Racism and radicalisation in Denmark: outline for a social pedagogical prevention model

Political discourse that encourages radicalisation tendencies  

For effective practice, it is essential that social pedagogues link the structural conditions and the individual profiles to a greater extent. This means, among other things, paying attention to the political discourse that creates stigmatisation and exclusion of young people with ethnic minority backgrounds. We therefore briefly describe the political discourse to clarify what such progressive social pedagogy must be aware of.

Immigrants and descendants of immigrants have been increasingly establishing themselves in Denmark (Arendt, Dustmann and Ku, 2022; Jakobsen, 2000). More and more people are pursuing an education, getting a job or starting their own business, just as more and more people are obtaining Danish citizenship and buying their own house and car. Parallel to this positive development, however, people from minority ethnic communities are still overrepresented among criminals, the unemployed and the poor. For years, various groups of people have tried to understand and explain this overrepresentation; the concept of integration has been the focal point here and it is related to the theme of radicalisation in the public debate. The assumption here is that more integration means less radicalisation.

It was after the 1980s that Denmark began to articulate the concept of integration and view immigrants (‘foreigners’) as permanent residents. The focal point of the debate was primarily the public expenditure that increased due to immigration, but there were also voices from the right-wing populist party – the Fremskridtspartiet – who pointed to problems associated with Muslim migrant workers. The Fremskridtspartiet also highlighted the threat that migrants pose to Danish values (Jensen, Weibel and Vitus, 2017; Østergaard, 2007).

The public and political debate took a significant turn in the 1990s. It was a period of great social upheaval where the outsourcing of jobs intensified mobility and global migration influenced the debate, which became centred on the ‘problems’ associated with immigration from countries where the culture is fundamentally different from that of Denmark. Cultural differences in everything from clothing, food and marriage, to settlement in ‘ghettos’ and the will to integrate were increasingly seen as a barrier to integration, and the ‘foreign’ cultures being perceived as a threat to Danish values and to social cohesion, which was put forward as something particularly Danish (Østergaard, 2007). Parallel to this development, some European countries suffered several terrorist attacks carried out by self-proclaimed Islamist groups or individuals throughout the 2000s and 2010s. This contributed to directing the debate on integration towards Muslim populations.

Since 2001, the public and political debate has become increasingly centred on values – which were first referred to as basic democratic values but quickly became Danish values, even though these values only referred to universal concepts such as equality, democracy and freedom of expression (Olwig and Pærregaard, 2011). In particular, freedom of expression became a focal point in 2005,¹ when the Danish government was adamant that freedom of expression was a uniquely Danish democratic value.

Gradually, a discourse emerged, which has become so dominant that it has functioned as legitimisation of political interventions against phenomena and groups in society perceived as threats to social cohesion (Jensen et al., 2017; Olwig and Pærregaard, 2011). It is argued that since the 9/11 attacks in the United States, the public space has been dominated by a discourse about Islam that links the religion to terrorism and radicalisation. Since the terrorist attack in Copenhagen in the winter of 2015, in which a 22-year-old perpetrator shot and killed two innocent people, the media have talked about the darkened ideology of Islam. The tone of the debate became markedly harsher, and it helped to maintain an ‘us and them’ dichotomy, as the terms Muslim(s) and Islam were linked to terrorism. Many proposals have been put forward for what should be done, including suggestions that politicians should limit immigration, especially from certain countries. It is also claimed that ‘The terror that exists stems from Islam’, and that ‘every politician should familiarize themselves with the greatest danger we face today, namely Nazi Islamism’ (Khader, 2015, n.p.; authors’ own translation). In short, this discourse claims that ‘the problem is that Islam is not only a religion, but a totalitarian ideology that permeates all aspects of everyday life, and that jihad is inseparable from Islam’ (Johansen, 2015, n.p.; authors’ own translation).

‘Ghetto packages’: an example of the realisation of the political discourse  

The discursive development was followed by political actions in the form of ‘ghetto packages’, and in 2010 the Danish government adopted an action plan, which emphasised that:

These are strong values that hold Denmark together and that we must not compromise. But today there are places in Denmark where Danish values are no longer sustainable. And where the rules that apply in the rest of society therefore do not have the same effect. Such conditions prevail today in parts of the residential areas that we colloquially call ghettos.

(Regeringen, 2010, p. 5)

In the same year, the government presented the first ‘ghetto list’ – a list of residential areas that aligned with a number of criteria on employment, education, crime and ethnicity.² In 2020, the government coined the term ‘hard ghetto areas’, which are residential areas that have been a ghetto area for at least four years (Bolig og Planstyrelsen, 2020). The Parallel Society Agreement describes how to deal with the hard ghetto areas.

The target group of the Parallel Society Agreement is refugees and immigrants. It is held here that this group of residents is an economic burden to the welfare state and a threat to Danish culture. A report from the Ministry of Finance points out that ‘immigrants and descendants from certain countries cost Denmark DKK 36 billion in 2015’ (Parallelsamfundsaftalen, 2018, p. 5; authors’ own translation). The Parallel Society Agreement draws on the same elements and basic understandings that have been structured in the political discourse over recent decades. The basic argument is based on a claim that this group of citizens refuses to integrate, lives its life isolated from Danish society and maintains its ‘backward culture’ with ‘associated oppression’ and ;social control’ (Tireli, 2022).

The ‘parallel society’ is seen as more than living in a residential area with other groups of ethnic minorities. It is also about a lack of connections to the labour market and education, and opting out of interaction with Danes, which is seen as a conscious choice and not as a result of the conditions in the labour market and other structural conditions.

Prevention of radicalisation  

Since 2014, prevention of radicalisation and extremism in Denmark has been conducted across authorities and in close cooperation between several ministries, probation services and the Danish Security and Intelligence Agency, as well as local authority actors in municipalities and police districts (Regeringen, 2014). Various projects have been launched, based on a so-called prevention pyramid with three interdependent layers: a basic preventive level; an intermediate anticipatory level; and an overlying interventional level. The impact of this work has been criticised for having limited scope – the essence of the criticism is that initiatives are not directed at the radicalisation process, but at the young people who have broken terror legislation (Dahlgaard, 2017). The goal here is to keep the young person in civil society and prevent radicalisation that stems from that person feeling excluded from the dominant society.

Reflections on social pedagogical prevention and some conclusions  

Professional practices with individual solutions to complex social and political problems entail a risk of contributing to depoliticisation and undermining professional credibility. The fact that several authorities have to work together not only makes prevention work more complex, but also overlooks the necessary political dimension of prevention work. Social pedagogical work often acts blindly in relation to the political context; it has been individualised since the 1980s, which has made it difficult to challenge the exclusionary policies in the field (Guru, 2012; Herz, 2016). Although social pedagogues and other social workers have often stated goals such as non-discrimination and human rights, it has been difficult to put these ambitions into practice. Research has shown this in relation to people of colour in the United States, who have long been controlled rather than helped by social pedagogues and other social workers (Dominelli, 2008; Guru, 2012).

Prevention work has therefore been perceived by young people as irrelevant, as social surveillance and as attempts to acclimatise them to ways of life synonymous with a hostile majority society. Social pedagogical projects are adapted to municipal agendas with entirely different objectives and are not aimed specifically at preventing radicalisation. Larsson and Björk (2015) believe that political and social factors are often included as part of the problem description, but they rarely appear in the practical initiatives that are proposed or implemented. This is also evident in the RAN projects: unemployment, poverty, racism and social marginalisation are overlooked as causes of radicalisation, and the preventive measures are rarely aimed at changing these conditions. Theories about social pedagogical prevention programmes for young people at risk of radicalisation are almost entirely absent. This is problematic, in light of the fact that much social pedagogical prevention work has affected the actors and their surroundings, but without the effects of those efforts being documented (Herz, 2016).

Social pedagogues face many challenges in dealing with radicalisation, and those challenges depend on the specific context. Prevention must therefore be adapted to the particular types of factors that influence the ‘local’ radicalisation processes. This makes it more difficult for social pedagogues to work purposefully to devise strategies and approaches for prevention efforts, and to define their role in contexts where only a few general guidelines and many ad hoc decisions apply. There is a need to better understand the many causes that lead to radicalisation and the reasons that young people become involved in extremist groups. Finally, there is a need for social pedagogues to recognise the first signs of radicalisation and know how to deal with young people who are at risk.

With the background of the RAN projects and based on experiences with social pedagogical inclusion projects in Denmark, we can set out the following guidelines for structurally changing prevention work in the future:

• Partnerships must be built with other social actors so that values from those domains can penetrate the anti-radicalisation work

• Young people at risk of radicalisation must develop their critical skills so that they have more opportunities and better future perspectives in their personal and work lives

• Young people must experience alternative role models and must have the opportunity to discuss messages that encourage violence and racism. This must be done by developing young people’s critical thinking and by being open to those young people’s criticism of the norms of the dominant society.

Some of the ways of working with young people to overcome these challenges include positive development of their identity through education and practical training, as well as involving relevant social networks – parents, families, peers and local communities – and in a wider sense the promotion of social cohesion, stability, positive and socially inclusive environments, and offering learning and development opportunities. In the following section, we outline a model for prevention based on these principles.

A concrete social pedagogical model  

In another context (Tireli and Jacobsen, 2019), we have developed a critical working model that can be used by pedagogues in their work with children and young people (see Figure 1).

The model includes five interconnected steps: the starting point is experience or problem, followed by description and critical reflection and the cycle continues clockwise. It is circular, indicating that work with the model is an ongoing process. Each time the cycle is complete, one faces a new experience or problem, resulting in a new focus. The model is based on Danish experiences with the inclusion paradigm.

Figure 1

Critical didactic analysis model (Source: Tireli and Jacobsen, 2019, p. 63)

The experience or problem that forms the starting point can, for example, be a situation at school where young people talk among themselves about discrimination in education. They do not want to mention it to the teachers, who are thought to be always busy, but they discuss it with the social pedagogues in the after-school programme. The social pedagogue mentions to the teacher that the students are dissatisfied with group divisions in the classroom where the academically weakest students are grouped together, as this makes it clear that young people from minority ethnic communities always end up in this group. The teacher tries to divide the students into mixed groups, and pedagogues and teachers agree to discuss what it means to be academically weak and how the same division of weak and strong also occurs outside school, often without white Danes giving it any thought. The students agree with the teachers and pedagogues to create a project to see whether it is possible to change the division of children and young people, and why it may be difficult to implement without creating major changes in society.

Social pedagogues and teachers decide to initiate a project so that students can examine what it means to come from homes where education is not valued. Does it mean, for example, that young people get no or very little support at home for schoolwork? Young people can talk about examples of a similar division into ‘us and them’ in other contexts. They can decide to inform their younger siblings about their experiences and notice the positive stories that exist.

A description and critical reflection of the situation above means that pedagogues and teachers (and possibly parents) shed light on the content of the project by uncovering the circumstances that can influence practice. How are the elements of the project connected? Who will be affected by the implementation of the project and who will be against it? How can the project relate to other critical initiatives against similar discrimination? These are questions that pedagogues and teachers can discuss together with the students. In this example, social pedagogues facilitate a process whereby young people examine and reflect on what discrimination can cause, why discrimination exists at all and what consequences it has. There are many possibilities for action within the project; social pedagogues together with the students can prepare an interview guide and ask people around them whether they have experienced racism and discrimination and whether they can remember the first time they experienced humiliating divisions in society.

The structural analysis is about linking issues on a level of subjective experience with an overall objective power perspective: Who decides? Where can something be done about discrimination? A structural perspective is also a way to avoid individualising problems and solutions. It is a linking process that must be undertaken together with the students. In this example, it could be a question of what knowledge is needed in society, how ethic minority youths get this knowledge and how young people from all countries can together draw attention to discrimination when they experience it. How do their parents experience discrimination when they are looking for work or accommodation and when they are in public spaces? Social pedagogues can help young people to link micro and macro conditions through such projects.

Transformative learning involves extracting a changed understanding from the analysis. It can be both a joint and an individual learning process. The young people have probably gained knowledge through the project about the connection between their family’s perceptions of school and discrimination and about discrimination in completely different contexts. The result may be that the individuals with an ethnic minority background know the most appropriate way to act the next time they encounter racism in everyday life. Those individual reflections can become the basis for shared learning in the classroom. They can, for example, lead to the students agreeing to create an anti-discrimination page on the school’s and youth club’s digital network, where they collect concrete experiences about discrimination and openly share them. The school and the youth club can perhaps formulate an anti-racism policy and involve other agencies and sectors in the fight against racism.

The action plan must be implemented to ensure that the structural analysis and transformative learning actually lead to change. In this phase, new actions must be initiated that change or dissolve the problem that was originally the starting point of the project. In this example, the students, together with their teachers and social pedagogues, plan to follow up on the project: how do the youth club, school, classrooms and students continue to work with the experiences that their classmates from minority ethnic communities have had? How can the school and youth club help to raise awareness of combating discrimination, regardless of where young people encounter it?

The focus and new focus phase is the opportunity to continue to work with the same or a related theme. Processes become critical if social pedagogues and young people continue to work with them. After going through the different phases of the model as a community, they have gained experience with concrete options for action. These experiences must then lead to a new modified focus or a new problem area. One could imagine that the students discovered that the adults were not as willing to get involved in countering discrimination in everyday life. This could become a new focus: how can they induce the adults to become more involved? It could be an occasion for social pedagogues and teachers to plan a new project – and go through the cycle of the model again.