression that they drop out of school and where does this leave them incredibly vulnerable to antisocial outcomes so I put this up here not to forecast that this is what these kids are headed for but to make two points one what starts as a trauma response in the brain can have long-term multifaceted consequences if kids don't get the support and treatment they need so two we need to be in the game of prevention we need to be doing everything we can to get in early and turn the ship around so that instead of a cascade of problems we can see a cascade of positive growth so how do you do that? the best answer to this question that I know has come from decades of work in child development and is based on the idea that a child is part of a social ecology whatever strengths or problems they have interact with the layers of the social ecology around them for better or for worse they live in families go to school are part of communities and neighborhoods that and at the broadest broadest level they're part of a nation disruptions in any one layer of the social ecology can have profound effects on the developing child at its core so think for a minute about the kinds of stressors that kids may be facing in the process of reintegration you might see cultural conflict stigma bullying at school as I mentioned family conflict but also loss and separation from their parents there's all the adjustment of coming into a new setting the new culture for some kids that's also a linguistic adjustment adjustment they may not speak the language of their home or country of origin and then individually they may be bringing developmental delays lagging skills and mental health problems but if these disruptions to the social environment can negatively affect development the inverse is also true each layer of the social ecology offers an opportunity to create positive growth for the child so let me illustrate how this works by drawing from some of my research with Somali refugee young adults 18 years ago I started working with Somali refugees in the United States running a community-based participatory research program to understand what promoted positive developmental trajectories among youth who had experienced significant trauma and disruption so a population that has some overlap with who we're talking about when midway into my research a number of Somalis left the U.S. to join El Shabab and later ISIS I realized that our research team needed to also understand why some youth were vulnerable to extremist ideas when the vast majority were not one of the first things we looked at was trauma and in fact we found that having experienced more trauma was associated with greater support for the use of violence for political change but and I want you to think of that picture of the social ecology here this was only true for those who felt stigmatized in their communities or who felt disconnected from the United States in which they were living and so what you can see here is the the bottom lines that essentially are flat or you know much lower are those who felt connected and like they belonged in the society in which they were living and for those greater trauma did not necessarily mean increases in radicalism fast forward a few years to a much larger longitudinal study of Somalis in the U.S. and Canada this was a sample size of roughly 460 and again we found that trauma was associated with more support for violent radicalism but other experiences in the social environment like experiencing your government as just or feeling a positive attachment to the U.S. or Canada were protective so within our study sample we found that the way trauma played out in relation to one very specific outcome views on violent extremism was shaped by those levers at the outer level of the social ecology at the level of government and community in the intervention trauma systems therapy we like to talk about how when you think about trauma using a socio ecological lens it multiplies your intervention opportunities because we can work not only from the inside out providing really good mental health care for the child but also from the outside in by thinking about how to build positive experiences throughout the social environment as we think about building successful reintegration and rehabilitation programs for children who have experienced the kind of trauma that we were talking about earlier under ISIS we need to be doing two things we need to be thinking about the kinds of stressors they might encounter in the social environment and systematically working to reduce them and then we need to be thinking about the ways that we can build safety acceptance and cohesion across the social ecology so you might see you might see efforts to address stigma and increased cohesion thinking about due process and how you build that trust in government that sense of adjust government opportunities for civic engagement support for families and addressing family conflict in the school setting thinking about bullying support and promoting academic success and then at the individual level mental health care and developmental support so all of these layers for a child who's experienced trauma are going to be incredibly important because they may in fact shape a different trajectory as that child is recovering from their trauma and the child's sense of safety will interact with the social ecology to the degree that they feel threatened by it so clearly for a problem like this there's no silver bullet but just as unattended trauma can lead to negative developmental cascades I believe that a thoughtfully orchestrated program that addresses both the trauma and the social environment can lead to positive cascades where you might see a child's sense who's experiencing a sense of safety and connection begin to be able to explore trying new things at school learning making new friends which then sets them on a path towards a long-term sense of belonging positive sense of self the world and their future thank you Thanks Heidi I think it was really interesting you drew some important connections between community rejection and trauma and trauma and violent radicalization but really what struck me was how something that a lay person would look at as individual and cognitive like trauma really is deeply social and even structural nature now violent extremism is not the only highly stigmatized and complex social phenomenon that we've ever faced and public health may provide a template for how to deal with those stigmatized populations and in fact violent extremism may really be only one of many potential adverse outcomes from a familiar set of risk factors you know such as marginalization poor governance access to services family community support undressed trauma so on and so forth Steve you've looked at rehabilitation programs all over the world from a public health perspective can you help us put together some of what we've heard and some of the dynamics that we've talked about today Sure Thanks I'm going to stand up I think it'll help all of us Thanks Chris and thanks Leanne for pulling this important event together and for inviting me to contribute thanks to the panelists for sharing their insights and knowledge and thanks to you and the audience for hanging in there and for your leadership on this issue so I'm going to flash to Kazakhstan a Central Asian country former Soviet Republic which as far as I know leads all countries in terms of having repatriated more than 400 children and 100 mothers along with 30 adult male former fighters and the government of Kazakhstan has developed a national rehabilitation and reintegration program which has involved the government agencies and local NGOs to support its implementation I traveled there in June and in November through support of the State Department and I had opportunity there to meet with well to visit three of the centers and to meet with leadership and the professional staff from all 17 centers and to interview the number of women and children to understand what's going on over there and one of the things that I heard was a lot of concern about kids like say age 10 to 13 why concern about them because they were old enough to have been involved in some kind of training with weapons or suicide vests they were they had been indoctrinated into the ideology and perhaps instructed that when they go to their country they shouldn't say anything and so people wanted to know what kind of risk are these folks and I think Kazakhstan the folks I met who are working on this fully recognize these kinds of risks but essentially are treating these kids and moms as if they're victims and trying to offer them kind of humanitarian support to facilitate their rebuilding their lives in their home country and in some sense no country that I know is doing what Kazakhstan is doing in terms of having launched such an ambitious program and but no doubt they're grappling with many serious challenges there and so I want to share a little insight on some of the challenges by giving you a few case vignettes and in these vignettes I have changed facts and so that nobody would be identifiable so one would be a tween returning a 10-year-old boy who goes to school they all get put placed into school and there he meets other kids and they like tell him what normal life looks like and you know you don't have to be forced to read the Koran every day and so he goes back and tells his mother you know why why are you making me do these things and she kinds of backs off and in some ways his life starts to look more like the peers in his school I think this could be thought of as an example of family and community processes facilitating rehabilitation and reintegration I heard another story about a 19-year-old woman who followed her new husband to Syria and there he was killed along with one of their children and now she's back in her country with her daughter and both of them basically cry all day and ask why can't we return to Allah and see our loved ones again she has PTSD and depression and she's getting I'd say good support from the center but isn't getting the kind of treatment that like Heidi would recommend in terms of trauma informed care she's also in a struggle with her family who worry over her and she says treat me like a baby or treat me like a child and I don't want to be treated that way so she's not living with them I think this could be thought of as an example where some of the mental health processes and family processes can impede rehabilitation and reintegration many women who returned from Syria with their children and refused to work with the rehabilitation centers and the staff said to me they don't trust us they come back with made-up stories and legends and a lot of these returnees are upset they protest that the government prohibits their children from wearing hijabs in school they refuse all medications and therapies they instead take cumin seed and they say to these workers how are you supposed to teach us if you are not a righteous person so I think this is you know an example of some of the complexities going on in communities and the relationship between communities and state agencies and how these processes if not addressed can impede rehabilitation and reintegration so these are some of the things that USIP states that they believe in and I certainly believe in them too the important role of communities and the social dimension of the work that we're talking about today I talk about the need for avenues to enable social cohesion for sustained positive inclusive pro-social engagement and then they talk about resilience community resilience the importance of that so I think that this raises a number of challenges if you go to a place like Kazakhstan or any other such place with these ideas in your head you immediately or I immediately find myself asking these kinds of questions what role might community resilience play in rehabilitation and reintegration and how does it interplay against other core rehabilitation and reintegration processes such as we've heard of from the other speakers how might community resilience be tailored for local sociocultural context because for sure we know that an idea that you know we have in our heads or in our computers in Chicago or D.C. is not going to immediately translate into something in another country it has to be filtered through local culture and practices all that stuff so through what levers can community resilience contribute to rehabilitation reintegration what are the contextual factors that facilitate or impede the possibilities for building community resilience or social cohesion against violent extremism and what are the indicators of community resilience how can they be measured these are the some of the things that were on my mind when I was there and thinking about it afterwards so when we think about community resilience and the factors that either build it or diminish it we think about it from a sociocological model which is similar to like what Heidi presented earlier which is fundamental to a public health point of view so we can see the individual nested in family and community and in broader social societal context and organization and so we want to think about risks and protective factors at each of those levels so in order to think about this further a few of us Heidi myself Emma Cardelli and Zach Brombat back there decided to take a look at existing evidence and conduct a rapid review on this so our point of view is that there is a lot of evidence out there and that countries that are trying to implement a program of rehabilitation and reintegration should as much as possible leverage off of existing evidence and so we turned to existing literature and clinical community and social science which is examined children who are exposed to trauma and adversity and I'm not talking about like the studies of disengagement and de-radicalization I'm talking about other areas so we thought about other kinds of experiences that are very close to this in some ways unique experience of returning from Syria in Iraq and so we thought about refugee children war impacted children former criminal gang members child victims of domestic abuse and trafficking victims each of which have important affinities with the kinds of trauma and adversity that these child returnees have experienced kind of as Heidi was saying earlier so we selected we reviewed many articles and then of those we selected a total of 28 articles of which 14 were reviews themselves and then we tried to sort through them to under look at especially at the outcomes that these projects were focused on risk factors protective factors best practices and we use that to try to build an intervention framework and so this is the framework that we built from that and what you can see is that it's composed of four levels so if you looked at all of the evidence-based practices that have been used against in all of these experiences they kind of sort into four levels so promoting individual mental health and health top level promoting school success promoting community and family support and improving structural conditions and protecting public safety so right away you can see that it's not all about individual level right we're talking about what was learned from the work with child soldiers trafficking victims all these other levels are important you have to pay attention to that so we need a multi-level approach implying that policies and programs are needed at all of those levels then we looked down further and we looked at the risk and protective factors of many hundreds that were identified across all of these different experiences we sorted them into in each of these different spaces the individual space the school space the community and family space and the public safety structural space which risks and protective factors does it look like you'd really want to be able to move so we identified things like displacement stressors alcohol drug use health problems developmental sorry it got scrambled and by the way I have a handout if you want it and you could email me and I'll send you this little bit access to services or delays in access to services excuse me other risks at the level of schools learning problems bullying discrimination language barriers at the level of wow that's really a mess it wasn't on my computer I don't know stigma social isolation detachment poverty unemployment acculturation stressors at the level of structural conditions economic hardship lack of education and employment inequitable access to resources those kinds of things but the good news is is there's lots of protective factors family support belief system hope and optimism at the school level attendance and engagement in school teacher support peer friendships and support recreational activities and at the social community level social support religious faith and support family acceptance cohesion family responsibilities outside mentors employment financial stability making the immigrant the reentry patriotism process less strenuous safe environment positive engagement with the state civic engagement so there's a lot to work with. This is a kind of a menu for the things that programs would want to look out for in terms of either amplifying those protective resources in each level or trying to de-amplify the risk factors and so these are the big kind of takeaways of what is the policy agenda to promote programs so at the level of individuals provide mental health and health services to recover from developmental mental and physical injuries at the school level promote school involvement and success especially for delayed distressed youth with specialized education programs then at the community and family level strengthen community resilience and support to mitigate stigma and discrimination strengthen families and mitigate family conflict and then at the structural level improve the conditions for living and working for children and mothers and assess security threats and prevent future involvement in extremism and targeted violence and then we thought about those things and if you map those out those really if you map those out in relation to what's described as the levers of community resilience they map on to seven levels of community resilience wellness access education partnership engagement equity and safety and so in a way this model identifies how the work if you leverage off of the existing evidence with all these different kinds of children exposed to trauma adversity it's telling you you got to be building community resilience in these seven very specific ways if you want to be if you want support from the existing evidence so what are the takeaways takeaways are that existing evidence from relevant areas of child trauma and adversity illustrates that there are multi-level factors and processes involved in the rehabilitation and reintegration of child returnees and those especially include social processes schools things like that another takeaway is that communities can build resilience to violent extremism through activities that enhance the levers of wellness access education partnership engagement equity and safety and we also believe in a public health approach that this should not be focused narrowly just on this issue that we've chosen but on other threats that community members or community leadership identify as a problem in their community things have to be broad not so narrowly focused then of course addressing the multi-level factors and processes that we've just outlined can only be achieved through a public-private partnership and copious civilian involvement with multidisciplinary collaboration this is not a job just for security agencies it's a job that has to be done with civil society and it's not a job just for psychiatrists or psychologists we need educators community leaders youth leaders religious folk all of us working together so in many countries efforts are needed to build the capacity of leadership and of practitioners in civil society and government no problem and so some of the areas of need that we've identified are trauma informed mental health care developmental assessment and support I mean because like a lot of these kids have been exposed to malnutrition had trauma horrendous trauma and other kinds of medical illness which has effect their physical development and neurological development also specialized educational programs it's not enough just to put these kids in any classroom they've been out of school for a number of years they require individualized educational plans and in order to help them to succeed and to be on that trajectory that Heidi was mentioning before violent extremism risk assessment and prevention this is something that we're challenged to do in any context but it's something that that has to be thought about then how how do we understand which of these kids or moms is at risk and and that's an issue that's going to have to be grappled with over many years because if you think about how many years it will take for say a three-year-old to to become a young adult when we would expect that they would be at most risk this is going to be have to be a concern going forward 15 20 years I'm sorry to say and then last but not least training in building community and family support and resilience because for all the reasons we've said the evidence points us in that direction we need to make investments in helping families and communities to know how to progress in those areas thanks much if you email me I could send you this presentation thank you Steve that was I think fascinating I really appreciated the way that you nested individual family and community processes in kind of a such a succinct way and really highlighted first how extremely contextual this is you know I I may be a bit biased because I married to a public health professional but I really do think that public health and peace building have a lot to offer each other and our kindred spirits in some ways and it's a partnership that I think we don't make often enough but I think they have a lot to offer each other you know it's interesting violent radicalization doesn't occur in our vacuum right it occurs as the result of lived experience in a particular context and many people are going to be returning to that very same context so without addressing the cognitive social and structural dynamics that we've been talking about all day to violent extremism disengagement is really not going to be sustainable I am cognizant of the time we have about 10 minutes left and I don't want to monopolize it all blabbering on my own we probably have time for maybe one round of questions I'll take maybe three or four of them at a time and throw them all out to the panelists all at once okay I see a hand here in the front row I see a friend here Aaron Moore all the way in the back and I'm in the white shirt and then right here blackjacket and we have microphones that are going to be coming around hello Catherine Legerro I'm with Office of Commander Secretary of Defense for Policy I appreciate the fact that you guys did look into different sectors to sort of influence the collection of research that you had but I'm interested to know in terms of some of these applications and sort of solutions being put forward are sort of like very system based and sound very costly and very long term in approach and so my question to you is how would you actually I guess if there was one thing to initially focus on what would you put forward as an area of which policymakers could be doing their due diligence to really tackle this issue especially as we're thinking through there's a shift in looking at how our government is engaging in these spaces focusing now on competition as opposed to countering BEOs and so what could the narrative be what could potential initial steps be for policymakers thank you and we're going to take all the questions at once and then throw them out to the panelists so the four that I said and generalizing the how I'm just with jacket it Lynn Carter with MSI thank you all for those very interesting presentations Mary Beth when you were looking at the characteristics tied to recidivism you pointed to retaining ties to the ideology and of course we're all dancing around de-radicalization and talking about disengagement and behavioral change that gets people to step away from violence yet if the ideology is an important characteristic for going back to the group I mean can you elaborate thanks and then a gentleman with the blue shirt and a toppled jacket thank you in the case of Iraq we see that there are two ministries tasked with doing almost exactly what we're talking about there's a vibrant NGO and UN community willing to do that but we've seen that those ministries are quite explicitly disenfranchised from being able to make those calls and it's the national security advisor who's calling all of the shots and is quite clearly intending to when Iraq is in a better place to do so repatriate their people into essentially a de facto detention camp although they reject that terminology how do we get the importance of this message to security and to help them see how a de facto detention facility is quite diametrically opposed to this approach thank you a gentleman with the white shirt yeah my name is Agustin my question is similar to the first question about government commitment I really appreciate the talk concerning how the people perceive the government approaches and policies towards it so my question is how do you reconcile you know a government that is showing some kind of you know laissez-faire attitude towards the programming of reintegration you know the whole DDR process you know using Nigeria for instance the reason why it seems like you know these people are not so receptive is because the way the government you know postures itself on the DDR aspect if the public doesn't understand in exactly what is happening and the programs that are being later so how do you run this whole program when you know to the eyes of the public and these affected communities the government is not doing enough so how do you carry it on thank you and then one more question of women in a black jacket thank you Rebecca Catality International Center for Religion and Diplomacy my question sort of relates to the second one but it was mainly directed to Dr. Smith if I recall correctly you mentioned at one point in your presentation about an engaging someone that's a attorney to that it's more credible to have someone who shares their ideology but can speak to nonviolent ways of you know living it out but if the ideology itself is socially or psychologically problematic like if it's racial or ethnic prejudice toward another group could you speak to how to address that dynamic and if it's if the approach is to address the issue of violence first and then ideology at what point does addressing the ideology become appropriate thank you so I think we have five questions we have one about is there an initial investment that governments can make we have a second question to Dr. Altier specifically about recidivism and if ideological ties are important to recidivism recidivism how do you reconcile that with the behavioral approach we have a question about Iraq gender specifically if people are returning to detention camps how do you engage with security actors to emphasize to them that this is really not probably a good approach there's a question about how to reconcile governments with laissez-faire attitudes toward DDR and populations who are maybe not so thrilled to take people back how do you how do you make that program and more palatable to those governments and communities and we have a question specifically for Dr. Smith about engaging those who share ideologies but when those ideologies may be problematic in some ways I'm happy to jump in on maybe question one a little bit before so I'm a big believer in process and I fully understand looking at the slides that both Steve put up and I put up that's a lot that we're talking about and it would be great if every country anyway was doing all of that so how do we think about prioritization within that there's a there's a pressing need to get in there at the level of the individual child or family and understand what to do but how you do that can be a process that builds some of those other protective factors so for instance in my slides I was talking about the importance of trusting government and I was talking about trauma when someone comes in to provide services how you do that the way you partner with the community the way you think about the social ecology that is affecting the child's development and the way you take on those social factors as real parts of a child's mental health and functioning you are communicating something about how agencies operate how government operates and the service system that you're a part of so what I would say is even if we're coming in to address the most immediate need of what do you do to help a child who is or an individual returning who was really struggling with trauma and mental health the program and process around that can begin to lay the bricks for that larger sense of trust cohesion and engagement throughout the broader community you mentioned the issue of cost what's the cost of not investing in these things it's not as if security solutions are inexpensive so if I don't having an honest conversation about that would be important but then I think that there are resources in most societies there are capacities for addressing children impacted by trauma and adversity I think you need a model I laid out one example of a model Heidi laid out some elements of a model and there's no way that the model can't be a multi-level model I'm sorry we can't just say put our finger on one point and it's going to solve all these problems we have to work with individuals schools communities families and and in greater societal structures but I think that what each country needs to do is form essentially a multi-disciplinary body of experts in their space in education and mental health and criminal justice who could say compared to this ideal model this is where we're at and we need strategic investments to build our capacity here there and other places as a mental health professional I'm aware that many of these countries don't have access to mental health services or child mental health services and especially with expertise and trauma like Heidi is talking about and so there it does require some kind of strategic investment but the good news is if you make that investment you could have a benefit the evidence tells us that we can help these kids and that what I hope is that the numbers are not that huge these are not not huge numbers per country from a public health point of view to deal with 400 kids or something like that my hope is that through working with those number of kids you're building the expertise building the relationships that can then leverage into broader gains in terms of preventing violent extremism in general or other public health or public mental health gains for kids and families thank you and I know that we're running up against time here and that's my fault as moderator I did not manage that very well if you guys have to run out totally get it there is a survey on your chairs if you guys feel compelled to fill out out for us we would highly appreciate that otherwise if you want to run out that's fine I'm going to ask Mary Beth and Laura if they have an answer to the question that were directed directly to them yeah sure so in terms of the ideology I do think we should be focused primarily on behaviors even though it is an important risk factor for re-engagement I think that giving people the space to disengage and while they're disengaging as I mentioned I think that that process of de-radicalization often happens organically as they start to establish other social bonds we do need to be aware if they are ideologically committed but I think some of the things that Heidi talked about and Stephen talked about are things that set that process into motion and prison too also gives people space time away from the group time to think I've seen it time and again with individuals so and also just having credible messengers I think some of the things Rebecca spoke to so there are other credible voices in society that might help with that that process and I think my answer to my specific question directly leads from that about this credible messenger so what I was saying is not so much ideology as communications with people who share that worldview and by well view I meant grievance so if we if people are to be persuaded to choose nonviolent courses of action then they need to hear it from somebody who shares their grievance and that they advocate for peaceful responses rather than the violent ones great thank you everyone well I think we threw a lot at you I hope you got enough as much out of it as as I certainly did thank you for joining us