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The Step Together webinar series is a professional learning resource accessible to everyone. It aims to provide an introduction to the concept of violent extremism in Australia, and who is most vulnerable to this negative influence.
The series explores:
An insightful look at how online spaces are shaping young people, and what families, schools and platforms can do to support them.
An insightful look at how online spaces are shaping young people, and what families, schools and platforms can do to support them.
National Child Protection Week 2025 Webinar - Unpacking Netflix’s Adolescence: Building healthier masculinities in today’s online world
Good morning, everyone. Thank you for joining us today. My name is Alice Dolan.
I sit on the NAPCAN Youth Speak Out Council and I'm very excited to be hosting this webinar.
Thank you for coming to join us all, everyone.
So we'll just perhaps give it a minute and wait and see, let everyone trickle in, but we'll get started pretty soon.
I'll just give it a second, let all the instructions from the GoToWebinar platform finish and then perhaps I'll get started now.
So thank you for joining us all today.
I'm very excited to be hosting this webinar here on the topic of the TV show Adolescents. We have such a great lineup today.
So I think it's going to be a really great panel that we have today.
So I'd just like to begin by acknowledging the traditional owners of the lands that we're all joining from today.
I'm here on the lovely of partially sunny, partially rainy lands of the Gadigal people of the Eora nation.
And I'd just like to keep in mind that a lot of our conversations today will be about the internet, which you know, it's a pretty recent phenomenon for every culture in the world to be dealing with.
But I think what we'll see in our discussions today is that ultimately what we're talking about comes down to just children needing adults to provide safety and love.
And so I want to acknowledge the countless millennia of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities, really championing their young people, providing that culture and connection and community on these lands that we're all on.
And so I pay my respects to elders, past and present, and particularly to the First Nations children who will carry on these cultures into this new internet-filled world.
And I particularly pay my respects to Tony Mobb joining us here today.
So a few housekeeping items to start.
So all the webinars this week as part of our National Child Protection Week series, they be recorded and posted on our website in the coming weeks.
We do have the chat function available where you can ask questions, so please feel free to submit questions throughout this webinar.
We'll try to get to as many of the questions as possible in the Q &A session at the end. The chat function, you can find that at the top of your screen.
The webinar is in listen-only mode, so everyone in the audience is muted and your camera is off, so it's only our panellists that you'll see up on the screen.
If you need, closed captions available and you can enable those by clicking the CC icon on the bottom right of your screen.
If you experience any issues please refer to the frequently asked questions posted in the chat and or you can contact the phone number or email address provided in the chat.
So this year as part of National Child Protection Week we're continuing to champion the message that every conversation matters but building on this the campaign also highlights the importance shifting conversation to action because we heard from a lot of young people that it's great to have all these conversations but doesn't mean anything if you don't do anything about it and so we have to recognize that dialogue is just the first step but meaningful change that comes when those conversations lead to actual actions that cause safer more support lives for every child now and into the future. So in terms of what we're talking about today, we're talking about adolescence.
So Earlier this year, Netflix released its four-part series, Adolescents.
This is a drama about a 13-year-old boy who's been accused of murdering his classmate.
And throughout the show, we follow the detectives and the psychologists as they interview the boy and his parents and his classmates, and they try to piece together what happened and what his possible murders are.
And as all this unfolds, we start to get glimpses into this world of online misogyny that all these children are being exposed to.
And so this show received extensive praise after its release.
It had a 98% approval rating on Rotten Tomatoes and the Prime Ministers of Australia and the UK have both acted the idea of showing it in schools.
But then on the flip side, after finishing the show, I was a bit curious kind of what the reception was.
I went and I had a look on Reddit to see what people were saying there and it was interesting. A lot of people were really scaping about the show.
They were saying it's just, you know, pearl clutching moral panic.
It doesn't provide any clear answers. It's blaming parents.
It's complaining all these different online communities as simply being identical and they're really falls short of what it's trying to do.
It's interesting to see that there's such these different perspectives and it is quite a divisive show.
So today what we want to do is we want to unpack this show, we want to explore what it got right and what's still missing from the conversation.
And then we want to focus on what everyone can do to help ensure the best outcomes for our young people.
So a bit of a content warning.
So today's discussion will obviously focus on issues of misogyny, gender-based violence and technology-facilitated abuse and additionally we may also venture into topics such as mental health and suicide, bullying, racism, homophobia and queerphobia and body image.
So there are some heavy conversations that will be had today and this might be distressing for some people.
So please take care of your well-being, step away if you need to and reach out for support if you need.
So if you find yourself needing immediate support or someone to talk to, there are some phone support numbers that are provided in the chat and NAPCAN also has some staff behind the scenes who are readily available to support you.
Additionally, if you have a young person in the room with you who might not be ready for some of these discussions, now might be a good time to pop some headphones in.
So with all that being said, thank you so much for joining us here today or in the future if you're watching this recording and it's time to introduce our panelists.
So I'll ask each person to turn the camera and pop up on the screen as I introduce them.
Firstly, I'd like to introduce Heather Jackson, who is the Director of Interventions and Innovation at the Department of Communities and Justice.
Heather has been involved in countering violent extremism since 2016 for various agencies with a focus on client reintegration into the community and violence extremism disengagement.
Heather leads three countering violent extremism programmes with specialist staff both in New South Wales and nationally, and these provide support and structured case management to people who are vulnerable to violent extremism.
And particularly, youth vulnerability and susceptibility is an area of ongoing research.
So thanks for joining us here today, Heather.
We also have Dr.
Simon Copland, a researcher at Australian National University, whose research focuses on violent extremism, misogynist groups online, and white supremacy.
And he's also a recently published author with his recent book, The Male Complaint, the Manusia and Online Massachly.
So thanks for joining us today, Simon.
We also have Daniel Paproth, who's the communications manager at the Man Cave, as well as a former lead facilitator of their programs.
So over the past seven years, he's worked directly with thousands of teenage boys in classrooms across Australia, and now he focuses on translating the insights from those programs into stories that the wider world can engage with, building a bridge between an often misunderstood and blind demographic, which is young men, and the communities and systems around them.
And finally, we have Matt Tyler, who's the executive director at the Men's Project at Jesuit Social Services.
Over the last six years, he's worked with a team committed to reducing violence, preventing child sexual abuse, and promoting flourishing amongst men and boys themselves.
This has included leading research on the Man Box Project, which is a fantastic piece of research they put together, as well as translating that into practice as one part preventing men's violence and he has also worked on the development of Australia's first helpline Stop It Now to prevent child sexual abuse by engaging those who are at risk of offending and overseeing a range of programs to prevent violence and abuse working with adolescents who have often experienced harms and supporting them to flourish. So thanks for joining us today.
So it's such an incredible panel that we've got here today, such an amazing lineup.
I'm so excited to learn from all these wonderful voices.
And yeah, I think we're gonna have a really great discussion.
So our conversation today, we're gonna first just kind of set the scene, have a look at what online misogyny looks like in the world today.
Then we'll go and start exploring the impact that has on young people.
And then finally we'll talk about what actions everyone can take.
So to kick us off, I'd like to throw it to Daniel and ask from your experience, What do relationships look like for young people today?
And how are those different from young relationships from previous generations?
Thanks very much for having me, Alice.
Hello, everyone.
I work at the Mankase Aware, a preventative mental health, emotional literacy, character development charity for teenage boys and their communities.
Really excited for this discussion.
So in our context, we work predominantly with teenage boys in high schools.
We are through our comprehensive data system beginning to get some insights into how the female peers in teenage boys' lives and how their teachers observing the boys' attitudes, behaviors before a workshop, after a workshop.
So that's something that we're actively investigating.
But yeah, our predominant focus is on teenage boys and our context.
And yeah, I could say a lot about how I guess outdated stereotypes of the masculinity, which are very well outlined in the Jesuit Social Services Man Box research. We reference that all the time, so hello Matt.
Yeah, I could speak a great deal about how those impact young relationships, but I think in the context of adolescence and what we're talking about today, the biggest difference that we see between the current generation and perhaps previous generations is just the rapid advancement of the online and the digital world.
I'm 35 years old now.
When I was in high school, I had a Nokia 3310, which could not access the internet.
And I didn't have a device that could access the internet until I left school.
So I feel like I was probably one of the last generations to grow up with a device that couldn't access the internet.
And so I think there's a big gap in understanding between perhaps my generation and older generations and the realities of what it's like to live in a world where all of these young people are connected through digital devices and have access to basically everything on the internet from such a young age.
And I think there's still some research to be done in that area.
And I think we saw in adolescence how the online world impacts young relationships, particularly around the use of emojis.
We saw, I think that was in episode two, and yeah, we see that playing out in the real world as well.
The wilting rose emoji is currently one that's really being used by young people in an ironic way to reference something that is a bit outdated.
And so it really is impacting their lives.
But yeah, we also see that boys capacity for care and empathy and respect come through really strongly in our workshops as well.
So I do just want to say that it's not all doom and gloom.
And when we give boys spaces, role models, tools to connect in an authentic way, there is a lot of hope out there as well.
Yeah, absolutely. I think we talked so much about, you know, that young people are constantly connected, constantly online and you always have that sort of ever present pressure that, you know, you have to present yourself in a certain way and your image is so important.
But I think that's a really good point that it's so much about young people, you know, they just want to do the right thing and they want to flourish and they want to, you know, it comes from a place of care where this is happening.
So I think that's a really good point.
Thanks, Daniel. So I might throw to Simon now. So in the show Adolescence, as well as elsewhere, we hear all these terms like incels, red pills, trollege and all this stuff.
So can you shed some light on that, Simon? What does all this mean? What is the Manosphere?
Yeah, it's such a good question.
And I think one of the things that was interesting about Adolescence was that the Manosphere actually only appears very marginally in the show, but it became the real focus of the discussion afterwards.
And I think there's a lot of fear about the Manosphere, and rightfully so, but there can be overblown as well, a little bit of, I think people talked about, sort of panic around this community as well.
But the Manosphere is a collection of online blogs and social media forums, places online, where men come together to talk about quote unquote, men's interests.
And generally that's a focus on talking about *** and relationships, talking about their experiences with them, talking about self-help, and talking about their lives in general.
And there's a lot of deeply personal discussions on there about people talking about their lives.
But this is all done through a very anti-feminist and often highly misogynistic lens.
And the basic belief within these communities is that men's lives, that things are going wrong for men, that society has turned against men and that feminism is to blame for that, that the feminism has gone too far and in turn is destroying men's lives and beyond that there are inherent differences, such inherent differences between men and women that a lot of people end up, a lot of people in these communities end up believing that these differences are so strong that they create such misogynistic views, really highly misogynistic views.
And there's three real communities within the Manosphere that sort of all have these similar beliefs, but what they do is they think about how to respond to that in different kinds of ways.
So I'll just go through those very briefly, but there's the seduction community.
That's people like Andrew Tate is really strong within that community.
That's people who teach each other.
They have courses, programs, very expensive programs to teach men how to pick up women, to get relationships with women, and it's a system that they call GAME.
And GAME is often men teaching highly manipulative tactics about how to pick up women, teaching things like no doesn't mean no, that you should continue pursuing someone even if they've said no, for example.
So that's one group.
There's incels who are people was mentioned in adolescence and people may have heard of, that's involuntary celibates.
it's people who believe that due to their physical traits or their personality, that they're unable to obtain relationships with women.
And then they often become very angry about that.
And they have been engaged in physical violence.
There's been some quite high profile attacks from incels.
And the final group is men going their own way on MGTOW.
And they're men often in their middle age who have entered in, who have left generally bad relationships or have had women leave them.
And they believe that relationships with women are so dangerous and so bad for men that they should just avoid them altogether and that men should, quote unquote, go their own way. So they're the different groups that exist within this community.
Oh, thank you.
That's a really useful overview because I think, and we saw in adolescence as well, there are all these different glimpses of these different communities.
But I think it can be quite confusing when you just hear little bits and pieces here.
So I think it's worth acknowledging that this, while like massaging may be the common theme, everyone's kind of approaching it from a bit of a different way in these different communities.
So Heather, where are young people getting these messages and this content?
Is it social media or is it ***********? Is it gaming? Yeah, where is this all happening?
I think it's happening everywhere and I think what Simon's just pointed out in the different groups, there's entry-level aspects to And then I think, and there's been many studies done on this and the power of the algorithm, the targeting of young men, the targeting of messaging.
What seems as rather a curious looking to the world or a sense of, you know, the slope between Andrew Tate and that further what we call rabbit hole messaging is once those algorithms get you And they do rate you by gender and age and target audience.
I find that particularly the clients that we have and we talk to is it becomes a very slippery slope.
So what is a very casual act of being on social media or playing a game in a network of other people can have that messaging there.
So you can either actively seek it or in a little bit both ways actively come and seeks you.
So I think the messaging is everywhere but I also think it's really really important to point out it's just not online.
There are a lot of people what we've seen especially with our clients is there are negative male role models, misogynistic men that are using domestic and family violence in their relationships in real life that's also modeling some of those healthy behaviours and then they're being sort of accelerated online.
So I think there's an element of real world behaviour and then there's online influences. You're right.
I think you're very right as well with the point about how there's you can deliberately look for it or it can be shown to you and I think we saw that in the show at one point the dad mentioned that he was just looking up some gym instruction content and then that then let him down that rabbit hole and that's a bit of a common path, just looking at very innocent fitness content to begin with can take you down that way. But that leads us on to our next question about the drivers of this.
So I want to throw to Matt and say, what is it that makes the menace here appealing to young men?
Thank you, Alice. And yeah, firstly, thanks to you and Nat Kam for convening this conversation.
I I think I'm really grateful to you for playing that role.
I think inherent in that question, Alice, requires empathy, which in the context of this conversation can be pretty fraught.
It is given what Simon's touched on, there's some pretty extreme and harmful behaviors with really significant consequences for the victim of those behaviors.
And so I just want to name up front that addressing a question like this is inherently tricky and requires, I think, a degree of a degree of empathy, which at times is understandably not where people would want to go in the first instance.
I also think that to address a question like that, it sort of requires you to go to human rather than go to necessarily the technical parts of this and the sort of what the online parts of this.
This is fundamentally what are the sort of needs, wants, desires that the types of behaviour that Simon and Heather and Daniela touched on. What is it for filling?
There's a few things that I think come out based on the research and also our practice experience.
The one is the social rewards to this behaviour.
This sense that somehow this behaviour is either funny or puts people in a position where they're somehow on top of other people.
This sort of idea that to secure a spot in that alpha male group, you've got to be misogynistic, homophobic, classist.
You've got to show up in ways that other.
And inherent in that is, of course, power dynamics, that we know that these types of harms are gendered and oftentimes people who identify as non-heterosexual are on the end of them as well.
And so there's power dynamics in the sort of physical world that are accelerated as Heather has highlighted online.
And I think the final thing is that sort of retaliatory impulse, this idea that somehow, and I'll focus on men, it's of course not exclusively, but somehow men are being left behind and they've got to find an outlet to blame.
We've seen that in recent days across the country as it relates to the anti-immigration protests, that this sort of grievance politics where you are left in a position where to make yourself sort of reconcile the difficulties that you might be confronting, there's a need to blame an other and push down people who have less power.
And so, yeah, I think there are a few of the things that stand out to me as what makes some of these environments appealing to young men, Alice.
That makes sense.
That's a really good point about the empathy as well, that I think that's important in this conversation that to acknowledge that we can work to understand and recognize what's driving this without necessarily condemning it and to make that distinction important.
And yeah, I think Heather made a good point about the sort of, you know, the offline influence as well from, you know, the different masculinity figures someone might have in their life.
I think it's really important as well.
You know from the Australian child maltreatment study that like two-thirds of Australians have experienced some form of child abuse or neglect and so a lot of people are going to be having some of those similar influences in the home life. But I also just want to ask Daniel, do you also have a perspective on this?
Why is the manosphere appealing? Yeah I do, thank you.
I echo a lot of what Matt had to share so I repeat myself there but I think what I notice is a lot of the appeal of some of the content that gets published by Manosphere figures is around success.
There's the hustle and grind mindset, there's the entrepreneurship and so what I see in that is that these external factors become quite attractive.
So, you know, they might see a man like Andrew Tay, but there's plenty of others as well that, you know, have the body. They have the cars. They have the women. They have the money.
And that's appealing. But what those things are are external factors.
And I think what the Manosphere often misses is providing boys with the internal architecture to be able to support their own well-being.
And so it raises a question for me around, you know, what are we doing for the teenage boys, for our young people, in order for them to, yeah, look after their own well-being and become more aligned with how they feel about themselves on the inside rather than chasing these external factors.
And I really do believe that, you know, underlying all of these things is a strong desire for connection.
And Matt touched on the anti-immigration protests, so we see that as well in the way that, for example, neo-**** groups groom young people as they offer these lost or isolated young men with a sense of community, of connection, of brotherhood.
And I am a firm believer that there's a way that we and address those needs without causing harm to anyone else.
And so it raises the question for me around how are we doing that?
Yeah, absolutely.
And Matt, just to kind of wrap us up for this section, can you tell us how is misogyny online different to violence and misogyny offline?
Yeah, thanks, Alice.
I think I'll just might start by sharing just a couple of findings from our Manbox 2024 research, which is to say that misogyny offline is pretty prevalent.
You know, just to give you a feel, this is a representative sample, 3 ,500 Australian men.
And I'll focus here on, given the orientation of this conversation towards younger men, what we found for 18 to 30-year-olds.
And so we found that 35% of 18 to 30-year-old men believe that many women mistakenly interpret innocent remarks as being sexist.
The same number said that many women don't appreciate all that men do for them.
And then at the more, I guess, extreme end of things, 24% shared that many allegations sexual assault made by women are false and 20 percent shared that domestic violence is a private matter and so I guess to start in the offline world these are not sort of these misogynistic views it's not to say that there's a small group like that's quite a significant number of men who some of these perspectives and I'd say that if you move then to the online world that word that Heather touched on a moment ago you know that accelerant that the online world provides it allows an environment where you can be reinforced your views can be reinforced in a sort of a community without challenge in a way that I think you will be sanctioned I think in an offline world and you know to Daniel's point that there may also be much greater opportunities for connection with people who don't hold these perspectives.
In an online world you can be pushed into sort of environments whether gaming or social media or just viewing content where your perspectives can just be reinforced over and over again.
And so I think in those environments where you're able to connect with, you know, inverted commas, like minded people, things can become much darker, much more quickly, and you start to push much more into the extreme end of things.
And I think the nature of that challenge, and this goes a little bit to I know where you'll take us Alice, you know, what can governments and educators be doing.
I think there is a real need to increase our levels of transparency around what these algorithms are doing and how they're working and how they can be regulated.
We wouldn't tolerate that in the offline world.
This idea that you can be pushed harmful content without interruption or any accountability and yet in the online world there seems to be this sort of passive acceptance on the part of governments and by extension communities, that that is permissible.
And so I think to understand that reality, that the online world is reinforcing these ideas with no accountability on the part of technology companies aside from where that is illegal, I think that does need to inform MUGO with regards to solutions on this.
Definitely.
And yeah, hopefully we'll dive into some more of that in a little bit.
And yeah, those are some really surprising statistics, I do really encourage people to go look at the Manbox research because there's so many more fascinating statistics like that. It's a really great piece of research.
So coming now to sort of the impacts that this misogyny actually has on people and now we've sort of explained a bit what it's about and how it works.
So I want to come first to Simon and ask firstly, what impact does this misogyny have on how boys and young men view themselves?
It's a really good question, and I think it's really hard to tell often in these communities how that's plying out unless you're working with people.
But I think that working with people in depth, but if we're talking about how misogyny impacts how boys view themselves, I think that there's a twofold thing that's going on here.
much of this is based on a belief of a kind of superiority, misogyny is based in a belief of the superiority of men and in these kind of inherent differences that people believe that they exist between men and women that can lead to this and so it can, at the surface level, lead to men feeling those sort of those ideas.
Often the Manosphere is really sold on providing a a clear answer to understand what's going on in men's lives and a clear solutions to those problems and so often it can provide a sense of false clarity I would suggest for people, for young people, not just young people but for all people about what's going on in the world.
This is why people talk about taking the red pill and the red pill is a term used in the Manusphere quite a lot which is based off the matrix which is the belief that if you take the red pill you get to understand the truth of the world, and taking the red pill in the atmosphere is understanding the truth of the problems of feminism and the problems of our current society.
So there's this sort of belief in this sense of clarity.
But then in my, as I argue in my book, this is all what we call, it's a cruel belief.
It's a, it's a sense of something that a solution, and then often a problem, a solution that is, the solution is go and do more self help, go and learn, pick up techniques, or go to the gym more.
This is why often gym content ends up letting people down to these places.
But those solutions don't actually give people real solutions.
It doesn't give them a real outlet.
And the communities aren't real communities.
People are often, Matt mentioned, seeking social connection.
But these communities aren't real communities, particularly the ones online.
And so you have this sort of sense of the clarity that can come from the red pill, but then a sense of disappointment that can often follow, or an internal disappointment, or an internal continued struggle to try and find more answers because nothing works.
And you do end up with men in the manosphere, for example, who end up with very nihilistic worldviews that nothing will ever get better.
These incels are based entirely on this idea of nihilism, that nothing will ever get better.
And often that's where you see people going down the path of taking violent actions, whether it's committing mass attacks or there's actually high levels of suicide rates and high levels of self-harm and mental health problems in these communities. And so you can lead.
And that's often because a community provides a sense of false hope that some things will get better if you participate, that they don't get better. And then the violence that follows is part of that.
So it's a real mixed bag in terms of this.
But, you know, I think that in the end, it's sort of a sense of a sense of clarity that can come, but then there are long-term impacts.
And then obviously we're not taking into obviously, the impacts of the relationships that, how it can impact people's relationships with people outside of them.
And often these communities are quite, they encompass people to the point where you lose your connections with other folks outside who aren't participating in them.
And that's very true for extremist groups in general.
You lose that opportunity to have connections and you become engrossed in this community only.
And so you might lose your family connections, your connections with women in particular, connections with previous friends, et cetera, and that can obviously have other impacts.
Absolutely, and that ties us in really well, straight into our next question.
For Daniel, which is, what is the impact that this online misogyny has on young relationships?
So you have to expand a bit more on what Simon was just saying.
Yeah, absolutely.
It has a severe impact, I think.
You know, it puts a very harmful false agenda in the way of actual human connection.
And I think what I've seen a lot is that it, you know, it can take root at a young age, but it continues to play out for years.
I mean, I saw just earlier this week, a dear female friend of mine, she shared a screenshot in a video on her Instagram of an interaction that she had with a man of my age, mid thirties on a dating app.
And she had a prompt on her dating app around, you know, smashing the patriarchy.
And she got a very angry and borderline abusive response from a man, just straight up.
And so it continues to play out as some of these boys grow into adults.
And so I think it also becomes a self-perpetuating cycle too.
I guess the core belief inside some of those communities that Simon was referring to, you know, particularly incels and that sort of thing is that, you know, I would say the core underneath or that is, you know, unfundedly, fundamentally broken or unlovable, unworthy.
And so I don't want to feel that, so I'm going to externalize that and say that that is women's fault or that is the feminist agenda's fault.
And so when they then enter into a relational space as a young person and they go from that place of aggression and then often find the girl or the woman, rejects them because it's they're coming from a very negative place and then they just go, see, I just got rejected again. See, you know, I try and be myself and, and I get rejected again and so it becomes this kind of self fulfilling negative cycle.
and so yeah without intervention or without prevention tools that can work with young boys to address some of these harmful beliefs or stop them before they start or just give them tools and role models to be able to explore and express their internal world before they get influenced by these online figures.
Yeah, if we don't have preventative programs or interventions, then we're gonna continue to see these harmful behaviors play out.
And we know from the study that the Australian Institute of Family Studies did that a lot of girls, young women, have already experienced violence in intimate relationships before they've even hit the age of 18.
So it's having a severe impact.
Yeah, I think that was a really good example of just how hard it is for someone to break out of that on their own without that external support and just how much damage can be done in those relationships as that person keeps perpetuating these ideas.
So thank you for that.
So now Simon, in adolescence, we see the girls in the schools kind of repeating some of these same misogynistic talking points. It's not just entirely the boys doing it.
So can you tell us a bit like, what role do women play in this world? Are they female incels too?
How does that all work?
Yeah, absolutely there is.
It's actually a little known fact that the incels as a group was initially created by a woman, although she didn't have the same misogynistic views.
It was just a group that she wanted to create to help people get support for entering and talking to people in relationships.
But we do see women who are heavily involved in these communities.
And in fact, in Australia, the most prominent men's rights activist, I would suggest, is a woman, Bettina Arndt.
And women are increasingly involved.
And I think that it's worth noting that that's the case.
There is research that does show that women are increasingly being involved in these communities, and often to a really extreme level.
So in the US, in particular, there is a community called Tradwives.
These are women who are increasingly becoming influential on social media who believe that women should go back into what they consider to be traditional relationship structures and that means that they should stay at home.
Women who promote the idea that they should, that they can't, you know, they should be subservient to men, to their husbands.
Videos talking about how women should be leaving the house after dark without their husband, that they, lots of cooking videos, house making videos, all of these types of things.
And those movements are often very much linked to white supremacy movements as well.
So it's not only should women be at home, but there is a threat because of the belief of the threat of more immigration that women should be at home to have more white babies to try and ensure that the white people continue dominance in the United States.
So they're very much linked to a lot of these very racist ideas as well.
So I think, yes, women are heavily involved and increasingly involved.
And I think that for me, what that points to that's really important to be thinking about is that we can't just be thinking about the structures of masculinity and how perceptions or what it means to be a man is not the only factor that's leading to this.
Because otherwise, women would have no interest in these communities because if it's just about what it means to be a man, they wouldn't be involved.
And so there are other factors played out here.
There are other factors in terms of people's material realities, what people are feeling really hit by modern society, by neoliberal society, and are looking back to the past with rose-colored glasses, but a belief that that was better for people, both men and women.
And I think there's some genuine complaints there about our current society.
And the Manusphere Cell's a really nice picture that our current society across a whole range of things, not just gendered relationships is problematic and that going back to an old society was better for everybody and that plays out really clearly.
So we have to look at these broader factors as well.
Looking at perceptions of what it means to be a man is important, but there are other things we really need to be discussing here because people don't just exist in their gender.
They exist across a whole range of different things and the fact that women are so actively involved really points to this, points to the fact that there are different ways in and different appeals to these communities. Yeah, such a fascinating point. Thank you.
I feel like we could spend so much longer than diving into all the socioeconomic drivers of all this as well. Yeah.
Yeah, so much to it. But just to ask you as well, Simon, just to also shed a bit more nuance onto this.
So far, we've been talking in a very sort of binary way, talking about men wanting to get the girlfriend, but do we see this online with such need also affecting young LGBTQIA plus relationships as well?
Yeah so when in my research I found less engagement from gay men in these communities but it's very hard to tell because you don't often online people don't talk about their sexuality necessarily in that kind of way and one of the things that I always found ironic was you complaining about women and complaining about relationships with women, but never countenance the idea that you are then maybe entering a relationship with men might be a solution to that problem.
There's always kind of an attachment to these heterosexual relationships, which they then complain about bitterly.
But that doesn't mean that there isn't misogynistic gay people, LGBTIQ people.
And I think that we need to understand that misogyny isn't something that's occurring in a niche part of our society.
It's not just this thing that's to this community over here, misogyny is embedded in much of our social structures, much of our culture, much of everything that we exist in our society.
And that influences all of us in different kinds of ways. And I think about TV shows that I watched growing up.
The classic TV show that I think about now is How I Met Your Mother, which I watched growing up.
Well, not so much growing up in my early university years.
And you look back on that now and I find it highly misogynistic. But that was considered normal kind of mainstream culture at that point of time.
And that that has an influence over everybody. It has an influence over all of these types of, all of people.
And so you do see amongst gay men, for example, high, often high levels of misogyny, a high level of a sense of, actually, we've got it better, because we don't have to be in relationships with women, or the use of misogynistic terms and language and, and and so, yes, that plays out.
And that's just, you know, we've got to think about the fact that this is influencing all of us in different kinds of ways and the manosphere is just an extreme end of what is dominant social and cultural ideas.
That's really interesting.
Yeah, it's a new format, but it's not new ideas.
Exactly.
Yeah, so thank you for all that talking about, so the impacts that all this has on young people and their relationships.
So now, you know, given that National Child Protection Week is all about turning conversations into action, I want to start talking about, given all this, what are the possible actions that everyone can take?
So before we jump into hearing all of your lovely ideas, I want to first just talk about a couple of the solutions that are already out there being proposed.
And then I think the big one is the under 16 social media ban, we're just a couple months away now from it being implemented.
And so I'm curious, what impact do you think that has on online misogyny. Perhaps Simon first if you want to talk about that.
Sorry, Mike was off. Yeah, such a good question on the social media ban.
It's one that I get asked quite a lot in book events and things. It happens over and over again.
And I think that I'm highly sceptical of the ban.
I know of families with kids who have social media and they're very, very concerned about social media, I know the impact of social media.
I think the biggest risk of the ban is that kids are smart and kids will get around these bans and kids will figure out how to do that.
And what it's doing is putting a bandaid over that problem and what you're gonna have is a situation where a kid 12, 13, 14 is accessing social media, maybe accessing problematic content or may end up in really dangerous situations, may end up in dangerous grooming situations, But they'll have no adults to talk to because they'll fear going to an adult to admit that they've broken the law to access this content.
And so you're removing the incentive for both government, for schools, for parents to have serious conversations with their kids, to engage with their kids about what it means to be on social media and to engage with their kids about the risks associated with that.
And you're removing the incentive for kids to have chats with adults about it.
and in fact, you're increasing the fear of doing so.
And I fear that what's going to happen is you're going to have kids who end up in these spaces in kind of unregulated ways in secret, which means that all of these kinds of conversations we need to be having with kids just get lost.
And that could be very, very dangerous.
And I think that that is a real worry about this, Ben.
Absolutely, yeah.
And I think we saw in the UK their recent age restrictions that they're putting in place that then just the download rates for VPNs, which is the way that young people can get around these bands, they just merged immediately. So we know young people will find.
Oh, absolutely.
Yeah, but Daniel, you've actually heard quite a few opinions from young people.
What are they telling you about this?
Yeah, we surveyed 4 ,200 teenage boys on this subject directly.
Not surprisingly, the majority of them said that they would seek ways to get around the ban according what Simon just said but I think the interesting piece that came out of our data is that that kind of subverts some narratives around teenage boys is that nine out of ten teenage boys said that it's the responsibility of the social media platforms themselves and the tech giants to keep their platforms safe for young people.
I think that there is a bit of an idea around their around young people that, you know, they're not critical thinkers.
They're not kind of actively engaged in issues and the world around them.
And but, yeah, 90 percent of all has told us that they believe that the responsibility should be on the social media giants to keep their platforms safe.
And so, yeah, that just suggests to me that young people have the capacity to think about a social media ban quite deeply, potentially even more deeply than some people who make these sorts of policy decisions.
Yeah, absolutely.
And so one of the other big solutions, a solution that's been proposed, and as we mentioned earlier, is about showing adolescence in schools.
That Anthony Albanese mentioned that at one point and it could be a good idea.
Matt, what's your opinion on that? Should we be showing adolescence in high schools?
Thanks Alice. I'll be brief on this because I know we've got a bit to get through on actions.
In short, I don't think so.
I think reality is that our experience working with teachers and for that matter also parents is that they are struggling with the confidence to implement the respectful relationships curriculum as it stands, let alone a dramatisation.
And so I think the risk there is that it opens up some pretty significant issues, including as it relates to, you know, things that are very live in young people's lives at the moment that are pretty difficult for schools to respond to without the appropriate supports.
I do think, one caveat I'd say, Alice, is that I would like to think we can get to a point where we can tolerate content like that adults take responsibility for leading on content like that, but I just don't think that's our reality presently. Oh, that's fair enough.
Yeah, I think we know teachers are so overwhelmed already and they just don't have the capacity to handle the sorts of conversations that would come from this.
So if that's the case, Daniel, what else can educators do to help support, you know, their young people experiencing this online misogyny?
It's a great question and I'd largely agree with that.
I think asking them to show a four hour TV series and then hold a very nuanced conversation with young people is asking a great deal.
I think for us, what would be a better use of time would be more investment in programs that can help young people explore their own emotional literacy and put words to how they're feeling about things and doing that with people of all genders and building empathy across different backgrounds.
I know that's probably getting a little bit more into what governments can do.
But I think as well for educators, just being able to be healthy role models for young people, being authentic role models is something that is a little bit more accessible and I've just got a quick example of that here.
I facilitated a workshop last week with a group of teenage boys and we had some fantastic educators in the room who showed up so authentically and we also had myself and the co-facilitators just showing up authentically in the room and giving the boys access to a down on post-it notes at the end of the day, just a final reflection before they left the room.
So I grabbed this one here because it really struck me and it says, lots of men online tell us what a man should be. Today you showed us what a man can be.
And that was directed at the facilitators and also the educators who were in the room.
and to me that was just a perfect example of the power of curious, positive, empathetic role models.
It's such a sweet outcome to come from a program like that.
Yes, I think there's a lot of really great programs out there between, yeah, the Mancaves programs on schools, NAPCAN also has our Love Bites program, which recently has undergone a rewrite to focus a bit more on these online experiences for young people.
Matt as well, the Jesuit Social Services also runs programs in school. So yeah, what's your perspective on what educators could do?
Yeah, thanks Alex. Echo what Daniel has said. I'd also say that some of this is not rocket science.
We want a world where, you know, and I'll focus on our work with boys, where boys can get in touch a trusted adult regardless of how bad it gets for them and not be seen as a bad person.
Like we want them to be able to reach out for help put most directly.
As part of developing a national online early intervention service for young people worried about their sexual behaviours, we worked with the Royal Children's Hospital, the Gatehouse Centre and interviewed are all boys who were in therapeutic treatment for harmful sexual behaviors.
And one boy, and I'll use a fake name, but just to give a sense, Leo, he'd been accessing mainstream *********** since the age of eight, had started to access child sexual abuse materials starting when we spoke to him, and really had no one in his life that he could go to for help.
There was tremendous shame, stigma.
Eventually Leo came to the attention of police.
And so a bit of this is about creating relationships with young people, whether parents or other adults in their lives where they can reach out for help and not feel like they're going to be shamed as a result.
And so this is this is sort of this is as I say it's not rocket science in some respects but it's maintaining dialogue with young people even when things get really **** so that they know they can go somewhere and reach out for support.
The other thing I'd say Alice is and Daniel touched on this a little while back I think there needs to be much greater emphasis on the role of rejection and equipping boys with an understanding that over their journey, they're going to hear the words no, and engaging with them about that reality, what are they going to do in response when they, in any number of contexts, hear the words no?
and building up a sense of, for want of a better term, resilience in response to that reality that they're not gonna get everything they want in life.
Yeah, that's really, really important.
I think especially just that compassionate curiosity to be able to, no matter what they're talking about, even if you really are not comfortable, don't agree with it, to focus on understanding where that young person's coming from is the best way that you can offer that support help break them out of these places.
Heather, we've come to you in a while, if we talk about the social media then, but what else beyond that do you think governments can be doing to help with this world of online misogyny? I think governments are doing a lot.
I work with state and federal government and it's often a topic that we are collectively talking about and funding research and funding, community grants and all, to boost up this conversation and boost solutions such as the work that the ManCave is doing.
So I think we're already doing a lot.
We can do more.
And I think where we can really focus our attention and keep trying to keep social media giants or meters and the like to account, hold them to account.
I think, you know, if you look at any product, if you buy a car, there's a certain element of safety that you want with it.
There's a certain amount of responsibility that that manufacturer has in your providing a product.
There's a lot of responsibility that goes with it.
And I don't think that the social media industry is taking as much responsibility as other products that are delivered in Australia are taking.
And I think government's really wrestling with that.
I think it's big money and big infrastructure, and it's changing and evolving quicker than governments can respond to it.
I think you would have seen with the whole, and I think eSafety does a marvelous job, but the whole takedown, when there's been certain activities being streamed.
I think what else governments can do and what they are doing is really tap in and listen to young people.
When you look at government, they are, like myself, very middle-aged, very sort of not in terms of across what is happening to young people.
And I think that whole thing of about, you know, work with me, work with me with the solution, not talk about me. And I think that's really, really important.
I think there's also elements such as, you know, the federal government's just recently nationalised Step Together, which is obviously a program I'm deeply invested in that provides that family support community interventions and that platform for people to be able to look at the issues that we're discussing today and other more sort of issues on that end of spectrum of violence and be able to investigate what that means.
I think people become more fearful and more avoidant the more they don't know about a subject matter.
So I think the more that we socialize these conversations such as today, the more we talk about solutions and supporting young people such as the panel has talked about today, is the more we can address the issue.
I think demonizing these subjects or villainizing these subjects don't help the young men and the young people involved in it.
And I think that's where government can put more focus and as they are doing on supporting the family.
And I think when we talk about what else can governments do, governments can't be in your house.
Governments don't parent.
Governments are the social role model at the soccer game.
They're not informing in terms of, they're not your peers that are the most influential in your life.
They're not your father.
And I think it's really important that it's a community-based issue and not just a question on what is government doing about it.
Yeah, definitely.
It comes from a lot of different, you know, the more and more supports from those different places, the better and the stronger will be.
And yeah, you talk about wanting to take that sort of have a control over how this tech operates rather than letting it just run free.
And I think that ties really well into those surveys that Daniel's team have done with the young people who are saying they want that too.
And so I think we saw, you know, we saw it with the recent crisis in the early childhood sector that when a lot of people say we want change and there is that political will, government does respond and so I think it's definitely up to that community response as well to put that pressure on the government.
So that's one option to pop some more regulation on the tech companies but in the current situation where we might not have that as much, Simon could you tell us a bit what else could tech companies themselves be doing and is that different for social media about dating apps or gaming?
Yeah, it's a really good question.
And I think there is lots of things tech companies could be doing, changing their algorithms, increasing moderation of hateful content.
The algorithms in particular are quite dangerous and have been shown to be leading people into dark places very quickly.
There's been a lot of research, for example, on YouTube's algorithms where you can look up the, start by looking at fitness material and then end up in extremes places very, very quickly.
So there is plenty of things that can be done.
I would, however, say that we shouldn't be relying on tech companies to do this for us.
And pressure on tech companies is important, but the basis of tech companies and the basis of social media is to allow this content to flourish.
And that is how they make their money.
And so tech companies make money through attention.
They want people on their social media platforms as much as possible, because that gets you views for advertising, and that's where they make all their money.
And the way you get attention is you have new, diverse and often extreme content, because it's the kinds of things that can make people angry, can make people engaged.
And so you need to have algorithms that send people in lots of different directions, because that is how they keep people online.
And so what we fundamentally need to do is to be thinking what social media should be and what is the purpose of social media.
And we cannot rely on big corporations that make billions of dollars out of this to do that for us, because they have no incentive to do it for us.
And we've seen this very, very clearly since the election of Donald Trump, the re-election of Donald Trump, where big tech companies have given up on all of their moderation practices, because there's no longer the political pressure to make it happen.
And So they've become who they truly are.
And that has resulted in a proliferation of this content online.
So whilst tech companies could do more, I would not rely on tech companies doing more out of the goodness of their own hearts.
We need to pressure them or we need to legislate to change how these companies work and the kind of material that they allow to happen online.
Well said.
I'm running a little short on time, but Matt, do you want to quickly jump in on that point as well?
Yeah, thanks, Alice.
Just to come in behind Simon on that, so we are engaging with technology companies around using warning messages when someone access seeks to access illegal material online.
And our experience is that the role of the safety commission there has been massive in terms of pushing these companies to act.
I'd also say given the theme of Child Protection League, from conversation to action, I agree with Heather, there's been a welcome increased focus with regards to online harm.
I'd also say the pace, and I'm thinking here at a federal government level, the pace of some of this change and then moving from reviews and reports to action needs to speed up.
You know, there was the Online Safety Act review released in the October of 2024.
There's been a commitment by the federal government to a digital duty of care, but no timeline associated with that.
And in speaking with MPs, they, you know, one example, a Western Australian MP getting a huge amount of correspondence online exports, not a lot of correspondence on the Online Safety Act Review.
And so politicians will move where there's attention and energy and I just think we're probably letting, and in this case again, the federal government off the hook around a pretty slow pace in response to that Online Safety Act Review which has got some pretty helpful stuff in it as relates to online, the online digital duty of care of some of these technology companies.
Yeah, that's a great addition to that, I think.
And for anyone who's not familiar with the eSafety Commission, I would really recommend just having a look.
They do so much great work, so many great resources.
They can support individuals who are having issues with, you know, tech-facilitated abuse or whatever.
So, yeah, really have a look into them.
So, we're running short on time, but I'll just squeeze in one more question.
And I'll start with Heather.
What can parents and family members do?
have a lot of parents and family members here in the audience with us.
What do you think, yeah, they should know? Maybe you want to talk about the Step Together program too?
Yeah, I think what can parents and family members do is be involved.
I think when I was having a chat with you, Alice, and that quote that you put up in the adolescence at the end, he said he was in his room, wasn't he?
He thought he was safe, didn't we? Didn't we think he was safe? What harm he could do in there?
And I think, really, that whole line sums up the element of why we have National Step Together, because we have come across so many clients that when there is a police intervention where there is a point of a disruption process and the police go through that door and they're looking for a 14-, 15-year-old kid that has posted very significant threats and actions online and the parents have no idea.
And I think if you look at the Step Together website, we have very generous a father who talks about his experience of when his son was noticed by law enforcement and he says he was sitting next to me posting these things online and I had no idea.
And I think that's really about talk to your children, be involved about what they're online.
And don't let the child be in charge of technology in your house.
Really about educate yourself, go on to e-safety, it has a million resources.
And I think it's really telling Daniel's example there where he was getting the feedback from the child when all of this influence online about what it is to be a man, there's one session about, and I'm not downplaying it, but the influence of in real life practice.
Like, I've seen all these people online, but you've shown me what it's like to be a man.
And that's been in an in real life conversation.
So I think it really is about don't make it government and don't make it teachers' jobs to do all of this awareness, be involved, go on the Step Together website, use the different resources on this, the man cave and all of these different studies that Simon's doing and the work that Matt's doing and educate yourself.
Fantastic.
And we have the link to the Step Together resource in the chat there as well for anyone who's interested. And I might just finally finish off with Daniel.
Could you also just say what do you think parents and family members should know about what they can do to help support their young people dealing with all this misogyny out there?
Thank you.
Yeah, I think, again, having, yeah, just curious, open conversations, I think, particularly in our context with young men being able to, if we can, start some of these conversations from a place of curiosity, of non-judgment, of empathy, and really seeking to understand the young person's perspective before we go and share ours.
Now, obviously that can be very difficult at times with some of the attitudes that we've been talking about today.
But I think what I have found time and time again in our workshops is that once we get underneath the kind of noise and the layer of, you know, what in our context, young men are, you know, seeing and really enjoying online and we're able to get to a conversation about, you know, what are you enjoying about that content?
What about that content appeals to you?
and exploring values, those conversations start to become really interesting and a little more deep.
And I think there's also a great space as well for adults sharing stories of their lives and times that they've stuffed up, times that they've gotten things wrong, times that they potentially went down a rabbit hole that ended up no longer serving them.
You know, with the age, you know, we have some wisdom that comes to us as well.
And so being able to show young people that, you know, we're not perfect.
We're not infallible either.
And in fact, you know, we're on this lifelong journey with them is one way to be able to engage young people in this conversation that isn't going to get their backs up.
That's a really lovely way to finish.
I think we just keep hearing that again and again of just that empathy and that compassionate curiosity is so important for helping out young people who are just trying to learn how the world works.
They're dealing with all this influence from all these corporations trying to make money off them.
So I think that's a really valuable way to put it.
So we have a little bit of time now for questions from the audience as much as I'd like to keep asking lots and lots of questions. I will head it over a little bit.
So yeah, we have so many great questions coming through.
So I might just start asking these and just throw it out to anyone who might want to jump in and answer. So let me just bring these up and have a look.
So the first one that we've got here is how do we encourage parents to have these serious important conversations around social media.
Adolescents start the conversation between parents and young people and at what age would you let your children watch adolescence?
Apologies if you can hear a dog in the background there.
That's a bit similar to what we were just talking about but how could we help encourage those parents to just talk about the social media as well. And do you think children should be watching adolescents? Simon?
I'll jump in very quickly.
I think the main thing that I hear from a lot of parents, and I'm not a parent myself, so I can't talk to this experience, but the main thing I hear is a lot of fear about because they don't understand or they're not on these spaces themselves.
And so I think it's giving people the tools to truly understand what these spaces are and there's there's a whole lot of work there and I think that I'm always really skeptical when I hear about schools having to do this work I think a lot more focus needs to be put on how do we encourage and work with parents because actually parents are a much stronger influence on kids lives than schools are and schools are an easy way to do it because governments can intervene in schools but schools are one part of kids lives but we should be doing a lot of work to give parents the tools to do this and I think that we need to be in this and again going back to the social media ban, the problem with the social media ban is that it means the government has no incentive to do any of that work because well kids just aren't supposed to be online at this point of time so why would we talk to parents about how they can work with their kids around this and I think that's a real real risk at the moment.
Alice just sort of something I think to be hopeful about which reinforces Simon's point we'll be launching our adolescent man box research at the beginning of and one of the findings from that is that, you know, we asked adolescents aged between 14 to 18 where would you go if you needed help with something that's pretty tricky and overwhelmingly the most common response was parents and so that included kind of a whole range of different options including seeking help online and so it's old-fashioned and it goes a bit to Heather's point but parents still are fundamental to young people's lives and so it's sort of I think there's there's hope in that in that you know many many young people I think is about two-thirds of young people said that they would go to their parents to seek advice and and there there are resources out there as Heather's pointed to me safety commissions website to help support that but yeah parents are fundamental to this I think yeah and it comes back Again, what we just say about every little conversation you can have has an impact.
I think it's up here behind me.
Every conversation matters.
So we also have this question here.
Are prevention and early intervention strategies to promote positive masculinities and reduce toxic masculinity?
Are they more effective when delivered by men compared with women?
I wonder if maybe Dan.
Yeah, I can jump in and speak a little bit to this.
I think there is an element of when delivered by men, boys in the room can identify with the people sharing their stories.
I think that for me is why representation and diversity and inclusion are actually so important.
When I facilitate workshops in areas of Victoria that have large migrant populations, for example, often I struggle to connect a little with those boys because I'm not from that background and they can't see themselves in me as much as they can with some of our other facilitators.
However, what I'll also say is that we have female facilitators at the man cave and we've had facilitators of different gender identities in the past as well.
And I've seen incredibly powerful moments between teenage boys and female facilitators, teenage boys and gender diverse facilitators happen in rooms as well.
So I do think there is a strong thing to be said for having men come in and work on these programs.
And I also think that ties into particularly the issue of gender-based violence. It shouldn't just be an issue for women to solve.
It's an issue for all of us to solve.
And I think when it comes to male violence, that's an issue that needs far more of men's voices in the space.
And so programs that are delivered by men can play a role in that.
And I've also seen really powerful things happen in rooms with programs that are delivered by people of all genders as well.
Great, that's a really sort of nuance to purchase that question, thank you.
That's just, I reckon we can get a couple more questions.
So I might ask this one it takes in focusing before.
Is there any research that examines the influence of people's cultural ethnic background on their misogynistic views? Is anyone familiar with any research like that?
Because I can imagine it's very possible that it's an area that is just not studied, not considered.
Well, yes and no. There is certainly research out there.
I don't have much strength in it, but just on the atmosphere, for example, we know it's often spoken about as a white phenomenal, Western phenomenon, but it is actually very common in other countries, in non-white countries, very high prominence of these ideas in places like India, South Korea, South America.
So there is certainly differences amongst these communities.
And there's different historical ideas of what it means to be a man, of what masculinity is, different historical things around colonization, for example, that all influence how that plays out.
But this idea is prominent across a range of different cultures.
And so there is certainly research into how masculinity exists in different ways across different places.
And a masculinity sense of what it means to be a man is different in different places.
It's different across time.
It's different across space.
It's different across locations.
So it's really important to think about those differences.
Just this final question I think we can do.
In light of recent events in Victoria involving young men, how can they be supported in a recovery-oriented way when at times the adults in their lives might also be processing their own traumatic experiences.
That's an interesting one. Does anyone have thoughts on that?
So because it's definitely true that it's difficult for people to help support someone else through their own trauma when they are still dealing with their own.
And we know that that's, again, from the Australian child male treatment study, we know that that really, there's enough people out there with that history of trauma, that that can really just build on each other. So yeah, I'm not sure.
Matt, do you have an idea?
Yeah, the question is broad.
And so I'll start by saying that I'm going to find a way into that, which might be different if we're having a conversation with the person who asked the question, but yeah, I'd say in general that as it relates to support for victim survivors of violence and abuse, particularly who have been victims of violence and abuse, I think we've just got a long, long way to go.
I think there's an increasingly positive rhetoric where a conversation that's been largely about violence against women is being recognised as, you know, violence against women and children.
And yet, in Victoria, given that's where the question is focused in Victoria at the moment, there's still upwards of five, six, seven months waiting lists to get into recovery services for young people who have experienced violence in the home.
And so it's pretty basic stuff that if you are in need of a therapeutic response to something that's happened in your life that that service should be available in a way that's timely and so it's really in some respects what gets prioritised and I tell you what does get prioritised is when those same young people end up coming to the attention of the justice system not inevitably but we know that young people who end up in the youth justice system have oftentimes been victims of violence and abuse for many years themselves never received a response.
And yet when they come to the attention of the justice system, it comes down pretty quick.
And so there are instances where we're able to prioritise a response and there are instances when we're not.
And so I think that's a big part of it.
What gets prioritised is pretty telling and young people pick up on that also pretty quickly.
Yeah, and often those responses come of too little, too late, really. So, Daniel, are you just going to throw in the point too?
Yeah, just quickly, I had a fantastic answer from Matt and just wanted to share for people.
This is covered really, really deeply in Jess Hill's fantastic quarterly essay from earlier in this year.
So, if people are really interested in a deep dive into the topic of how trauma impacts with this and the failures of some of our systems to support people.
I'd highly recommend reading Jess Hill's quarterly essay from earlier this year, which covers it in great detail.
Thanks for that suggestion. Yeah, she does some incredible work.
All right, well, thank you. That's all we have time for. There's more questions.
I'm sorry to everyone whose question we didn't get around to for this.
I wish we could keep talking forever.
But if you are interested in discussing these things in more detail, a lot of this was a bit of just a scratching the surface.
At the end of this webinar, you will be given a survey just about how you found it.
So if you want to hear more on this topic, please pop that in the comments so we know that this is something that you might like to see us going into in more detail because it's such an important and topical issue and there's so much change going on in the world of online safety right now.
So then thank you to everyone who joined us for this conversation.
Thank you to our amazing panel. I really loved listening and learning from all of you.
So yeah, thanks for giving your time. I really appreciate it.
And thanks for supporting National Channel Protection Week.
Thanks, everybody.
Thank you.
Okay, I guess I can just leave.
What’s really going on behind the screens of young people today? This confronting yet essential webinar dives deep into the hidden worlds of online subcultures that glorify misogyny and gendered violence.
Building on the conversations started by the hit Netflix series Adolescence, we’ll explore how these toxic narratives are spreading across social media, gaming, and online communities, shaping beliefs, behaviours, and even national security responses.
Hear from experts in education, policy, tech and youth safety as we unpack how violent misogyny is taking root, why respectful relationships education is more urgent than ever - and how families, schools and platforms can work together to intervene early.
Ben James from AAP's Fact Check unit on combatting misinformation
Ben James from AAP's Fact Check unit on combatting misinformation
AAP's Ben James webinar - Combatting Misinformation
Rebecca Shaw 0:20
OK guys.
We might get underway because we've got a fair bit to cover off in an hour, and I imagine there's gonna be a fair few questions at the end.
Firstly good you know, good afternoon everyone.
Thanks so much for joining again.
We do appreciate your time, especially in your lunch break.
My name is BEC and I did a communications for the NSW Countering Viol, extremism engagement and support programme.
Some of you may be already familiar with the work that we do, but today is not about us.
It's just giving.
Context on who is facilitating. Today we begin by acknowledging the traditional custodians of the land on which we meet today and pay our respects to the elders, past and present. We extend that respect to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people here today and appreciate that people are in.
Fact beaming in from all over our guest today is Ben James from AAP.
Fact Check Ben is a journalist, editor and author with 15 years experience working in news organisations in Australia.
And the UK?
And he has been editor of AAP Fact Check since February 2022, having previously worked across various News Corp titles.
Today's session is being recorded just for information, so if there's anyone that misses the session.
I'll be I can share the file with you or it will be put on our step together website after the fact.
Just give our IT department a little while to manage that one.
I'll moderate questions that come through the chat.
And willing to cover off anything that is not answered during the presentation, obviously. And I will also moderate questions that we don't have time for as Ben's kindly offered to answer those after the session.
So just reach out to me directly and I'll make sure or put in the chat and I'll make sure we get back to you within a reasonable time frame.
And if you can also now just also make sure your mic and video is off.
That would be wonderful.
So again, just to give you a little bit of context on who we are and why we have asked Ben to present today the engagement support unit has two public facing early intervention awareness programs.
So that is a step together helpline which goes national under Home Affairs as of July 1.
This is an anonymous support line offering advice on all things VN, extremism and counter violent extremism.
And a triage point for referral to other support services.
Or eligibility into our engagement and support program or a similar program in each each state as of July 1, the engagement and support program is a voluntary face to face case management program for people involved with violent extremism. And it's also a we also sort of under our.
Remit is a broader education and awareness on all things violent extremism.
So hence our series of webinars and we have had.
Been we had the pleasure of having been at one of our international conferences.
Recently and so, we're delighted to have him back.
His presentations are very thought provoking, especially in the current climate.
And Speaking of this slide is just to give you a little bit of an snippet of what our current violent extremism landscape looks like. And as you can see, it's largely geared around the online world.
When it comes to sort of the, you know, dangers around violent extremism.
So it's it's these are all issues related to the online world and why young people are the focus of of the work that we do at the ESU.
So Mike Burgess, Director General of ASIO in his National threat assessment, speak to a disturbing resurgence in youth terror cases.
At the social media summit of late 2024, I think it was October, he said, that all of the nation's most recent terror cases were allegedly perpetrated by young people, including one as young as 14.
And that speaks to us because we've had to reduce our referral agent to ESP to 10, which is pretty alarming, but 20% of Asio's priority counter terrorism cases involve minors. So social media and digital technologies are really fueling threats to national security.
And it's this violent, misogynist and violent extremist propaganda.
That's a growing problem.
You guys may or may not be familiar with the new Netflix series adolescents. If you've seen it, it's really sparks a lot of conversation around violent misogyny, and you can see the misogynistic exposure example above in these slides where it says, you know, it takes an average of.
26 minutes for young men to be exposed to misogynistic content on Tiktok or YouTube shorts, regardless of whether they were searching for it or not.
But another one is that it takes just two clicks to go between.
A page advocating a hardline religious interpretation.
And a telegram network that was explicitly pro ISIS and you know, that's obviously with propaganda material promoting Australian terrorists.
So there's there's this real need for teaching media literacy.
And it's never been more critical.
And it needs to be done at a younger and younger age.
And on that note, I'm going to hand over to our guest, Ben James, because this is absolutely the work that he does.
So over to you, Ben.
He's going to share his screen and slides with you now.
Ben Jame 5:43
Thank you very much.
Can you see my slides now?
Can I get a thumbs up for me?
Rebecca Shaw 5:48
Yes. Yep. We can. Yep.
Ben Jame 5:51
Good stuff. All right.
Yeah. Thank you all for coming today.
It feels like every time I do a presentation like this, I say it's, you know, the topic is more important than ever.
But yeah, that certainly seems to be the case again.
So just briefly on what we'll cover in the next 40 minutes or so, I'll give you a quick introduction to AP Fact Check and the work we do.
We'll talk through some of the missing disinformation that we're seeing in Australia.
We'll talk about who's behind the claims we come across.
I'll touch on some of the emerging threats and finally what we can, what we can do about it.
But First off, a bit of an intro into AAP Fact Check now. AAP or Australian Associated Press. Many of you will have heard of AAP is the national News Wire founder back in in 1935.
AP Fact Check meanwhile, dates back to just 2019.
We set up back then with some seed funding from Google initially to Fact Check the NSW election that year.
We soon became signatory with the international Fact Checking Network.
Now that's the kind of global standards body for fact checkers and that accreditation we receive is is hard one, you know, we have to demonstrate the consistency and unbiased fact checking of the highest standard.
We're also Fact Check partners with Meta.
So that's Facebook, Instagram and Threads and Tiktok as well.
So this involves working with those companies to minimise the spread of harmful misin disinformation on platforms, and we're the only fact checker in in Australia and New Zealand to work with matter and TikTok in that way there are about 15 of us in the in the fact.
Team programming based in Sydney.
But also people in Melbourne, Brisbane, New Zealand and London as well.
So what is it that fact checkers do?
We split our work into kind of three distinct buckets.
First of all, we have our debuges.
Now this is really a kind of bread and butter.
This is reacting to claims as we come across them.
It's investigating them and making a ruling on them before publishing a Fact Check and through our work with Meta and TikTok. This enables us to make an intervention.
This is typically kind of applying a warning to a piece of content.
With a link to our Fact Check, which will then reduce the spread on those platforms and up until about 18 months ago, this was pretty much all we did.
And look, don't get me wrong, it's a really impactful.
You know way to do things, particularly through the partnership with the social media companies.
However, the downside to debunks is that they take time. We can't afford to be wrong.
You know, our reputation is everything when it comes to fact checking.
And yeah, look, falsehoods are generally exciting.
They're scandalous and they're scary, and as a result they spread its speed. I think, as the saying goes, you know, lies halfway around the world by design. The truth has got its boots on so well. We make these really important interventions with our social media partners, with Deb.
Can't prevent the harm being done while we're researching and writing these, these debunks, and we obviously can't catch everything.
So we've recently started doing what are known as prisons now. Pre bunks are really seen as industry best practice at the moment. This is about kind of getting ahead of the problem. Predicting the missing disinformation coming down the line and warning people in advance.
And it uses what's called inoculation theory, whereas much like a vaccine, you can introduce a bit of the bad stuff to the audience so that when they come across in real life, they can, they can pat it away and beat it.
So for example, with the election that we got coming up, we know a lot of the claims that we're likely to see.
We've covered elections before.
We can therefore pre warn people, we can let them know what they're likely to see.
We can let them know some of the themes of disinformation that they're likely to come across and let them know in advance why these claims are false, misleading or whatever, and that enables the audience to then process that false and harmful piece of information when they come across.
It in real life.
And the third category of work that we do is media literacy, which Rebecca touched on earlier, and this is this is about equity in the general public with the skills necessary to be able to process the massive information.
You know, they encounter each and every day.
You know, if you if you think about how much new information we are met with every day now it's it's incredible compared to you know 10/15/2020 five years ago.
So we really need the skills to be able to kind of process.
That information in a helpful way.
And look, this can be anything from, you know, talking about verification tools to warning about disinformation techniques or, you know, discussing what makes a good, you know, a good source.
Are these three buckets make up what we call our three pronged approach?
We have pre bunks attempting to predict and warn people.
You have a debunks reacting to claims as the appear and making that intervention, and then we have media literacy.
Which is ensuring the general public has the necessary skills.
Now, I could probably spend the whole hour doing a bit of a deep dive into exactly what we're seeing, but I'll give you a quick overview of some of the some of the key recurring themes. And while this is not an exhaustive list, this perhaps covers about 90.
Percent of of what we encounter at new Fact Check.
First half crisis in crisis events and you know, bad actors love a crisis.
Anything they can use to influence or stir up fear and hatred, you know, while people are particularly emotional, you know, or vulnerable.
So picture there is the aftermath of the the Bondi junction attacks last year, and the disinformation that came from that event was, you know, incredibly effective and fairly well reported on in the end.
And I think what makes crisis events particularly susceptible to missing disinformation is the absence of reliable information in those early hours as early minutes and early days.
I mean, the other big disinformation crisis event that comes to right to mind from from, you know, recent months was the Southport attack in the UK, which which led to mass disorder throughout the UK.
And I'll talk a little bit more about that later on. But as with that case, there was this vacuum of information.
In the early days.
And hours after, after the incident and and for good reason. You know, the suspect was still alive. And the police and press were, you know, adhering to strict reporting restrictions. And, you know, that's just how it is.
And perhaps this wouldn't have been a problem 20 years ago, but we're now in this social media age and there was that vacuum of information and and and people fill it.
And I think we're seeing so devastating as well.
People are searching for answers, trying to make sense of such an awful event.
And so any claims made about, you know the suspects or the motive are pounced on, you know, take the the Bondi Junction attack in those first few hours, we saw claims that, you know, the attacker was Jewish, was was Muslim, was a, you know, white nationalist was ment.
Ill was was was transgender.
Now you name it.
So yeah, crisis events are a common target and.
A recurring theme that we see time and time again.
Next up, health and science.
I joined AP Fact Check in 2022 and I reckon 90% of what you know, we were checking them as related to the pandemic in in vaccines that was that was our main workload for that first year or so.
And it's still a huge problem today.
I mean claims about vaccines and medicine.
False claims about vaccines and medicine get a huge audience in Australia.
Are these claims are having a real world impact?
I mean vaccine hesitancy is, is a huge problem at the moment and you know all of a sudden we're having outbreaks of of measles.
So yeah, it's it's a real concern.
But when talking about science, it's also things like, you know, climate science. And I think a lot of these claims come from the general kind of degrading and chipping away at the reputations of academia and science and institutions which which leads on to our next recurring theme.
Institutions are constant source of clients, both national and international, and this is not in a kind of healthy questioning of authority kind of way.
This is outright conspiracies and disinformation.
You take something like, you know, a body like the Australian Electoral Commission and the federal election we've got in in a few weeks. And of course, a journalist, we should never become complacent. But there is nothing to suggest that the AEC is, is anything other than a STR.
Neutral body concerned with running fair elections.
But the disinformation we see about the AEC every election is is relentless.
And that poses a significant problem for society when you know the body in charge of running our elections is subject to that, you know, level of disinformation. You know, we've all seen what happened in the US with the basis baseless accusations about the 2020 election.
So that's institutions.
Politics is next.
This is an obvious theme that runs through many of the others as well, and again, as journalists we should we should never be taking our eye off the ball.
But you know much of what is said.
About politicians.
About what they supposedly say about political processes and government is baseless and conspiratorial.
We obviously then have the politicians themselves and what they say, and that's obviously a lot of what we're doing at the moment during the election campaign.
And look, thankfully, we're not where the US is.
The US is at the moment, you know where you do have politicians presenting alternative facts and pushing out white falsehoods.
Look, I get it wrong there.
There are some in Australia that are moving in that direction, but generally the claims we see from our politicians are more nuanced, more misleading rather than kind of outright falsehoods.
You know, perhaps you'd call it political spin.
Now the claims come from the cherry picking of data, or from taking words and images out of context.
That's not to say it's not damaging, or that there's, you know, not a need to call it out. But thankfully, as I say, we're not where the US is at the moment and hopefully we are not going to get there either.
And perhaps a bit of a clumsy turn for this final category. But bad actors will use disinformation to target vulnerable groups of people.
Be it.
You know the transgender community, refugees, Jewish community, the Muslim community, and obviously there's a crossover with, you know, vulnerable groups and other recurring themes we've spoken about, such as such as crisis events.
So that's what we're seeing.
But who is behind it?
Who's making all these claims? And to answer this question, we had to ask ourselves why people were spreading misinformation, and we've consulted various experts on this over a number of years and they more or less narrow it down to these two main reasons. Money influence or a comb.
Of the two.
Now we did a bit of work in the aftermath of the Southport attack in England last year and spoke to several experts in the UK and Australia about this.
And I'm sure most of you will know about the Southport incident, but just quickly, this was a horrific attack in July last year in the UK town of Southport, a 17 year old walked into a Taylor Swift themed dance class and began attacking people.
Indiscriminately 3 young girls died and the teenager was arrested shortly after.
The.
Now, as previously mentioned, there was a vacuum of information in the hours and days afterwards, and that vacuum was filled by various sources, leading to numerous false claims and speculation about the attackers motives. Is immigration status is country of birth things he said at the scene? All sort.
And this in turn led to a series of, you know, riots in which mosques and immigration hotels were targeted.
So yeah, going back the experts we spoke to split those who had made the claims relating to South Thor into three.
Groups there were those with a direct ideological link to the disinformation.
Those without a particular link.
And attention seekers, those seeking attention now, this certainly struck a chord with us.
It matched what we tend to see in Australia with with crisis events and major kind of disinformation narratives in particular, we closely match what we had seen with Bondi stabbings just just a few months before. So I just want to take you through those groups in a bit.
More detail.
In relation to the Southport attack.
So firstly, there's those with the direct ideological motivation.
So in this case this was, you know, the far right anti immigration groups anti Muslim groups.
And you know, these groups were quick to jump on claims that the attacker was silent.
Seeker was was Muslim, had shouted Allah Akbar as he attacked the girls.
Now this was a crisis event that they could use to their advantage to push forward a specific agenda tied to the tied to the event.
The picture there some of you may recognises is well known far right? Agitator and thug Tommy Robinson, who was one of the main players.
Regarding the kind of disinformation around South Wharf.
The second group of those without a kind of direct ideological motivation linked to the disinformation, but but simply a desire to create discord and to to to build tensions and to split society.
So this is often where foreign influence and foreign powers come in.
I think there's a couple of a couple of months ago, the former head of the Russian desk at MI6 said that there was clear Russian involvement in this information that followed the South Pole attacks, which ultimately led to the Wiors.
Now, I don't think Moscow has any real interest in UK Border policies or, you know, crime rates in Southport or whatever. You know, the disinformation that was in the claims that were being spread at the time, but you know, it has an interest in destabilising a, you know.
A Western Power, when it's particularly vulnerable.
And that's exactly what the result was in this case.
And you can see the potential parallels here in Australia.
So the image there is.
A man called Simeon Boykoff, otherwise known as is Aussie Cossack, or Putin's man in Australia.
And he was one of the main spreaders of disinformation following the Bondi Steppings, and that's what he does.
You know, he doesn't hide his allegiance to to the Kremlin. He he agitates.
He tries to divide and stir up trouble and he's incredibly effective.
And the final group that our experts identified are those, you know, who don't really have an ideological motivation or a particular motivation disrupt.
They just like the attention, be it because they're vain or because they can monetize the situation. And in the case of Southport, this is where your Andrew Tate's of this world's come in.
It's about power. It's about influence.
It's about. It's about money.
It's about wanting to shock and offend and to have people talking about you.
And obviously Tate is the extreme end of this, but we see these types of, you know, attention seekers all the time in, in the MIS and disinformation that we see in Australia.
For example, it started pandemic.
You have these very kind of ordinary people with just a couple of dozen followers, perhaps, who started making a few videos railing against the lockdowns and restrictions and you know, I'm sure they're genuinely held views at the time.
And within a few weeks, they had amassed these amazing.
Following hundreds of thousands.
Well, not hundreds, thousands, hundreds or thousands.
Of people who were, you know, pretty much hanging on their every word.
Some tried to monetize it and have been very successful, but I think others just like the attention and you know what we noticed was that as soon as the pandemic died down, you know, they would switch the next thing, be it, you know, the voice of the par.
Or US politics.
You know, whatever they could show on the road and you know, potentially keep the money rolling in and stay relevant.
And of course, the disinformation following the Southport killings was central to what sparked the disorder, which then followed.
You know which is to say this this problem is not theoretical, it's an academic.
It's having real world consequences.
So that's where we are now.
But where are we going?
What are the major and emerging threats we're facing in in 2025 and beyond?
Well the 1st 2 on this list would have been on my list this time last year.
The third, however, is is worryingly new, and I'll go into them in a bit more detail shortly.
But yeah, firstly, not just their images, but our text generation audio as well.
There's foreign interference, which we kind of touched on a little bit in. Foreign interference often goes in hand with with the assistance of AI now as well. And finally big tech, whether or not big tech and social media companies are interested in doing anything about this at all.
Because yeah, we certainly need them on side if we're going to make headway here.
So AI, some of you may have seen this video before. It's it's weird.
It's a bit gross and it sticks with you, but there is reason for me showing it to you today.
So let's endure a little bit of it now.
There's ack.
Uncle Phil, come try this fresh pasta of Bel Air.
OK.
That's probably enough of that.
I'm not sure if you could hear the audio on that.
Give me a thumbs up or thumbs down just quickly if you could.
Thumbs up. OK, that probably makes it even worse.
Yeah, look, it's nightmare inducing stuff.
This dates back to March 2023 and was a result of someone using text to video AI to generate a montage. Using the prompt Will Smith eating spaghetti.
It's awful.
It's it's, it's cringey, but it's also rubbish, you know, the point being that you know, AI is not where it was two years ago.
It's not where it was six months ago.
It's getting better.
All the time and it's getting hard.
By comparison.
This is a polymer now.
Media literature campaign.
We did a few months ago and I'll play it quickly now.
Hopefully the audio will work, but if not, yes, you'll see a series of images and one's AI.
One's real and you have to guess which one is real and which is AI.
See how you go.
Can you tell the difference between a real photograph and an AI generated image?
Which image is the real photo?
What about these?
And these.
Which of these is real?
And which one here?
How do you think you did?
In every case the second image was the real photograph. AI is making it harder than ever to tell what's real from what's not.
That's why it's important to think carefully about the content.
Tricky, right?
I mean, some are easier than others, but you know, I certainly didn't get them all when when I did it.
And it's, you know, it's my job to spot these things.
So yeah, and I know they they're moving along quickly, but that is how people are viewing these things on their phones.
They're swiping through.
You know, they're taking things in a matter of seconds.
You know, the point being that we're no longer in the world of spotting 7 fingered people and missing limbs.
You know I can't tell you the amount of time we spend as a team poring over.
You know images genuine images.
Second guessing whether they're AI or real, and you know there's no quick fix at the moment. You know there's no reliable tool out there that gets it right 100% of the time.
And there's no consistency with, you know, the approach to, say, watermarking or anything like that so.
It is increasingly a concern and and and.
Certainly takes up a lot of a lot of our efforts.
Remind me, can you tell the?
But just as concerning if, if not more concerning, I think it is what AI can do for disinformation spreaders of text. Now this next example really hammered that home for me.
This here is a a man called Mohammed Shabaya Shakat.
I would be very surprised if anyone has ever heard of him.
There's no real need for you to know him, but weekend crossing when looking into several false or misleading posts circulating Australia relating to cultures last year.
We managed to track him down online and set up a zoom call with him.
You know, nice enough chat, 28 year old living in Lahore, Pakistan, studying at university.
But his side hustle was running a series of satire web pages, bumping out, you know, ridiculous stories.
Which, you know, preyed on people's prejudices, people's fears and and and generally, polarization in society.
You know, he pitched his work at Sattai.
But this is, you know, it wasn't satire as as you and I, you or I would know it.
He was adding the smallest possible satire label, which 99% of people were not seeing.
You know, in order to prevent the content from being factored.
But certainly most of those who are seeing his content were seeing it as if it was real and believe me to be real. And it's really good, you know, well written append as if you know, written by a journalist, a tabloid.
It had that sharp, catchy, concise kind of style to it.
And he happily told us about all the cash he was making from from driving ad revenue. As a result, to to to his website and other websites.
Uh, and it was relentless.
You know, story after story after story.
He pump these stories out all perfectly.
Kind of crafted.
And we asked him.
We asked him how he did it, how big his team was, and he said it was all AI generated.
He just put a few prompts into ChatGPT, and he'd get these perfectly crafted news pieces, perfectly designed to prey on people's fears, to prey on people's anxieties and prejudices, and ultimately to generate clicks and money.
You know, masses of content polluting the information environment just through a few prompts.
Five years ago to do something like this, you'd have needed a team of semi talented copywwwwers to put all this together. But today is the click of a button.
Point being, it's never been easier to be a spreader of disinformation.
AI will do the bulk of the work for you, and that is a major concern for us, particularly when it comes to when it comes to scale.
Moving on to foreign interference, now, along with AI, this is the other big threat. That's that's really kind of top of our agenda at the moment and I'm sure it has always been that, but we certainly more aware of it now.
For us, there are three main categories of claims we usually associate with with foreign interference.
Obviously there are specific events of interested to to the foreign power in question, so we had a lot from Russia on the Russia Ukraine conflict, for example.
Then there was a binary kind of a motive.
Topics we know there is making the claims that, you know, perhaps not interested in the topics as such, but they provide the perfect opportunity to, you know, drive a wedge and you know, create discord.
You take something like the voice of Parliament. We did not expect that to be the disinformation event that it was.
And look, we don't have anything definitive on this, but we certainly suspect that a lot of the claims that.
That we were seeing were coming from overseas.
Now say that was Russia or China or whoever.
Now I doubt they have had any interest in the, you know, the proposal for indigenous people to have a non binding say on matters relating to them. But you know, they had interest in creating discord in a, you know, Western democracy and what better way to do that.
Than to, you know, stir the pot in a binary. Yes or no vote, which is which is dividing a nation.
And then breaking news in crisis events, which we've kind of already spoken about, and this is particularly when there is that absence of reliable information.
It's the perfect.
In for for disinformation spreaders to to really make a really making an impact and pack a punch.
Now, sometimes it's easy to spot foreign interference, say the likes of Simeon Boykoff Aussie Cossack, who I mentioned earlier.
Now he doesn't hide his allegiance to Russia or Putin.
But he's incredibly effective.
But sometimes it is harder to spot.
For example, we started to receive emails like this several months ago.
All were from Western sounding names and and generally appears to be related to the Russia Ukraine War.
It was a little strange to be getting so many requests to check matters relating to the war, but you know we acted in good faith.
We responded to these people every time they contacted us.
You know, we even looked into some of the clients.
But we just kept getting them day after day after day, and while we were flattered that people were coming to us to ask for us to look at misinformation, something didn't quite add up.
So we sent a sample of these emails to a digital analysis company.
We work within the US.
And they looked into these emails and they tracked those who were sending them.
And came back to us and said they were located in a town about 40 kilometers outside of Moscow.
And it turns out we weren't the only fact checkers to receive such emails.
There were dozens of other organizations that received, you know, very similar and we still received them today.
I got one this morning.
And the intention is supposedly twofold.
Firstly, to distract us from from some of the claims, we perhaps should have been looking at in relation to the war and you know, potential war crimes.
But secondly, and apparently this has happened to other fact checkers.
The intention is to get us to write and publish a Fact Check, which they would then selectively translate and republish it and push it out to the Russian people and say, look, even the western fact checkers have said, you know, XYZ, whatever it may be.
But the point being, foreign interference is happening.
It is.
Here it is now.
And it's something we certainly need to be alive to.
Finally, on to big tech and social media. Now, as I previously said, we need big tech and social media companies to be on side if we're going to fight this X or Twitter as it was previously known, is a prime example of what happens when there is a.
Lack.
Of will from the from you know the social media platform. I think we can all agree that X is a bit of a Wild West.
And so I was looking at some research last week and look, it's all pointing in the same direction.
The EU did a major piece of work on this and found that, you know, by far it had a large proportion of disinformation of all the major platforms and just for the election last year it was estimated false or misleading claims from from Elon Musk late into the.
Election had been seen by 2 billion people.
You know that's not from all users across the platform.
That's just from the bloke who's running it.
Look, since master's come in, he's obviously slashed.
You know the trust and safety teams.
There's there's there's no relationship with fact checkers and he's reinstated.
You know, several known spreaders of disinformation onto the platform.
He's brought his trust into community notes to protect users against harmful content, but that is simply not doing the job.
I think that's clear to see and for those who don't know, community notices basically Crowdsource Fact Check in people like Denise the context.
Opposed they had corrections and and if enough people and the right people agree, then a note is added to to the post in question and look, it works pretty well for things like scams where there's this kind of consensus.
But the problem is that for a community not to appear publicly, there needs to be consensus across the political spectrum of other people.
Contributing to community nights, so anything relating to politics, to social issues.
Is to ending to the culture wars.
Anything like that is unlikely to ever have a community node attached to it, and that's why as you see there, I think it's just around 8% of community notes end up appearing on.
X and look the Trump in the White House and and you know.
Musk, supposedly having great influence over Trump.
You know the theories that this is more the direction social media companies will take.
I certainly hope that is not the case.
But yeah, if it if it does, that's that's gonna make our role. You know, a lot more, lot more difficult.
And that is that is a real concern for us.
So what can we do?
And look, make that mistake.
This this is a huge threat to liberal democracies around the world.
You know, a couple of things from the outset, I'd say there needs to be real joined up approach on this.
It isn't something fact checkers can solve alone.
It isn't something, you know governments or police can solve alone.
There needs to be joined up thinking and everyone needs to play a part in this, including social media companies and big tech.
Traditionally, traditional fact checking and and by that I mean D banks are a great intervention.
You know, I see is, is the firefighters, if you like, you know, putting out the fires as they pop up and before they get out of control, we kind of the last line of defense, but it does need to be more than that.
There needs to be public education, you know, fire safety if you like. You know, we need to educate people to spot the dangerous signs and to extinguish the flames before they get out of control.
You know, if you want to run with that and RG, we need people to encourage people to install smoke alarms. If you like to have an extinguisher at home and that is where media literacy comes in.
And is now a key component of what we do, and you know it's something which really there should be more of in schools and it's something that that really needs to be taught from an early age.
And look whenever anyone asks for my advice on media literacy.
It always comes back to the same process, the same three-step process that I talk about. And to be honest, it's quite often the disappointment to people that they want to hear about call online verification tools. We use an an AI detectors and things like that.
Which don't get me wrong, are useful, but for us the key to success is building in this three-step process into your everyday practices.
This is the basis of all fact checking and it is really is a one-size-fits-all.
Key to protecting against MIS and disinformation and it goes as follows.
So whenever you come across a piece of information, you should ask yourself 3 questions.
Firstly, who's made the claim?
Are they reliable?
What's their agenda?
Why might they be making this claim?
Why might they be saying this?
You know, they got an axe to grind.
Secondly, what's the evidence?
Have they provided any evidence?
Does it stand up scrutiny?
And finally, what do trusted sources?
Say.
And this is about reading widely.
Kind of breaking out of your algorithm bubble and and and cross referencing across various trusted sources.
For fact checkers, this can often be a long drawn out process, but it doesn't have to be.
And it can't be if it's, if it's going to work.
And look, as I said, this has to become kind of second nature to people.
So I just want to run through a really quick.
Example of using this in in real life and this is a claim.
We did a few weeks ago.
It was actually sent to me by a by a close friend.
Now this friend is university educated, although I fear he didn't listen a huge amount at university.
He has a good job, a young family. You know, he's not an unintelligent man, but he tends to get most of his news from some fairly questionable sources without applying even a basic media literacy skills, which isn't ideal, but.
The great sort of great, great source of content.
For, for for me Fact Check, as you regularly send things on.
Now he sent this a few weeks ago asking if I'd heard about it.
And the post dates as you can see that the ADL or the Anti Defamation League has declared Christianity as extremism, and anyone who follows or identifies as a Christian is a terrorist after the text that you may also be able to make out this, the Star of David.
In the Israeli flag, this is a reference to the ADL being a Jewish organization, we've set up more than 100 years ago. I think to to combat the rise of anti-Semitism.
Now this Facebook post also came with a screenshot to the ADL website.
So that was it for him.
He'd read it online.
He was there in black and white. You know, the world's got mad and the Western civilization etcetera, etcetera.
He was very happy to send this on to me and I feared he did the same with his other friends and family and this is how these things spread. Now what he should have done was go through that simple three-step process that would have stopped this dead.
In its tracks in a matter of seconds.
So let's let's do that now.
So first question, who's making a claim?
You can see here that it came from a group called Truth is power.
Now, for many that should set alarm bells off straight away.
But let's give them the benefit of the doubt and not judge a book by its cover and all that.
So a quick look at their Facebook page and the 1st post it comes up is is from Candice Owens, a well known conspiracy theorist and anti Semite who recently had a speaking tour of Australia cancel because the visa was denied.
But perhaps my friends didn't know about her.
The next post from David I perhaps well, most well known conspiracy theorists in the world.
And aside from those two, it post after post after post about Jews about the Jewish faith, many regurgitating well known anti-Semitic tropes of Jews running the media in the banks and being obsessed with money.
So that's 30 seconds of clicking and scrolling. We've got given ourselves a good idea of what we're dealing with.
Who's behind this client?
For most people, that would be enough to seriously question or even dismiss this.
But we'll move on to the second question in our in our three question process and that's what is the evidence.
Now, hopefully the folks to truth is power have told us that this is from the ADL. So quick Google of ADL and Christian identity and you have the page of which there's a screenshot on Facebook. You can see their Christian identity, extremism, terrorism and bigotry, but it soon.
Becomes apparent that it's more to the scrum and grab just as a view.
It's the rest of the page, some rather important detail.
So the ADL is not referring to Christianity or those who identify as Christian. Rather, Christian identity is a niche religious ideology, ideology and extreme right wing circles where Derance believed that the white supremacent of the superior race and the Jews of the satanic offspring of even a SER.
Also states that this group is carried out numerous acts of terrorism, particularly in the states.
So again, 30 seconds and we've identified and examined the evidence.
Completely debunking the stated claim, but let's not take the Adl's word for it.
Let's move on to our third step and look across a series of trusted sources.
Encyclopedia Britannica states Crucialise entity is very much a white supremacist group and anti-Semitic.
Next up, George Washington's University's program on extremism, talks of militants from the group engaging in terrorist acts since the 1950s.
And there, finally, the US Department of Justice again talking about promotion of paramilitary and racist activities in the name of fighting Satanism in contemporary life. So within just a few seconds, perhaps a few minutes.
Some research we can see this is nothing to do with Christianity or identifying as Christian.
This is a radical white supremacist group that engages in terrorist activity.
And for us, that three-step process is key.
It underpins everything we do at AP Fact Check is the key media literacy message. We try to get out there.
No matter who it is we're speaking to.
And look, it won't always be involved.
Is is that example I've gone through. You know, sometimes even just pondering those questions.
Quickly in your mind is all it takes.
Now it all it takes to kind of stop. Just pause and think about things and that's it.
We need this to become a habit the same way that you know, we look left and right before we cross the road or check our mirrors and blind spot before merging lanes.
These things keep us safe and we have taught those steps from an early age and now we just do them without thinking. Well, you know, this three-step process has to be the same. We need to process information.
Like this?
Without even thinking about it.
And yeah, that really is the change for us.
And that's that's the key to media literacy as we move forward, as we see it.
I'll hand over to questions now if there are any and I'll do my best to my best answer.
Rebecca Shaw 46:02
We've got a question here from Brandon.
Brandon Coffey 46:06
Hi, thanks.
That was a really good presentation and I'm sorry if you've already gone over this.
I had to step out a few times to take a phone call.
I just wanted to know if you just had any advice or tips around fact checking so you know for example, we've got the election coming up.
You know, every time I read something about Dutton has voted against this, and then you'll read something about Albanese has voted against that and then what I find happens is I'll read a lot of different articles and they'll all be quite.
Bias towards one one another, and I'd struggle to find out. Like what?
The actual truth is to to a lot of this stuff.
So just any tips or advice or any resources maybe you can suggest when fact checking?
Ben Jame 46:49
Yeah, I mean, again, it's difficult with politics.
There are.
There are some facts. There are some binary facts, but there's there's a lot of stuff that is, you know, you wouldn't perhaps call them.
Brandon Coffey 47:01
What's the best example to use?
Sorry as we know there is a lot of no truth in that one.
Ben Jame 47:04
Yeah. Then it has.
No.
Again, a bit repetitive, but for everything we we run through that three-step process that is our kind of framework for everything.
And yeah, it's I guess it was something like that.
It's knowing your trusted sources and having those trusted sources that you can that you can go back to and rely on.
And look, I am not suggesting that AI is perfect.
At all.
But for me, I find it a fantastic.
Starting point for anything like that.
I think it's increasingly, you know, more intuitive than the simple.
Francine Clough 47:51
I don't think I wanna play anymore.
Ben Jame 47:53
Internet Internet search and you can put.
Francine Clough 47:54
You need someone to play with you out there and I was still.
Ben Jame 47:57
Those you can put those questions.
Rebecca Shaw 47:57
Oh, sorry. Someone's just got their mic off. Yeah, thanks.
Ben Jame 48:02
You know you can put those.
You can put those questions into into ChatGPT and I'm not saying you should take that answer.
As read straight away, but it should be a start of your investigations and it is a good way of of trawling a massive information to to to hopefully get to an answer.
Yes. So I'm not sure that helps, Brandon.
Brandon Coffey 48:24
No, that's all good. Thanks.
Just wanted to hear your thoughts on it.
Ben Jame 48:25
Yes, it's very. Look, it's difficult as I say, the claims about politicians.
And planes leading into into election are are complex.
Brandon Coffey 48:35
In.
Ben Jame 48:36
It's it's probably easy in the US where there are some outright lies and outright falsehoods, and is perhaps a good thing that it's a bit more tricky to to check here.
Brandon Coffey 48:45
Yeah, you're right. Thanks, Ben.
Ben Jame 48:48
Thanks.
Rebecca Shaw 48:51
Has anyone else got any questions for Ben?
Often they come up after the fact as well, and I'm happy for put them in the chat and I can follow up after the fact.
Has anyone got one for now?
Francine Clough 49:03
Yeah. Hi, Sam. It's yeah.
Hi, Sam, can you hear me?
Ben Jame 49:08
Yep.
Francine Clough 49:09
Can you hear me?
Yeah. Hi, Sam. It's Francine here.
Yes, thank you for that presentation.
That's that's really interesting.
I suppose my question is, you know, relating to the young people who are, of course, you know, the clients of the countering extremism team.
Is it's very difficult to to address their information needs and also the reasons why they're sort of being motivated to do what they would do and think what they think.
I'm certainly.
At my age, who's on social media, I try and discern between what's fact and what's not. But I think that for my age, where I can discern between what's absolute rubbish and what's not, it's very difficult.
So how are we expecting young people who are coming through the ranks and also the next generation to know who to believe? And even though you have organisations like?
AAP to do some fact checking.
How quickly is that?
Because information now comes to us so quickly.
So quickly, if you have social media.
And I guess I'm wrong and I've listened to what you were saying, but I feel and it's certainly not as conspiracy theory that a lot of that misinformation.
Sure, it comes from the Andrew Tate's of the world, but it certainly comes also from the governments, from people such as Trump, from the Russians and so on, who have got.
Not so much monetary interest.
But certainly a political interest.
And they're the ones that are really influencing the young people to be against a particular religion or a particular culture. And you know, that's where the real issues lay right now.
Ben Jame 50:55
MMM.
Francine Clough 50:55
So what?
What is the solution?
Because I certainly don't trust the mainstream media anymore and what they might do it they may not report.
Facts or incorrect facts.
Sometimes they choose to just not report.
Support on things which in itself is creating bias, so I've made no secret of the fact that I am 100% committed to the Palestinian cause.
And yet I see that, you know, we are being doxed on social media.
We are being reported to our employees, which is the dcj um and so that political machine in those lobby groups are also very powerful.
Now I'm sure that if I was a young 14 year old, I probably could be a clight of the counter, you know, countering violence, extremism because of my views, which are against what mainstream political, you know, bodies say and the media says we've seen what's happened in Univers.
Recently.
Where students have been shut down, especially in America.
I mean, how far are we or how close are we from being like in America where we get arrested for?
For voicing our views and are they misinformed?
Ben Jame 52:17
There's a lot, a lot there and probably a lot of my.
Rebecca Shaw 52:18
I was gonna say a bit to unpack there for you, Ben.
Francine Clough 52:21
Yes, I know.
It's like, who do we believe?
Ben Jame 52:24
I think and there's probably a bit out of my price, my scope there, but in terms of you know young people, as I say, I think it just comes back to media literacy. I think it's so important.
It's it's not.
You know I'm 37.
Francine Clough 52:39
Yes.
Ben Jame 52:40
And I was not hit with, you know, the level of information daily from all manner of sources.
Is that the kids these days are met with, you know, they've all got phones, they've all got access to, you know, anything and everything.
And I just think there needs to be better education from from a young age to enable young people to be able to deal with whatever information they are met with and and and, you know, filter it and and dismiss it if needed. And you know work out what.
A good source and.
Work out the you know the disinformation narratives.
And things like that. And I think that just needs to be hammered into people from an early age.
I think that's the only way that that you can do that because as I say, look debunking is great and it makes it makes a real difference when we're working, particularly with a social media companies.
But yeah, there's there's a question of timeliness and there's, you know, we obviously can't catch everything.
So you need that.
You need those general skills.
That everyone has to be able to kind of do this stuff on their own effectively.
Francine Clough 53:51
See, but us as adults with the tools we're having difficulties, aren't we?
Rebecca Shaw 53:57
But the young people are actually more adept in understanding the tools. It's just.
Francine Clough 53:57
Yeah.
Rebecca Shaw 54:03
It's just that they need the early education and awareness. I think we've got time. Hopefully for there's a couple more in the chat. Ben, if we've got a few more minutes from Julia, what will happen if meta pools funding from AAP?
Francine Clough 54:07
Yeah.
Rebecca Shaw 54:17
Is there any way of further understanding the accreditation process for fact checking organisations?
What would be 3 recommendations?
Sorry for whole school approaches for schools in NSW to combat myths and disinformation.
Ben Jame 54:34
Yeah. So it's so quickly on matter. You probably would have seen early this year. So they have.
They're moving to a community notes system in in the US.
We that is just in the US for now and I hope that stays in the US or changes in the US back to a third party fact checking program.
Yeah, we're certainly kind of business as usual for now and and I hope that is, I hope that continues to the case. I think Community News is set to roll out.
Any day now, we were told.
Kind of March, April time. So we may start seeing that in the US soon.
What happens if Metropolis funding from AAP?
Well, look, we have numerous funding sources. You know, we have some fantastic partners with you know, Google and TikTok as well.
So we will, we will continue.
It obviously won't be ideal and.
You know it will reduce.
We'll have to find different ways to kind of have that impact.
But yeah, look, I hope it doesn't come to that.
I hope.
I hope they continue.
In terms of understanding the accreditation process for fact checking orgs, yeah. As I say, it's all done through the international fact Checking network, the kind of global body.
I it's been a while since I checked their website, but I imagine it will all be there.
There's there's a stringent kind of accreditation process we have to have to fill in every year.
So yes, I'm sure if you Google International fact checking network, they'll be all the details there.
And three, three recommendations for whole school approaches.
I mean, to be honest, I don't know exactly what, if anything, schools do in regards to media literacy at the moment, but whatever it is they do, they should do more.
And if they want to pay us AP to come in and do some, do some training, then we are ready and willing.
And the next question, what do you think about the proposed law to ban children under 16 from social media?
Yeah, I don't know. I it's.
I don't feel like I have looked into this enough to give.
A solid well thought out answer, so I am going to look it's interesting.
It's an interesting way to do it, whether they're still going to be able to get on some way anyway. I don't know how it's going to work, how it's going to be policed, so I'm not sure, but I don't know if banning them completely is the answer as.
I say I go back to me literally again.
I just think it's it's so important.
Kids are going to see this stuff anyway.
They just need to be able to process it and and.
You know, manage it in an effective way.
Rebecca Shaw 57:31
Thank you so much.
Ben, I really.
I'm sure we all appreciate you taking the time out. Such an important and very topical subject.
And like I said any more questions, please direct them my way.
After that, we'll let we'll give you guys back a few minutes of your afternoon.
Yeah, we'll catch you at the next webinar. Thanks guys.
Thank you, Ben.
Ben Jame 57:53
Thank you.
Brandon Coffey 57:58
Thanks guys.
Rebecca Shaw stopped transcription
How can we safely navigate the new landscape of misinformation? With the ongoing development of AI and global changes to moderation control policies, it has never been easier to create and spread false information.
Join Ben James, a seasoned journalist, editor, and author, as he delves into Australia's misinformation landscape. With over 15 years of experience in news organisations across Australia and the UK, Ben has been at the forefront of combating misinformation as the editor of AAP FactCheck since February 2022.
In this webinar, Ben will:
Learn about common misinformation themes and patterns, and understand how these false narratives can lead to radicalisation.
What makes our young people vulnerable to violent extremism, and what can we do about it?
What makes our young people vulnerable to violent extremism, and what can we do about it?
Campion, Kristy 0:00
Every time I log onto teams, I'm once again alarmed by how much I have to figure out.
Alright, so thank you all for coming and listening in today on some of the incredible work that I believe is being done by the ESP team, the ESU team and the ESP program with DCJ.
So I feel it's an incredible privilege for me today to be talking to you about the incredibly complex problem that is the engagement of young people in violent extremism.
I feel all too often we talk about this particular problem, or at least this problem is reported on, [um] with what I see to be a dangerous level of simplicity.
The idea of the good kid gone bad, the idea of the young person who was just born evil, the criminal extremist mastermind who was just waiting for their opportunity to do something harmful.
The idea that these young people have knowingly, willingly and deliberately turned their back on their village, turned their back on society and show this highly nuanced.
An in-depth, ideologically informed purpose, the idea that they are. Fundamentally, irredeemable [uh].
Destructive and willing to burn down the various society to which they were born.
These are some of the ideas we see when we when we hear about people discuss the engagement of young people in violent extremism. And as the work of Heather and her team will show, and this particular study will show, I believe, is that that sort of dialogue is fundamentally unhelpful for understanding why a young person would turn to extremism.
But more importantly, that it's fundamentally dangerous in our pursuit or in our quest to try and disengage young people from violent extremism is fundamentally unhelpful to think about them in such a way.
Heather Jackson 2:35
You’ve accidentally muted yourself, Kristy.
Campion, Kristy 2:40
Thanks for that, I will not press that button again.
I'm thrilled to be able to present the findings of the report undertaken with my colleague Dr Emma Colvin but also undertaken in close proximity with Heather and her team [uh] which was really about looking at the why.
Why the young people become involved in violent extremism, what are factors that are making them vulnerable, what are the factors of vulnerability that have contributed towards their overall susceptibility [um] and what does this mean for how we manage these young
people.
So [uh] when I'm talking to you today I'm aiming to [uh] leave 15 minutes for discussion and questions [uh] so basically I'll be presenting you with an overview of what we wanted to achieve, how we did it [um] and what we think we found that's particularly relevant [um] to contemporary Australia.
So the main intent of this research was I think really simple but really important and that was that we had to better understand the ways in which young people became involved in violent extremism.
[Uh] it wasn't simply a matter of [um] of casting blame, of making assumptions.
We needed a really evidence-based and [uh] informed way of understanding this problem [uh] and stepping away from I think some of the assumptions that [um] that abound both in our society but also in others.
This, you know the idea of this young person radicalising alone in their bedroom with you know, the happy family outside who had no idea.
Like those sorts of assumptions we wanted to get to the bottom of it and figure out actually what is going on.
[Um], so to do that we wanted to illuminate underrecognised factors that may have impacted their engagement.
What was going on in their lives, who was actually getting them involved in extremism, was it a self-directed quest [um], what was really going on there that informed their recruitment and their alleged radicalisation and we hoped that in understanding this better, and in an evidence [uh] based way, that we'd be able to provide recommendations for how we could [um] support these young people and the associated teams.
[Um] and get them you know [uh] reintegrating back with our society [um] in a way that's sustainable [um] fair and just.
So to do that, we [um] obviously we did the very academic thing where we read as much as we could.
So we conducted a review of the international domestic scholarship on the engagement of young people [um], and what we found very much in this preliminary stage was that the research overwhelmingly focused on the engagement of [um] young Muslims.
And this is very much in the international literature but it was also in the domestic literature as well [uh] the big gap was [um] was certainly around [uh] engagement by young people associated with extreme right-wing ideologies.
Or associated with as Heather indicated that mixed ideologies, where it wasn't really quite clear [um] you know [uh] the what their [um] immediate belief system was.
So that was quite a substantial gap but the other gap was [um] was actually about the young people themselves so for example, where people were [uh] looking at why young people would support the likes of Boko Haram.
[Uh] they were looking at it from the perspective of you they were focusing on the terrorist organisation to the extent that [uh] arguably what was going on in that young person's life was fundamentally being minimalised, trivialised or otherwise overlooked.
[Uh], so this sort of [um] starting point for our research was actually quite important because we realised “oh hang on, there's this substantive issue here”, which is when we talk about young people we're talking about them but we're not actually “engaging” with what's going on with them.
[Um], so that really [uh] was important because it highlighted to myself and Emma a blind spot [um] in the academic field, which could have implications for how the community sees this problem but also how they're managed [um] [uh] across departments.
So from that point we then reviewed files, [um] associated with young people [um] deidentified files associated with young people, [uh] who had involved, who had been involved or affiliated with violent extremism in any way.
[Uh], and we also conducted quite extensive interviews [uh] with members of the ESU so that was six plus hours of interviewing [uh] which was incredibly useful for us in terms of the very real challenges faced by practitioners in this space.
But also an extremely nuanced view of the challenges being faced by the young people that they were working with on a daily basis.
So what we were really interested in and I'm sorry for how this slide looks, I know it's a lot, but what we were really interested in was [um] the young person's context, what was really going on.
Were there mental health issues that perhaps hadn't been diagnosed or weren't perhaps being managed, was there some aspect there that could have indicated neurodiversity.
If so, what and what did that mean, were their experiences of trauma, and this one was an interesting one for us because we knew from the literature that [um] adults who were engaged in white supremacy, in particularly in the United States had reported a higher level of childhood trauma than people associated with the extreme left.
So that was interesting we wanted to know what was going on there [um] but also education what was going on [um] with school and socialisation.
So what was going on in their social lives but what this did is that gave us this idea of the young person [um] and what they were going through, which enabled us to go a little bit deeper.
[Um] sort of in a in a linear fashion so okay we know this young person has these [um] these challenges that they're facing, what else is going on and this is where the environmental factors came in.
Such as, were they exposed to violence, did they have experiences of violence were they had they committed prior offences, what did other aspects of their life look like, did they have friends, did they have secure family relationships [um], had their house just burned down, had they just witnessed a death, [um] was someone in the family terminally ill?
Like looking at the stresses [um] was really important for us to identify the cognitive opening that may have made them more [uh] vulnerable to recruitment or to being radicalised.
And also the educational outlook was really a matter of us saying, well what did the future look like for these young people.
Because that was really important in understanding well [um] you know the overall why [um] that we were really trying to understand there.
When it came to recruitment this was a bit tricky of course because the it's not like we were walking into a fully fleshed data set [um] sometimes there was a high measure of [um] unknown variables, but…
What we were really looking at was, what could have [um] impacted their being recruited into violent extremism.
So what were their exposures if we could identify any [um], what were the relationships [uh] who had approached them, had they approached someone, was it online?
And this is one of the things we see a lot of which is the idea that, you know all these young people are radicalising online.
Okay well is that true, [um] or was there an offline dynamic as well [um], were they seeking out extremist organisations or were they being sought out, did they know that they were being recruited or did they not?
And you know, in a context where we're seeing headlines [um] that are [um], for example indicating you know [uh] children as young of young as 10 are being [uh] recruited by Neo-Nazi organizations.
Okay well, did that 10-year-old know, [uh] that they were being recruited?
These were some of the questions that we had around recruitment, [um] and there weren't the answers that we thought there should be [uh] in the field of knowledge.
Which is why this [um] research was so important.
And finally we're looking at radicalisation, were they actually radicalised?
Because of course you can participate in violent extremism without being radicalised and that's a well established fact.
[Um] if they were being radicalised or if they were radicalised, how could we identify that?
[Um], and so basically what we were looking at there was their engagement with narratives, [um] the possession of material [um], and that was contrasted with.
What was happening in the environmental [um] and personal contexts, and of course we looked at networks.
So are the are young people [uh] being radicalised you know by shadowy International Terror networks?
Or was it someone around the corner, you know what was that interplay there between the domestic and the transnational [um] between the online and the offline.
So we started this research with a lot of questions [um] and quite [uh] fortunately with the support of [uh] the team and particularly through the interviews, we were able to come to a couple of conclusions that I think work towards understanding the engagement of young people in violent extremism.
So I'll start at the really high level of who were these young people [uh] that we were [um] trying to understand better.
So the first thing to say, is that they were a majority male.
[Um] so it was not possible for us to conduct a gendered analysis [um] of the data.
In terms of age, they generally were [um] between 13 and 27 [um] so a median of 19 years old.
Now what was [um] important I think to mention with this study, is our conceptualisation of young people [um] was from [uh] was from 12 to [um] to 24. Because that is generally speaking [um] according to [um] certain Australian guidelines the age of [um] of cognitive maturity.
[Uh], so we took a very broad view of young person which is why [um] I'll only [uh] occasionally refer to them as children and that's if I [um] if I'm um talking specifically about a certain age bracket.
In terms of where they lived, and this is the other thing we [um] we sort of find [um] particularly in some of the news reporting.
There's this idea that there are hotpots of extremism [uh] around Australia and that certain places just have to be worse [uh] than others.
And that [um] you know that sort of idea is contributed to by [um] by comments that would indicate all you know [um] the shadowy Neo-Nazi groups are you know gathering in [um] hotpots around Australia and saluting the flag and all that sort of thing.
Well actually we found that, [um], that realistically that there was [uh] considerable presence in regional areas and there was considerable presence in metro areas.
So it wasn't a matter of going yes well they're all from this one town you know, or they're all from [um] this one Community.
Really it was [um], it was both regional and urban so I don't think we didn't find that geography [um] in such a way was an indicator of really anything.
We did find the 41% identified as an ethnic minority [um] which is important for some of the context I'll be discussing [uh] next.
And many of these people had come to the [um] the ESU through referrals from primarily from police organisations such as AFP but also from the likes of corrective Services New South Wales [um] and a couple of others but [um] I'll make another mention of them later I think.
So [uh] generally speaking what did we find in terms of youth vulnerability?
So I guess the main thing to highlight is that there's been a lot of discussion around neurodiversity and young people [um] and of course there are certain aspects of neurodiversity [um] that could very well be manipulated by adult recruiters and that was something we went into this project with a really firm awareness of.
So what we found, was that [um] 17% had confirmed ASD diagnosis, but 29% there was suspected or [um] contradictory information around diagnosis relating to neurodiversity.
What we found almost overwhelmingly though, was comorbidity of factors so it was never just neurodiversity.
There was always [um] other situations [uh] and other challenges such as [uh] as Heather indicated, Oppositional Defiance Disorder (ODD), [um] ADHD as well, [um] all of those sorts of things were going on but there was also [um] considerable mental health challenges.
And this was very common [um] so this was about 60% [uh] so when I say mental health challenges I mean [um] anxiety, depression, suicidal ideation, [um] quite severe challenges in terms of mental well-being.
What we also found was a considerable number had experienced adverse childhood experiences.
So from memory this was around 70% of the young people and these weren't just minor adverse childhood experiences.
These were quite severe, so I'm talking [um] exposure to [um], to war, to severe acts of family violence, [um] sustained deprivation, poverty, witnessing death, incarceration, family loss, terminal illness in the family, [um] abuse was very common [um], child protection orders.
You know these were not just [um] trivial experiences these young people had had. [Um] they were severe [um], and when you compound that with mental health problems such as for example PTSD [um] or suspected neurodiversity, you've got someone who's extremely vulnerable.
[Uh] and that was only compounded by their experiences of victimisation, and this was [um] sometimes [uh] experiences of victimisation in the playground.
This was sometimes experiences in the home environment, [um] this was sometimes online.
You know this was a really [um] important thing to consider, is that these young people were not the good kid gone bad.
They were not [uh] you know, the children of affluence and privilege, they had struggled and that struggle was really obvious um in you know when we looked at the victimisation.
And then of course it was made much more complex by [um] education and socialisation, so what we found in looking at that particular context is that they [um] had indications of [um] being quite [uh] socially isolated.
You know again, these aren't the popular kid [um] surrounded by friends, this is people that really lacked secure attachment.
[Um] they had few friends [um], they had issues at school so there was reports [um] from teachers and that sort of thing in indicating um inability to focus or inability to conform, or to follow instructions [um], but also over half had been subject to bullying [um] or had [uh] bullied themselves.
So [um] been bullies themselves I should say.
So what we generally found was that there were multiple intersecting vulnerabilities present in the context of the young person that overall enhanced their susceptibility to violent extremism.
[Um] so this is important right because this sort of set the scene for us understanding.
Okay well, why extremism?
And why not a gang? Why not a cult? You know these were things we had to think of is why extremism.
And this is what led to the next aspect which was [um] the environmental factors.
The environmental factors led to the Recruitment and that led [uh] to the radicalisation.
So with when it came to their environment [um], what we really found was that [um] the cohort and I think Heather indicated this earlier, could really be split between those associated with [um] extremist forms of Islam [uh], and those [um] affiliated with extreme right-wing [uh] views or beliefs.
So we did find indications that they kind of knew what the ideology or the core beliefs of the ideology were.
That was stronger in the data, in the extreme right [um] young people more so than the [uh] violent Salafi jihadist young people.
But overwhelmingly, and so if we remember right that these young people [um] are experiencing all these challenges.
[Um] overwhelmingly we found that there was violence in their lives.
And this is important right because as Heather indicated earlier when we're talking about violent extremism, we're really emphasising the endorsement, the celebration or the engagement in violence.
Violence is typically seem to be an abnormal thing for most of us to use as a typical measure of conflict resolution.
And yet with these young people, what we found was that violence was every day.
It was normal [uh], so that was at home and that was elsewhere as well.
[Um] so there were [um] substantive indications [um] of experiences of the criminal justice system and prior offences.
So this is stuff this is activity [um] that had been associated with them.
And it's quite a high number of prior offences with both the [um] violent Salafi jihadist cases but also the extreme right wing one.
So we knew that they were getting in trouble right [um], and that trouble was at home, in their personal lives but it was also at school.
And we found a high level was struggling academically, now this impacted their outlook right, because particularly those sort of towards the end of their teen years [uh], and they're getting all that um information about how to progress into adulthood.
And for many of these young people their outlook was bleak [uh], they weren't doing well at school, they weren't doing well at home, they weren't doing well in their personal lives [um], and so there was this [uh] I think this overall indication [uh] that their future was quite bleak.
And this was only compounded by the insecurity and uncertainty that pervaded their lives.
[Um] so when we talk about [um] life insecurity, you know, I mean to the likes of [um] [uh] limited secure attachments, [uh] high stress situations such as of course as I mentioned, terminal illness in the family such as house burning down, such as being victims of violence and abuse.
[Um] there was a lot going on [um] in these young people's lives, and it was overwhelming in the data as well.
So that they were being caught up or subject to events that were beyond their control.
[Um] which led us to the next [um] consideration which was okay, well how were they recruited.
So recruitment was kind of surprising, so what we found [uh] generally speaking with the [um] with violent Salafi jihadist young people, is that 50% were directly recruited right.
[Um] so this idea of oh you know they [um] were um you know [uh] recruited online by some [um] anonymous person.
Well no, they were directly recruited from people in their home environment, people from their social environment [um], so direct family, direct friends, travel.
All of these things were really important exposure points for them [um], to become involved with these [um], with these beliefs and these organisations.
With the extreme right, we're looking at closer to 44%[um] family and directly by organisations.
So the role of the online [um] network, was not as persuasive as what we otherwise would have assumed.
Some of them moreover were deliberately and intentionally groomed for the purpose of recruitment, and again, when we're talking about such vulnerable young people [um], it was very clear particularly in the interviews with practitioners [uh] that they had been identified by groomers, by adult predators. that they could be manipulated, [um] and thus they were.
And then with some of the others, it was socialisation, these ideas, these beliefs had been in their family their entire lives.
Maybe Dad was a right-wing extremist, maybe [uh] their Uncle held really fundamentalist religious views.
It was not an unusual thing for them [uh], so there was also this unintentional dynamic where they were being socialised [um], and they and they didn't know that they were.
And this is something that came out of the interviews as well is that, if you were to sit down with these young people and say, “Well, why did you become an extremist?”
“Or how did you radicalise?
I wonder if they would be able to answer that [uh], because many of them seemed to [um] from the interviews with practitioners seemed to not be aware of what was going on.
All right, and [uh] so if we then [uh] pivot again to radicalisation, [uh] what we found there was there was really variable [um] evidence, with respect to how radicalise they might have been considered to be.
So some of them had really high engagement with material [um] as you can see, that's different depending on whether it was violence life of Salafi jihadist or extreme right wing.
Some had quite low engagement [um] but there was quite clear confluence between [um] the family context, so what was happening in the family, what the family's beliefs were [uh] and what the young person was subsequently identifying with or believing.
[Uh] and also that there was this [um] network that that extended beyond them [uh], so [um] overwhelmingly we did find that there was both online and offline networks in place.
So it was never just, okay you know, they logged on to YouTube and suddenly they're right wing extremists, that was not the case at all.
What [um], what it really showed was [um], unsurprisingly, young people are online, as we are right now right?
Being online is not in it of itself a problem [um], but what we found is that they had both online and offline engagement.
So sometimes it started offline and went online, sometimes it started online and went offline [um], but it's important to really emphasise that [um], that in their search for community, or in their search for belonging, in their search for secure relationships in their lives [um], that the internet itself was not the only thing that was going on.
There was also this online aspect there [uh] offline aspect sorry
[Um], so what we really found with respect to the overall question of why? Why are young people uh coming to support violent extremist organisations?
What we found [uh] really relates to that context that I discussed earlier, [uh] they are living insecure lives, [uh] they don't have strong attachments, [um] they're not getting the support that they need [uh] within their particular context, with [um] within families, within friendship groups, and so extremist ideologies irregardless of whether [um] they are extreme right wing extreme, left wing [uh] or violent Salafi jihadist, were offering them something that they couldn't get anywhere else.
It was offering them belonging, acceptance, validation.
The really unfortunate thing about the trials of these young people is that extremist ideology was making them feel good about themselves.
And I think that really highlights a problem that we experience or that we're experiencing right now particularly with young people in Australia which is this alienation [uh] from the broader society, [um] to the point that they’re having to search for belonging in extremist communities that in some ways just seek to manipulate them, to achieve goals.
And of course, because these young people came from environments where violence was so normal, [um] violence that they had received from supposed caregivers, violence that they had perpetrated, [uh] you know, that they didn't look at [um], there wasn't the evidence there that suggests that violence was an abnormal thing in their lives.
For many of them, violence seemed like the average Tuesday, and so when we're thinking about democratic values and we're thinking about, “oh why these young people [um] engaging in violent extremism?”
Well, violence in these contexts is not the abnormal thing, [uh] they are victims of violence and they are perpetrators of violence.
[Um], so the permissive attitude towards it [um], both in their home environment [um] or in their social environments or where it may be, was a really important consideration [uh] to have.
And again very much debunks that idea that these are the children of privilege and affluence, they absolutely weren't.
Returning to the online, offline dynamic - so we didn't identify a single pathway [uh] through recruitment, we didn't identify a single pathway towards extremism.
There were so many different [uh] engagement pathways that we were able to identify [uh] but, I think when we're dealing with a younger cohort what we really have to be aware of, is the fact that the internet is part of the everyday.
[Um] it doesn't help us [uh], to simply say, “Okay well, we just need to get them offline.”
Because often, offline environments were quite important to their engagement in violent extremism.
So we found, [um], there that that there were really free form engagement environments.
There was a bit of online, there was a bit of offline, friends were involved, sometimes family were involved, sometimes shadowy people online were involved, and it was really important that we kept an open mind about what [um] a young person had been through.
And also of course [um] highlighting, the role of both foreign networks that young people have had for whatever reason come to admire, but also the importance of family, which is that, some of them were exposed because of vectors within their family.
Perhaps it was an uncle, perhaps it was [um] a you know, a parent [uh], but the idea that they were radicalising in their bedroom and their family had a totally different value set, it just wasn't really supported.
So what we wanted to do was understand ways that we could help [um] disengage [uh] young people from violent extremism, and I'm aware that I'm at time, so what I'll just really briefly highlight with this slide [uh], is that our overall finding was that [uh] we need to be really cautious in how we seek to understand the engagement of young people in violent extremism.
We cannot treat a 10-year-old or an 11-year-old [um] with lifelong stigma for a mistake they made while so young.
We really have to think about what comes after engagement with extremism, and if we're going to make that engagement with extremism a life sentence, then what we're really doing is making it fundamentally impossible for young people to properly disengage from violent extremism.
Some of the issues that they face include things such as stigma, include things such as [um] broader society and indeed even academia not understanding why they got involved with violent extremism to begin with.
[Um] so supporting a needs-based approach, supporting trauma informed approach and supporting [um], an approach that highlights the tolerance inherent to democratic values [um] but also supporting and showing them, that a fair and just community is one that accepts that they made mistakes [um], accepts that they've made their amends, accepts that they have engaged with programs to disengage and welcomes them back in.
At the end of the day, exiling young people and [um] submitting them to a lifelong rejection from their community is not going to convince them [uh] that they are welcome to that community and that they're part of it.
If anything, that's just going to reinforce behaviours that [uh] encourage searching for community and belonging [uh] in violent extremist milieus.
So, I'm aware at time and I do apologise for going over, I I hate being [um] the typical academic that can't stick to a clock, so I'm happy to clarify these points [uh] in the questions.
Shaw, Rebecca 34:19
Thanks Kristy.
I think we're happy to open it up to the group, we do have a couple on the chat.
Someone was asking over what time period was the sample collected for the clients, and how many files.
I do believe we weren't [um] releasing that information but can you answer that partially for us Kristy.
Campion, Kristy
Yeah [uh], so the research period itself [um] sorry it feels like um a decade ago, it was in fact last year.
So I think we undertook the project between [uh] July to September, I think it was.
So yeah, it's quite recent [um] and of course some of the [um] outcomes of this are still in peer review as well so [um] still yet to be released.
Shaw, Rebecca
Okay and we've got one, was there a correlation between low SES and VE?
Campion, Kristy
So I'm not sure if I would call it a correlation [um], but what we did find is that with some of the young people and I apologise I can't remember the exact [um] percentage, they could be described as living quite close to the poverty line.
[Uh] now, that's not all of them but it certainly was [um] a considerable number of them.
Some of them as well sort of just building on the low SES aspect [um] had also[um], had experiences that could have [uh], resulted in their removal from the family home [uh], if an intervention had been conducted by another department and perhaps sooner.
Um so yeah, but some of them, those who had [uh], been removed from the home at one point were often later returned to the home as well.
[Um] again, before their engagement [uh], with this with this program, so considerable indications of [um] of [uh], I guess relative deprivation I suppose you could call it.
Shaw, Rebecca
Okay, and anecdotally, the echo chamber effect associated with social media.
So the ability for a small proportion of people to create a community without [um] the moderating balancing effects of their views being in the minority in the general community is often cited, was there any support for this from your research?
Yeah, that was a mouthful. [laughter]
Campion, Kristy
I appreciate it [uh] so great question, and definitely something that [um] that I'm happy to talk to.
So generally speaking, [uh] with the echo chamber what we actually found wasn't so much [um] engagement with an extremist echo chamber necessarily, but actually immersion in an extremist ecosystem.
[Um] so this is where it wasn't necessarily a fact of [um] their only engagement is online, they're going online and they're just being inundated with its extremist material [um] and they in turn [um] [uh] you know, reposting, retweeting, re-sharing whatever the case may be, we didn't find that.
[Um] so what we did find was that[um], that there you know where there was engagement online [uh], there were again anecdotally instances of young people um being involved in spaces that weren't actually extreme, [um] or would be what I would consider to be extremism adjacent.
[Uh] sometimes they did [uh] create and lead their own extremist community online as well, that was very rare [uh], but more often than not, what we identified was [uh] extremism in the family or in the social [uh] in the social group [uh], or [um] proximity shall we say to [um], to extremist cells within their immediate offline environment.
[Um] and that in turn led to that online curiosity but also there were occasions where we did see, “okay this person [um] was online”, [um] this was a lot rarer, they were online, they were [um] engaging with this person online but then they met them offline, and they immediately took the relationship offline as well.
[Um], so the idea of the echo chamber [uh] didn't really manifest within our research, it was much more complex than that.
It was much more about the immersion in an ecosystem rather than simply they're online and they're hearing the same thing from everyone.
Shaw, Rebecca
Thanks Kristy.
And Tamara, did you have a camera, [uh] Tamara did you have a question for Kristy?
Tamara
Yes I did, sorry it was a bit too complicated to write it in the chat.
[Um] I just wanted to know just [um] thoughts around in a school based setting [um] when we hear we don't want to tell young people what to think, what to read, what to believe in, [um] but if we are hearing students voicing for example extreme right wing [um] views and beliefs [um] publicly willy-nilly out in the school playground [um] and when we discuss those beliefs with them in a way that suggests that in our school setting we need to respect all people that come.
And we want to value everybody's beliefs, but the students feel that they're being shut down, and they're being prevented from having an opinion – “How can as a school we provide [um] you know, some strategies or systems for students to feel that they're being heard, that there's someone that they can talk to and talk about their views in a safe way?”
…”[um] that also helps them to understand how to interact with others and how to [um] respect that there will be differing opinions [um] and you know, when do we sort of get nervous or worried about how much [uh] these views are being sort of spoken about in in our settings, and in our [um] classrooms and playgrounds that maybe causing offence, or even generating some fear [um] that something worse could happen from this student?”
Campion, Kristy
Yeah, I appreciate that that's [uh] a really [uh] really difficult challenge that many people in the education system are currently facing and [uh], and I'm very aware as well of [um] the unpredictability of it – “When do we know if a young person is just [uh] saying things to get attention [um], in order to galvanise some sort of response, or when there is a genuine violent threat there?”
That that is a really tricky thing [uh] to identify, and I'm not sure I've got [uh] the best answer for you there.
[Um] in regards to the first part of the question, how do we manage or how do we handle young people [um] and promote that sort of [uh] pluralism, or you know tolerance of other people's beliefs without them feeling [uh] attacked or shut down?
[Uh] not to not to [um] pass the buck here, but I do think the best people to talk to about that is Step Together with Heather and her team [uh], because this is the sort of conversation they had have all day, every day.
And [um], I think it can and does vary based on both the ideology and also the young person, but what I would suggest [uh], and this is just sort of off the back of our research, is when there is a young person that is showing those sorts of behaviours or saying that that sort of [um] [uh] that those sorts of things.
It always is important to consider ‘why’, [um], so what is actually going on in that young person's life?
Because one of [um] one of the cases we looked at, it was quite clear that young person [um] who was seemingly advocating Neo-Nazi ideology, had very little understanding of Neo-Nazi ideology.
[Um], but what they were actually experiencing was that they were subject to such [um] such challenging, personal circumstances as the victim of abuse, that they were just terrified of being bullied at school.
And so the adoption of the Neo Nazi persona, was in that instance [um] identified as a way that they were trying to protect themselves [um] so it's never [uh], as simple as what as what we hope it would be, [um] because in this particular case, this young person honestly I doubt they could have picked a neo Nazi out of a lineup [um], and yet they were walking around telling everyone they're a neo Nazi because they thought, “well, if I'm big and I'm scary and I'm tough, no one will mess with me and then maybe school is the one place where I’m not going to have to put up with [uh] being treated poorly.”
[um] So that's just one example, but [uh] one of the things I would encourage is really [um] finding out what's going on with them at home, [uh] because these beliefs are often connected with that sort of context.
[um], I I don't think [um] it's necessarily a case of them [uh] being [uh] born evil so to speak.
[um], when to get nervous, [uh] that is really [um] challenging [um], a challenging question, [uh] you know, at what point do we intervene?
And again, I think engaging with the Step Together program is I think, the first step in planning [um] the appropriate management strategy.
I think confronting young people and saying, “well, you can't believe this or you can't do that” [um], is not going to be [um] met with a positive reception, and may actually harden their position as well.
So working with um ESP and their team, and getting that better understanding about what's happening in that young person's life, uh those are the best ways to inform a management strategy for that young person.
[um] But the really tricky thing is doing it in such a way as that they're not feeling like they've been labelled as the bad kid, [um] that they're hopeless and that they're irredeemable, [uh] because I think that sort of [um] stigmatisation will actually [um] will actually [uh] firm up their engagement with that extremist [uh] community.
So sorry, there's no easy answer to that one.
Shaw, Rebecca
Thank you so much Kristy.
We are sort of at time and I do notice there's a couple of [um] other really good questions here that, if you don't mind Kristy I might throw to you after the fact and get back to [um], the people [um] [um] as soon as possible if that's okay.
[um] Because I would like to just put up a last slide with some contact details so that if you do have further questions you can.
So Kristy if you want to just [um] stop sharing for a second, I'll just wrap up for
everyone.
Campion, Kristy
Sorry I thought I already was no longer sharing.
Shaw, Rebecca
My bad, [um] okay.
Oh I've gone to the beginning sorry guys.
[um] Yeah so obviously that's a wrap for today.
[um] Thank you once again to everyone for joining us.
[um] If you would like to know more about our ESU programs, please do see our website listed here.
[um] Community engagement and sharing knowledge and education obviously plays a really important role in preventing and countering violent extremism.
We can present on violent extremism and our programs right across New South Wales, so if you do see an opportunity for us to present please do reach out to myself [um] also listed on this slide.
[um] What we're seeing throughout all parts of New South Wales is vulnerable people and especially vulnerable youth and so we all do need to work together for the shared goal of community safety.
What makes our young people vulnerable to violent extremism and what can we do about it? Young people are increasingly being targeted for recruitment by violent extremist organisations and individuals.
Join Dr Kristy Campion as she looks at how young people are exposed to violent extremism, and what makes them vulnerable.
Kristy is Senior Lecturer and Discipline Lead of Terrorism Studies at the Australian Graduate School of Policing and Security, Charles Sturt University. In 2024, she was named top researcher in her field.
In this Webinar we introduce Clinical Psychologist Dr Vicki Gibbs. Vicki is Head of Research at Autism Spectrum Australia (Aspect).
In this Webinar we introduce Clinical Psychologist Dr Vicki Gibbs. Vicki is Head of Research at Autism Spectrum Australia (Aspect).
okay we might kick off um just in the interest of saving time for everyone uh we're qu we're quite rushed today Vicki has condensed her presentation into an hour for us it usually goes for a little bit longer um but yes good morning thanks everyone for joining on a Monday at 10:30 um as always uh we appreciate your time we begin our webinar by in the traditional custodians of the land on which we meet today and pay our respects to their Elders past and present we extend that respect to our original and Tor straight Islander people here
today again Vicki has already um reduced her presentation so I'm just going to introduce our speakers quickly and um then get moving Heather Jackson we'll briefly provide you with some context today as to why we've been working with Vicki Heather is the director of the New South Wales engagement and support unit Heather has been involved in C since 2016 with a focus on client reintegration into the community and cve disengagement Heather leads three CV programs in New South Wales to provide support and structured case management to people vulnerable to or who have engaged in violent extremism Heather also provides advice and support for teams to implement intervention Pathways and deliver community and stakeholder engagement programs Our Guest today is clinical psychologist Dr Vicki Gibbs Vicki is head of research at autism spectrum Australia or aspect and has almost 20 years experience in the field of autism spanning diagnostic research education well-being employment and criminal justice I will moderate any questions that come through the chat today but because we are time poor um I think a lot of it will be covered off during the presentation and anything that isn't covered off uh Vicki has kindly offered to answer via email after the fact so I will send that information across to anyone who has outstanding questions I'll also put a slide up with my contact details at the end and so will Vicki so you can um follow up with either one of us um also noting again that we are recording so please keep your mics and um videos off um okay I'm going to share my screen and hand over to
hither thanks be um thanks everyone for joining us I know Monday morning A lot of people are catching up on emails and trying to recover from the weekend so I really appreciate um the people who have been able to attend we have been noticing in cve um and even some more of the broader um criminal justice elements the increase in um understanding the vulnerabilities and early interventions of people with neuro Divergence and we're very grateful for Vicki um Coming uh to talk to us today she's been doing a lot of work in this um Arena and she is one of our um guest speakers at our cve master class that we've run for cve practitioners what we've really seen in cve and and anyone that's sort of been involved in CV or even broader is that we're seeing a lot of domestic and international recognition that neurod Divergent people are showing vulnerability to Violent extremism and what I mean by that is what we're seeing in terms of uh the clients that are getting referred to the engagement support program and other programs whether it be in the correctional system or even in in broader um interventions is that we are seeing especially over the last 12 to 18 months uh a quite a few people that have been referred to by law enforcement that have been either diagnosed or later get diagnosed with um on the as of neurode Divergence and what we're really seeing in law enforcement is that they're noticing that these particularly young people are quite vulnerable to different aspects of violent extremism and thankfully they're diverting them to intervention programs rather than moving on to criminal charges noting their vulnerability some of the key aspects in neuro Divergence and vulnerability and Vicky will talk more on it is that some people in neurod Divergence have quite a fixation a fascination and intensity in a specific subject matter and this can lead them to influences of violent extremism and some of the examples we've got there is some young people or some um neurod Divergent people can be very fixated on things like military Warfare they can be quite fixated on things like symbolism um and that sort of really leads them down especially on the online environment where a lot of neurode Divergent people feel more comfortable and they can be sort of really in their sort of search Pathways and their interest Pathways they can be really attra um they can get attracted to um certain areas online that have nefarious means for more violent extremism um ideology and more violent extremism rhetoric and it's really clear and it's really important to show to state that not all neurode Divergent people are vulnerable to terrorism and for those that joined us in the previous webinar with Christy Campion and the vulnerability of young people in cve it really showed that neurod Divergence by themselves was not the only risk not the only mitigating factor of vulnerability um what was more prevalent was in terms of trauma background trauma and child adolesence violence in the homes um adverse childhood experiences mental health so neurodiversity made up one of many components of vulnerability so what we don't want to do is label um neurode Divergent people possible vulnerable to terrorism but we need to call it out that there is that aspect of vulnerability there that um we need to be able to be sensitive to approach and be informed about and really understand how that person Works in terms of their brain in terms of being able to work with the young person or the adult and being able to be able to be sensitive and inform form Med in terms of our interventions and I think just as importantly how do we support the family and other support services around them to help them guide them away from those fixations from those Pathways to Violent extremism so without further Ado I'd really like to thank Vicki for joining us um ask as many questions as you like I know that we are time poor but um it's a really interesting context and I hope you enjoy the webinar and thank you for joining us
thank you um yeah so we'll just get right into it so this is a focus on autism just on to the next slide thank you yeah so I'll just give you a very brief overview of autism just to kind of look at it from what we know currently kind of a modern understanding of autism because I think there are still some quite outdated Notions around autism floating around um then focus on what do we know about autism and radicalization from the research and also um what do we know about working specifically with autistic people in the cve context which as you'll discover as we go along isn't too much uh so then we'll fall back on to where we know a lot about um and that's to do just with General strategies for enhancing communication and managing distress because that's going to be useful in any context so yes just briefly an overview of autism next slide so of course it's a developmental condition and it affects how people communicate learn behave and interact with the world around them um current best estimates are somewhere in the range of at least one in 40 it's a moving Feast it's going up um and it has gone up consistently for the last 10 to 15 years like when I was in started at aspect it was one in 170 and it was 19 years ago um so and of course there's a lot of discussion about is it really going up or are we just more um aware and diagnosing people that we wouldn't have in the past um people do tend to lean towards the latter we are more aware we've got better diagnostic um screening tools we're diagnosing more people of color and adults and females all of whom potentially were missing out before but I don't think we can say it's case closed in terms of is there something else that's actually creating more autistic people so we're not too sure about that certainly awareness is accounting for a lot of it but I don't know if that's all of it um more boys than girls are diagnosed with autism again this racio is going down so 15 years ago it was like 10:1 now 3:1 um with a caveat there that I'm saying more boys than girls are diagnosed whether that actually means there are more autistic boys there are autistic girls the jury is out on that too is it that we're just not recognizing girls are or is there some female protective um effect where girls are less likely to be autistic than boys um but we're certainly getting better at recognizing autism in young girls because it does present subtly differently as to what causes autism um it's still being investigated we know that genetics is playing a huge role and we know that very clearly from Twin and family studies so you know for example if one identical twin has autism the chance that their ident identical twin is also autistic is like 80% which is certainly way higher than um in the general population but it's not 100% so we know there's something else going on some other triggering some environmental and we're not too sure what that is there are a number of things that have got more evidence than others so things like older paternal age um things like uh maternal uh problems during pregnancy there are a few links to that as well but again um no firm ideas around definitely what causes Environ what the environmental factors are uh next slide and autism as a spectrum condition um we've really come to understand autism in that sense of being on a Continuum so back in 2013 that was reflected in the DSM the diagnostic statistic iCal manual where we went from categories of autism so you know you will be very familiar with the term Aspergers you may be familiar with the term pervasive developmental disorder not otherwise specified um and then autistic Disorder so we used to have categories and we learned that that doesn't really um reflect what the reality is um the reality is that autism is on a spectrum you can't really draw these lines and put people into these different boxes of autism so in 20 2013 we went to autism spectrum disorder to to be the umbrella term and then people are somewhere kind of on that Continuum um and also people are affected in different ways across all of the characteristics of autism and then to add complexity some autistic people have really significant language um and learning difficulties and others don't have any of those and then we know that common uh there are common co-occurring conditions which can change I guess the profile of that autistic person so if you have an autistic person who has major anxiety um and severe depression that's obviously a different profile than somebody who's autistic and doesn't have any mental health problems um and then falling down from all of that how we support an autistic person it can be very different from one to the other so you need to understand their autism and how they're affected by that whether they have co-occurring language learning difficulties because obviously you have to cater for that if you're trying to communicate with them and whether they've got mental health issues that are feeding into what's going on for them as well so all of those things need to be considered and if someone's doing a diagnostic assessment they really should be painting that picture of that person because knowing that a person is Autistic or not really isn't telling you too much for all of the above reasons so we'll just go to the next slide so having said that there's all these variations in in autism and how autism can present of course there has to be a unifying um part of autism in that in order to receive a diagnosis of autism you have to have these two um difficulties differences if you like so these are the core diagnostic criteria for autism and that's differences in social communication and social interaction and differences in terms of what we call restricted and repetitive Behavior so in order to receive a formal diagnosis someone has to have evidence of of both of these areas um we don't quite know why they go together um because they're quite separate um I guess buckets of issues but we know that they do go together and when someone has both of these kind of buckets of issues going on that's that's autism um we'll just go to the next slide and that enlarges a little bit on on what we mean by social communication and social interaction differences again um how this presents in autistic person can vary but the sorts of things we see is that they may for example um prefer to spend more time on their own than typically developing people sometimes that's because the environment is difficult for them but other times it's because it's a preference um to non-autistic people the way they behave can appear odd they can appear potentially over friendly or potentially disinterested socially and people perceive them to be socially inappropriate or rude because of the way they kind of conduct themselves because of those reasons find it very hard to form friendships um often Mis misunderstood by non-autistic people and they certainly often have marked difficulties either using non-verbal communication to communicate and by that I mean eye contact facial expression gesture tone of voice all of those really important ways that people get their message across um again we don't quite know why but for a lot of autistic people none of of those things come very naturally so they can have quite a want of a better word kind of wooden um communication style where they're not conveying a lot of AFF effect and some autistic people are a particularly women are not too bad with their use of nonverbals but often struggle to read other people so they're not really picking up on cues that other people give by their tone of voice um by their facial expression so that reading and using nonverbal communication is a really um key element of autism that we look for when we're diagnosing autism and next Slide the restricted and repetitive behaviors that I mentioned this um is quite a disperate group of different things and they all fall under this umbrella and an autistic person wouldn't necessarily have to show all of them but they have to show at least some um and the sorts of things we look for is a strong preference for sameness and routines um can be a bit rigid black and white in their thinking um engage in repetitive movements and that might be repetitive body movements hand flapping is a classic one in small children but an older people sometimes um pacing um or repetitive play and sensory differences are very common amongst autistic people being over sensitive so finding noise lights um certain smells very aversive or on the flip side seeking out a lot of sensory stimulation and of course as mentioned earlier some autistic people have really intense highly focused interests or passions that they will devote a lot of time to develop a lot of expertise in that's not necessarily a problem can actually lead to amazing things and careers um but it's a characteristic of autistic people that they can get highly focused on certain things and as we'll talk about later sometimes that can um create some issues in that sphere that you're working in so next slide as I mentioned before communication varies greatly among autistic people all the way from non-verbal um or using very few words and I'm talking even in adulthood um up to being highly fluent communicators I would has it a guess that most of the people you would come across would be people with at least average language ability um and having said that even people who have who are highly fluent and on the surface have got um you know good expressive receptive language they have got some unusual language features and one that stands out is they often take things quite literally so Expressions that we might use like you know it's raining cats of dogs or I saw red um those sorts of things can be very confusing to an autistic people the person who takes language kind of face value things like humor jokes you know sarcasm these expressions and idioms that we use can be very confusing for Artis itic people um and so for some autistic people understanding abstract Concepts especially things around emotions and um thoughts and um other people's perspectives can be quite difficult as well even when they have got good language next slide because of this variation in autism and how it presents you may see and if you get reports with people that you're dealing with in their diagnosis they may be given a level um um level one up to three and really just reflecting the I guess the level of support that the diagnostician has decided at the time that that person needs so level one being the lower levels of support and level three being very high levels of support um I would again has it a guess that most of the people you would be coming across would be in this level one group who prior to 2013 would have gotten that Asbergers diagnosis uh next slide and important that we don't overlook the many strengths that can come along with autism um we know that autistic people can have incredible attention to detail um very good visual perception skills um some autistic people incredibly creative and artistic some people have great mathematical technical abilities as we said before interests or expertise in really Niche areas because they spend a lot of time learning about it and focusing on it um they also have character strengths autistic people by and large are pretty honest and loyal what you see is what you get type people they don't often have much capacity for things like manipulation or deception um and for many they have quite a strong sense of justice of right and wrong and lots of autistic people have got fantastic memories especially um for facts and that ties into their interests in these areas where they actually can become quite expert at certain things next slide and just I thought it' be nice rather than just me kind of giving the cold hard facts this is a bunch of young people from the UK talking about how they describe um autism so just have a bit of a listen to them Vicki just let me know if you can't hear the sound on this it should by all means work
okay not so much no sound yeah I mean I wonder if you can copy paste the link down there in YouTube into your browser and maybe it'll work straight rather than yep I'll do that for everyone yeah that could work sorry
everyone maybe not I thought it might have just been because it was embedded in the in the SL in the is that not working no it's kind of buffering a bit yeah look I'm sorry guys we did do some testing on this earlier I'm just going to um we will um what I'll do is um Vicky I'll put these two uh the two films in the um the chat yeah yep
um yeah it could be an internet because it's buffering it's not just it might be too big there were really really big files in the thing I'm sorry everyone let me just bring my PowerPoint back
up
okay I've lost my mouse
sorry SL
show from current slide oh didn't like the current slide one sorry
everyone oh go from here Vicki um I think you need to share your screen oh I was oh
yep lovely Okay Go Okay lovely so autism and radicalization what do we know from the research uh next
slide so I guess there is an ongoing debate if you like about um you know are autistic people more likely to be radicalized especially in an online environment and become involved in um you know terrorist related activities and I think a lot of that has been drawn from you know media cases so you know if an autistic person is caught up in these sorts of events typically the fact that they have autism is mentioned you know and so people do begin to question and there certainly have been some high-profile cases where autistic people have um become involved and there's just some um newspaper headings when I just did a quick um search that came up if we go to the next
slide these three are pretty high-profile cases in different countries across the world so that um Nikki Riley guy was an 18yearold from the UK um been diagnosed with Asbergers and he' really struggled socially all his life and then developed a fixation on terrorism and martyrdom that was his special interest he converted to Islam he got really obsessed with the 911 attacks um ended up befriending radicalized individuals online and these were probably the first and best friends he's had in a long time um so you can see how kind of appealing that would be to him and he ended up planning a suicide bombing at a restaurant um he made bombs he strapped them to his chest he went into the bathroom this restaurant and he activated the bomb but um probably thankfully for people in the restaurant he had trouble opening the bathroom sto door and then the bomb exploded before he walked out so he was really badly injured nobody else was um and then he was he ended up going to prison of course and he took his own life in prison a few years later so that was a very kind of high-profile case in the UK this young man pton prent was a very different um case in the us he was diagnosed with autism but he had a pretty significant intellectual disability as well like he was in a special school um and he ended up again spending excessive Time online got fixated with terrorism and was um talking to extremist groups online and then he ended up arrested in 2015 for sending bomb making instructions to someone he thought was Isis but actually was an undercover um FBI agent and he ended up going to jail for a year but for him um he was found not guilty eventually there were a number of appeals on the basis of his um level of functioning like mental defect um is how they refer to it over there but um that was quite a sad case um and then the probably the most famous case certainly in Canada is this guy Alec manassian and you may have heard of him he's the one who drove a um a van into pedestrians in Toronto outside their Parliament building and killed 10 people and he in his case his lawyers tried to use his autism as a defense to find him not criminally responsible um but that wasn't successful that was dismissed and he was found um guilty and he's serving a very long prison sentence um so there some of the cases that have come out in the Press if we go to the next slide where we look at the research so has anybody actually done some research to answer that question about is there a relationship between Autism and radicalization and the short answer to that is no there hasn't been kind of sufficient research to draw any conclusions we can't draw a length there been a handful of studies and that Drew it at Al in 2023 reviewed them and you know said on the basis of what's been done you really can't draw any conclusions there certainly is some evidence if you just look at um the terrorist population so looking at terrorists then you can see that having a co-occurring mental health um diagnosis and that includes autism um there can be higher rates of that among terrorists and also um if you look at autistic people who are caught up in terrorism they're more likely to be a lone actor which is probably not too surprising so those kinds of conclusions can be drawn but whether you know you say that an autistic population by and large is more likely to engage in Terrorist Behavior we can't um draw any conclusions based on the research having said that we're hearing from multiple um law enforcement agencies us UK you know all of you would know in your day-to-day work that a lot of the particularly very young people you're coming across um so these 12 to 18 year olds have got some diagnosis of autism or other forms of neurod Divergence and internationally this kind of um has been noted if you like so hence why we may be having discussions like this so going on to next slide whether or not um autistic people have um you know are more likely certainly autistic people can become involved and so people have been looking at well what is it about autism that you might consider you know kind of a risk factor and equally what is is it about autism that could be a protective Factor because when you're working with people and trying to kind of divert them away knowing what a risk and protective fact factors are really important um and so some of the factors around autism that have been put forward as potential risk factors are things like that tendency to become fixated on interests it can be problematic if those interests tend towards topics that are related to violence or extremism also that tendency to prefer structure routine predictability rules you know if those sorts of things break down in an autistic person's life that can heighten things like anxiety and stress and maybe heighten their need for order and predictability and then if they come across theories or ideologies or causes that have very fixed rules and are fixed in nature and and maybe make claims about restoring order that could be quite attractive to an autistic person of course those social communication differences can lead to social isolation and then the online World becomes a bit of a safe haven for autistic people and then they're on the online world and they come across individuals or groups who um have a sense that they might be able to exploit this other person who potentially comes across as socially naive and then they use their kind of desire for social connection to inspire them to commit acts of terrorism um and you know when you you're an autistic person who's potentially had difficulty forming friends and relationships all their their lives if you've got an online community suddenly encouraging your interest and validating you and validating your skills and expertise that can become really socially and emotionally reinforcing and you know that person might experience for the first time a real sense of belonging and purpose um as well as feeling like Mastery from the skills that they have so the online space can be incredibly um rewarding for that person um and then the issue is those social communication differences can mean that that autistic person doesn't really pick up um other people's agenders so you know sometimes other people might be say oh this person's trying to manipulate me I feel like this person's you know pushing me or coercing me and autistic people may miss that and they also don't often see the bigger picture and they don't think ahead to the consequences of what they're being encouraged to do and you know also that literal tendency they might take it extremist messages and propaganda really literally so all of those things can be seen as potential risk factors um and then once an autistic person is engaged in these kind of Pursuits and interests it's really hard potentially for them to ship their focus away and then finally the sensory processing differences so if you've got a person who's very hyper sensitive the you know real world can be overwhelming a lot of the time um and they can have a lot of negative experiences and then that kind of can fuel their grievances their anger and push people towards terrorist involvement and also on the other hand the terrorist propaganda can be very appealing to autistic people who are sensory seeking so the imagery the diagrams the uniforms can have a real sensory appeal um we'll go to next slide uh because on the flip side there might be protective factors around autism as well so you know that same preference for structure routine and rules if you're working in an intervention context you can potentially use that um to you know shift them into following more pro-social rules you know by you know educating them about the things that they may not be picking up on like the consequences of their actions and things like that um and those character strengths I mentioned before you know having a strong sense of morality honesty Fair fairness that can play into um being positive and also the independent thinking nature of autistic people can mean that they might be less likely than others to you know follow kind of fads or succumb to group think um so some of these things can work in autistic people's favor as well in a um risky environment if you like so we'll go on to the next slide so we need to move away to from thinking just about the autistic person and their autism and what whether you know a risk and protective Factor around that individual because it really goes beyond individual factors and you would know that just from your um work hold
on have you lost
me no you're still there Vicki oh good okay oh okay I can't I can't see you for some strange reason oh I'm back again oh something justed up on my lovely yeah so you know thinking about the broader social factors and I'm just casting my mind back to one of the slides that was shown right at the very beginning where it listed the vulnerability and it had near diversity and then I think it had mental health adverse childhood experience and victimization what we know is that autistic people experience higher rates of all of those things so autistic people are much more likely to have mental health problems they're much more likely to experience victimization and we do know this from research and much more likely to have adverse child experiences like child abuse so you know a lot of it is to do with the experiences that they have the disadvantage the stigma the Discrimination that plays into the reason why autistic people can be vulnerable in this scenario so you know those broader social factors play into it as well it's not just their autism so we need to be thinking about about them in their context um and their previous experiences because all of that um plays into the picture as well next
slide yeah so I guess that's a diagram trying to sum all of that up so whether or not autism is um associated with an increased risk of radicalization it's not that autism is kind of causal in any way to risk it's more like autism is a contextual factor and it's contextual to both risk and protective factors so like in other words autism can shape the experiences the functioning level the behavior of a person that might in some instances exacerbate whether they're vulnerable or not as Expos as opposed to saying autism causes the vulnerability if that makes sense and and on the other hand autistic characteristics can also contextualize res resilience as well um and autistic characteristics we need to think of them not just in terms of well how do they play into whether or not a person is radicalized but how do we need to consider those same autistic characteristics when we're working with them in a cve um context so we'll just go on to the next slide which is working with autistic people in the CV context so going back again and thinking about what is research telling us about this next
slide not much so there's been very little research around um working with autistic people in the cve context um I'm sure all of you are familiar with the work of um Dr faras and the Faris framework um she's definitely done most of the work around thinking around autism in that context I've just put the um QR code there anybody's not familiar because it's definitely worth going and reading some of the um work that Dr Ferris has done but looking at well you know so she's made some suggestions about how to work with autis peris context but looking at kind of research about well um how successful is that you know what are the outcomes if you follow autistic people who are being you know engaged with CV like what works what doesn't work the research around that we just don't have it to say what's an evidence-based approach um but certainly we've begun to identify what are the challenges and the opportunities in this space um and so in that document there if you go and have a look you will see an outline of the aspects of autism that are possible risk and protective factors we've talked about some of them already but what's quite nice in the in the document that um theyve put forward there is looking at well if if this particular aspect of autism is an issue for this person um and you need to kind of Judge that for each autistic person what can you do to address that particular issue with the aim to you know relieve distress whatever is going on because that could be contributing to why they're vulnerable um to help them manage their own kind of vulnerability and risk and help them identify when they need to seek support so if we're just go to the next slide there's an example of what you would find in um the document by Al tar and colleagues so if let's say for argument's sake you've got someone who they've got a strong interest in violence and you identify that this is definitely a risk factor for this person what does that um mean for support and intervention and some of the things that might mean is look I'm need to kind of work with this person to nurture and facilitate healthy interests because with an autistic person who's got a tendency to get fixated you really can't remove that and leave a vacuum so the idea would be to try and either um shift that person take that interest and kind of morph it a little bit into something less violent or introduce some new interests because if that person has that tendency they really do need to have that um that in their lives they're a person who's very driven by passions and fact seeking and they spend a lot of time doing that that so it's unrealistic to think you can stop them if you like it has to be like a replacement um opportunity also looking at um legal Pursuits of safe offshoots of terrorism that's what I meant kind of Shifting them and helping them develop strategies to monitor regulate their interest and manage their Stress and Anxiety that might be some of the implications there um example there if you identify that this person's social and communication difficulties are meaning that they isolated for example and that's increasing risk you might think how can I find um identify accommodation so that there isn't barers to this person being in school or this person being in employment or this person connecting with other people um there might be aspects of interacting that you need to be explicit and teach them and and um you know help them with social skills training for want to be better term um and maybe education around Internet safety awareness maybe they're vulnerable online because they're isolated they spend a lot of time online but they don't have any kind of skills around teasing out what's a safe you know kind of site to be on and what are sites that are inciting them and end up getting them into trouble um so we'll just move on to the next side I can see questions popping up but I think I probably missed it at the beginning when I was messing around trying to get back on but yeah we'll have a look at them right at the end um there was is one team that did publish um a paper where they have been been working with a lot of autistic people in their team in Montreal and they um did a study and published some a paper on it so I'll just go through their findings in a little bit but a little bit about the team so they've been working since 2016 and they the I guess the novelty of the this team is these mainly these three aspects first of all that they have a multi entry point system so they take referrals from anywhere they take them from school they can be self-referred family members so it's not just kind of via law enforcement so anyone um can be who where there are concerns about radicalization can be um referred on to this team and then the team is a very multi-disciplinary team so they have psychiatrists social workers psychologists and people who have expertise in risk assessment all working together and then they have excellent links back out to the community so they have a mentoring program service they have um you know independent skills Services they refer people out they have social kind of opportunities that they can refer people out to the community so this team's kind of a holistic wraparound service and if we go to the next slide they did a study where they looked at their clientele and asked some questions like how many of our referred um clients are autistic and they found that 27% of the 86 clients that they'd work with over the time frame were autistic um without intellectual disability so yeah that's a pretty high rate if we're saying that one in 40 auti people in the general population or autistic we've got nearly you know a third between a quarter and a third of their client-based are autistic they looked at their autistic and non-autistic clients to see if there were any difficult differences they could identify on demographics not so much so you know no difference in terms of the education level um the you know their social economic status that sort of thing gender so they're all male um and but they did find some differences autistic clients were more likely to have multiple co-occurring conditions and to be socially isolated everything we've set up to now that's probably not surprising they were more likely to hold gender related ideologies so for example 59% um in Cells versus only 12% in the non-autistic um clientele they were more likely to present with that mix unclear uncertain and we've certainly been hearing that from our Australian um law enforcement Partners too that they don't have like the traditional strong you know um focus on Islam or um uh extreme right they tend to have a bit of everything and violence in and of itself can be um where they're coming from and that's what they found with this group and like we said before 75% of them said that was socially isolated just under half and then next slide they also talked to their practitioners and said um what has been working for you when you're working with these the autistic clients in particular and some of the facilitators that are identified were having very structured clinical meetings with a clear agenda they said that works best when they're working with these clients to have a slightly more directive approach so not the reflective approach you know the how are you're feeling and what that might being like and you know with an auti and this is not surprising when we know how we work with people with mental health problems some of these very same things have come out as the facilitators in that context so having a more slightly directive approach uh making explicit everything that is implicit and that's really important we need to kind of try and look at things from an autistic lens and many things that we think are common sense if you like and are things that an autistic person needs to be told very very directly and that's something that I think these practitioners have learned as they've been working with this clientele especially when it comes to social aspects um they they're just things that are not do not come naturally to autistic people social rules social Moray you know the social implication of what they might say or do you kind of got to say what by the way and tell them um using visual aids to assist mentalization and help them see cause and effect and visual aids might be as simple as just drawing something out as you're talking about it using photos using images um setting goals and expectations that focus on practical and functional issues so I think by that they mean looking at their life what's going on their lives and getting them into work or getting them back into education or getting them into a you know social opportunity rather than spending time talking about the ideology for example and and in to help build rapport developing a connection around those special interests so that can be helpful in getting the person kind of talking to you um and having that Rapport building because we all know if you've got to have that Rapport in a therapeutic setting next slide now given that I've just said that we don't know too much about working with autistic people in a cve context we can draw on our general strategies for just enhancing communication and managing distress um when we're working with autistic people um so we know for example when you're interviewing because there's been some specific work done around police interviews and um you know what works and what doesn't work in getting people being able to tell you their story and we know that standard interviewing approach which in a police context is you know tell me what happened when you got home a free narrative and Then followed by probing questions that's how police usually operate but we know that is not effective for autistic people um in those instances they they report less information they have trouble recalling who where when it's too unstructured so in general in that kind of um research field they've found that autistic people do much better if you want to find information from them to be do it in a much more cued recall and use a lot more structure so if we just go to the next slide so few examples about that rather that you know really open-ended question tell me what happened when you arrived home yesterday um you know again make explicit what's implicit if I'm there to tell you about something terrible that happened yesterday afternoon I know if you stay tell me what happened when you arrived home yesterday that's what you want to hear about so I'll just jump straight into that say oh well that person was there but an autistic person will start from the minute they got home potentially I had a bowl of cereal and then I watched a show on TV because you've just said what happened when you arrived home yesterday so to be a bit more explicit and to break it down we'll just jump to the better example which is in that final oh sorry back to that slide before you know break down your questioning um tell me what time you got home who was home when you got there what did you see when you went inside and you know prompt them to the time that you're interested in then what happened next and what happened next so avoiding that kind of free narrative and breaking it down and giving them a bit of a structure in their recall is going to make it a lot easier for them and you'll get more factual information so next slide um really simple tips um following a logical chronological order in question don't be going back and forth try and start at the beginning and work your way through using short simple unambiguous questions um again is going to be very helpful and a very simple thing allowing extra time to respond a lot of autistic people even bright autistic people with good language if you ask them a question question it can take them some time to process what you've said and formulate a response and what often happens is you people ask a question and when the person doesn't answer immediately they think they don't understand the question so they'll ask it again in a different way and then maybe frame it again a different way in a few seconds later and the autistic person is still trying to work their way through the first so just give them um you know a while it's a bit of an awkward Gap but just leave a little bit of time and potentially at the end of 10 or 15 second say was would you like me to ask that question in a different way if you don't get a response then but don't kind of jump in immediately so just allow that little bit of extra time for them to process and formulate their response next slide um simple things like sign posting so you know instead of kind of just jumping from topic to topic letting them know you're moving on to a different topic okay we finished talking about X now we're going to talk about y um asking very precise questions so again instead of tell me what you saw this morning when you could hear all about who knows what um put them in a a space and time you told me you were at the park this morning that's what you want to know about not what they had for breakfast and when got on the bus something happened in the park you told me you at the park this morning tell me what happened when you were there so that's a much more precise question and then we always suggest leavings open so if you ask someone was it a ad it's probably
like oh just yeah thank you if you ask someone was it a child or an adult and they're an autistic person and they really want to please you and they feel you really want an answer they potentially will just say an adult because that was the last thing you said you haven't given them an option to say I don't know so was it a child or an adult or are you not sure like give them an open option because otherwise they feel like they have to give you an answer and they potentially will just give you something think what you want to know
next um supporting communication recall with visual supports we touched on a little bit earlier um so visual supports can be you know schedules like if you are having a session you might say look we're going to spend the first 10 minutes talking about what we talked about last time and seeing how you've been this week we're going to spend the middle time doing X and at the end we'll have some time for you to ask me questions or I'm going to talk to your support person or your mom like having a written agenda is one way if you're trying to talk them through you know cause and effect you could use mind maps photos cards um using technology can also be helpful some autistic people who are very fluent speakers if they're feeling stressed they lose the ability to speak for want of a better term they just kind of Go mute from the anxiety but they are they may prefer to still communicate with you but they'll type it out so you know just being a bit flexible about things like that as well uh next slide um just these are some examples of what not to do so touched on it before do not use um nonliteral language or idioms so it sounds like you saw red they'll just be like what um don't use multi-part questions so saying was anyone at the house when you arrived and was the door unlocked is a two-part question so that needs to be broken down into two parts don't rely on your intonation to indicate that a statement is actually a question so if I was say to you you're alone because I ended that with a kind of up thing with my intonation you know that I was saying were you alone but an autistic person doesn't hear that because we talked before about how they don't read nonverbals and a nonverbal is intonation so if if you want to know if they're alone say were you alone don't use your intonation to kind of indicate a question um don't use Tag questions so a tag question is something like you went to the park didn't you because then you're kind of it's they feel obliged to give you an answer if you like um don't use present tense when you're asking about the past so that can be helpful and people do so now you're at the shop and you're talking to your friend so you're kind of trying to put them back in the scenario by using present tense and putting them back there but that again can be confusing to an autistic person and don't use double negatives like you wouldn't disagree that it would have been dark outside could get them going in circle so it's getting back to that first point I made before of the three using simple language simple straightforward language rather than kind of these sorts of things next slide um just now thinking about Stress and Anxiety so questioning any person but an autistic person particularly about a traumatic event can result in them becoming extremely anxious sensory aspects of environments that you're potentially not aware of can also heightened anxiety and distress and if you've got an autistic person who becomes anxious and distressed then any um communication that you are hoping to have and any kind of recall or information you're trying to get is probably going to you know the likelihood of that happening is going to decrease and you could end up with something like a shutdown or a meltdown which is not conducive to to what you're trying to achieve so next slide
um so what I mean by meltdown and shut down these are they're not Tantrums so they occur when an autistic person is extremely stressed brightened or sensory uncomfortable um they're not a planned goal oriented action like they're not like a totle of tantrum I want to get a biscus I'll screen and jump up and down till I get these are things where the person has literally lost control um best thing they need time and space to recover um limit speaking so it's not the time to say is there anything I can do can I help you what's the problem they're they've pretty much lost it by that point and the best thing is to as long as they're not hurting themselves or hurting anybody else is to just move away um and they both are caused by the same thing but they look very very different a meltdown is can be something like pitting fleeing biting crying screaming you're not going to miss one of those they're easy to spot a shutdown it's caused by the same sort of thing but it's when an autistic person reacts in the opposite ways more like a freeze response they just shut down almost like they're catatonic they cannot speak anymore they will go quiet withdraw um and sometimes you might not even notice happen because they've gone quiet but they've checked out at that point either one of these you want to avoid it happening in the first place um but if it does happen there's really nothing you can do except to move away and let them calm down and generally they will if they're given that time and space uh next slide again this is a video but probably not going to work it's just young people talking about meltdowns and shutdowns um Vicki it should work I think this share sound button muted itself before um do you want to give it a go or have we got no time anyway I'm not sure uh I can't slides I've got but yeah give it a
will for me a meltdown is when I've hit a limit it feels as if circuit and your bra um you stop thinking
about about anything the person why start showing a bit of odd behavior maybe I started punching myself in the arm and two weeks later I still had the bruces but it doesn't necessarily mean it's the end of the world it's just it's just in in that moment either through emotional stuff or sensory stuff it's when my brain can't take any more in and the only way you can find relief from what's Happening is to react kind of outwardly it is rarely one thing it can be a buildup of things kind of throughout the day or throughout the week even sometimes people who are really well-meaning will be know are you okay what can we do to help what's happened I'm not going to be able to answer you so you're you're just giving me more input don't try and do that sometimes we need moral support and to be listened to if they don't judge the person that would be the first step and maybe if they show a bit of sympathy that really helps if someone says you know that tiny noise is bothering me don't go oh it's just a tiny noise because for them it is not a tiny noise ask people what they need when they're calm rather than when they're having a meltdown and they can't answer you and it's too
late um VI uh Vicky before you jump back in I might just say because we are almost at time if anyone needs to um leave uh please reach out and I can send you the recording of um the presentation and um I'll let Vicki
finish excellent we'll just move on to the next slide um yeah as that young lady said better for this to not happen in the first place so what can you do to try and avoid that just be aware of sensory elements that might upset that person you can observe the person and see how they react if they come in and put their hands over their ears obviously there's a noise ask their person that's with them is there anything that bothers this person is there anything we can do to make more comfortable the kind of common things they don't require that's not a big deal sometimes just having the lights died or off um reducing sound or going to a quieter room let them stem so stem I mean some people have fidget toys or you know they might need to Pace a little bit you know let them do it they're not hurting anybody and that helps to regulate them some people like to wear glasses inside like sunglasses because of the fluorescent lights big deal let them wear their sunglasses same a lot of people wear caps to try and avoid light so just little things like that can make a big difference allowing regular breaks um aren't telling them they can break when they need to sometimes having something like that feelings thermometer if they don't have good words they just got a point and say look I'm kind of getting worked up oh okay you might need a break um and just letting you know a lot of autistic people have a lot of trouble um they're alexithymic which means they have difficulty identifying their own emotions and bodily States like tired and pain as well as how they feel so getting them to talk about um emotions is difficult and can be actually quite um aggravating because it's just something that they find very difficult to talk about um next slide yeah just talking about letting them have a break giving them a visual aid or a cue I need a break a card they just got it hand you so they don't have to say anything um letting them have that's a sensory toy that blue one if they have fidget toys can make a big difference for some Artis people next slide main takeaways great because we're 11:30 so insufficient research evidence to say they're at increased risk of terrorism terrorism engagement however agencies here in overseas are reporting these high proportions in their case loads among terrorists autistic people are over represented in Lone actor terrorism compared to group terrorism um autistic tra traits need to be considered when identifying potential risk and protective factors but you need to go beyond just autistic traits to look at the broader social context of the person and autistic traits are equally important when you're to consider when you're working in the cve context and trying to accommodate their social communication and sensory differences are all really important that's it now yeah it's 11:30 so what what was the arrangement that we would send questions and I'll try and answer them by email uh yes look I'm going to put my um this is obviously Vicky's details here everyone um and I'll give you my um details here as well um if you didn't have it from the um meeting invite as I said I am very happy to send anyone the full recording and what I'm going to do is I'll moderate through the questions now send everybody um a um send everybody the video that didn't work the first one um and I'll will send your questions over to Vicki and get back to you so I guess just to just to wrap up um I know a lot of people are probably going to have to start hopping off so thanks for joining us if you'd like to know more about our ESU programs please see our website step together. New South wales. goo. um Community engagement and sharing knowledge and education um obviously plays an important role in preventing and countering Vine extremism um so yeah please reach out if you see any opportunity uh for us to educate um your communities further what we are seeing throughout all parts of New South Wales is vulnerable people especially Youth and we do need to work together for the shared goal of community safety so thank you so much to Vicki um as always it was extremely um insightful and interesting as well as engaging thank you all for joining and we will reach out with our next webinar um in future thank you everyone bye
Understanding the potential vulnerabilities that some individuals with autism may face is crucial for developing effective prevention and early intervention strategies.
In this webinar, we introduce Clinical Psychologist Dr Vicki Gibbs. Vicki is Head of Research at Autism Spectrum Australia (Aspect) and has almost 20 years’ experience in the field of autism, spanning diagnostic, research, education, well-being, employment, and criminal justice.
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