The Daily Telegraph - Features
How lockdowns fuelled a surge in teenage terrorists
One in five counter-terror arrests in Britain now involves a young person. Lizzie Dearden reports
Joe Metcalfe was 15 when he resolved to launch a terror attack in the UK. Shut in his bedroom in his family home, drinking vodka and smoking cannabis, he had become embroiled in the online world of neo-Nazis working to trigger an international race war.
The acne-afflicted teenager was referred to the Prevent counterterrorism programme by his school in 2021 after teachers became concerned about his extreme views and behaviour. But instead of moving away from violence, he tried to manipulate an mentor into believing he was changing his views while secretly plotting a horrific attack.
He is part of a growing phenomenon of teenage terror offenders in Britain, with 2023 seeing a new record of 42 under18s arrested for crimes including sharing terrorist propaganda and encouraging attacks.
In the most recent case, a 16-year-old from Cowes, on the Isle of Wight, was jailed for seven years this week. Like Metcalfe, that teenager – who cannot be named for legal reasons – was 15 at the time of the offences and had been radicalised online, but he became obsessed with jihadists instead of neo-Nazis.
The boy, from a secular white British family, converted to Islam in late 2021. He was described by a judge as an “isolated and troubled young man who looked for the fellowship and comfort of a religious faith”. Instead, he ended up following a “warped and corrupted form” of Islam after inept searches for information on social media led him to extremist groups. One of his tutors noticed that a photograph of Osama bin Laden was the background picture on his phone. The teenager first researched the Isle of Wight music festival as a potential target, before planning to murder people he believed had insulted his new religion, while spreading graphic Islamic State (IS) propaganda celebrating beheadings and international terror attacks.
“Even if I do get caught, I’m 15 – they will just tell me off and put me on some prevention course, trust me,” he bragged online after an Instagram user warned against sharing the gory videos.
Kingston Crown Court heard that the boy had been diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder when he was five, and later had his childhood “shattered” by the death of his father. He told a psychiatrist, who said he had impaired social skills and difficulty expressing himself, that he had no friends and had a “bad time at school”.
The number of teenage terror offenders has jumped by a third, year on year, meaning one in five terror suspects arrested in the UK is now legally considered a child
– a figure counter-terror police have called “truly shocking”.
While a child has not yet launched a terror attack in the UK, fears about the real-world threat they could pose were realised in Australia on Monday.
A teenage boy is accused of stabbing a bishop and a priest during an alleged terror attack at a Sydney church, with police saying his comments suggested a religious motive.
A third of the children convicted of terror offences in Britain since 2016 were “preparing acts of terrorism”, either by attempting to join IS abroad or planning attacks on home soil.
Dr Gina Vale, a University of Southampton criminologist who co-authored a report on Britain’s teenage terrorists in November, says the startling combination of social isolation, neurodivergence and “adverse childhood experiences” are not an exception but the rule among under-18s found guilty of terror offences.
“Teenagers are forming their identity, and uncertainty about belonging and disillusionment is common,” she says.
“When they are gaining access to extremist materials that are far too easy to access online,
‘Even if I do get caught, I’m 15 – they will just tell me off and put me on some course, trust me’
grievances and frustrations can then develop into ideological causes, which is the problem.”
Another common factor among teenage terror offenders is gender – of the more than 40 under-18s convicted of terror offences since 2016, only one was a girl.
Safaa Boular, then 17, planned an attack in 2017 with her sister and mother, in Britain’s first all-female terror cell. She had been seduced by a male IS fighter, who was directing her actions online before he was killed in a US drone strike.
Several male offenders have been misogynists obsessed with sexual violence, and some young neo-Nazi terrorists have also been prosecuted for child sex offences.
Metcalfe’s targets were two mosques in Keighley, near Bradford, where he planned to massacre worshipping Muslims while disguised as a police officer. The plan was only stopped after he crashed a stolen car during a reconnaissance mission.
However, while being prosecuted for his terror plot, he was also convicted of raping and abusing his 15-year-old girlfriend. He enjoyed “manipulating her into saying and communicating racist things and making Nazi salutes”, Mrs Justice Cheema-Grubb told his sentencing hearing.
Metcalfe’s parents were in an abusive relationship and his mother had moved out during the period he was committing the terror offences. The judge said his father “will provide little effective guidance at the moment”.
Vale and her colleagues are charting all child terror prosecutions in Britain through the Child Innocence Project, with the startling data showing distinct waves of activity.
Between 2016 and 2018, all convicted terror offenders under the age of 18 were inspired by IS or al-Qaeda, but they were then overtaken by a wave of neo-Nazis inspired by National Action, a far-Right group now proscribed as a terror body, and its spin-off organisations.
Children driven by extreme Right-wing ideologies formed the majority of cases until 2022, when young jihadists inspired by IS started to make a regular reappearance in the courts.
“We’re now seeing a more sustained terrorist or extremist activism from under-18s from across the ideological spectrum,” Vale says. “We have a new generation that is engaging with extremism in a new phase.”
The dangers facing children were exacerbated during the Covid pandemic, when counterterror police warned of a “perfect storm” of people spending
“more time isolated and online, and with fewer of the protective factors that schooling, friends and family can provide”, while extremist groups of all kinds were using the crisis to spread their messages of hate.
Officers are concerned about the rising number of children in their caseload, and are calling for parents and guardians to “pay close attention” to what they are viewing and sharing online.
Jonathan Hall KC, the UK’s independent reviewer of terrorism legislation, says that tech giants do not have the resources in place to moderate billions of posts and messages, and that parents should take more of a role in policing their children’s online activities.
“The expectation of what we allow our children to access has to change. We wouldn’t allow a stranger into a child’s bedroom, but we allow a phone in their bedroom that allows them to connect to the worst sort of strangers,” he says.
Such is the demand on security services that Hall has called for the Government to create alternatives to conventional criminal prosecution for low-risk children who have committed offences by looking at or sharing material online.
New court-imposed injunctions would see teenagers arrested and jailed if they broke strict conditions, including mandatory ideological mentoring, and how they browse, communicate and interact with other people online.
Hall warns that there is “almost no long-term effect” of prosecuting children for lowerlevel terror offences that do not garner significant jail sentences. He says authorities are finding it particularly difficult to judge the risk that young terror offenders may pose, and that recent cases show even where a teenager may not be planning violence themselves, they are capable of inspiring it abroad.
Some children have been consuming vast amounts of terrorist material, using peer-topeer sharing to access banned IS videos and manuals, as well as far-Right manifestos and neo-Nazi books, videos and propaganda. Vale says the process often starts when initially harmless research on current events leads young people down online “rabbit holes”.
“Once you start looking for certain content, for example the Ukraine war or the Mediterranean refugee crisis, it’s very easy to start getting on to platforms that are espousing a very different narrative and leading into more and more extreme ideas,” she adds.
“There is a lot of extremist propaganda that’s focused on a teenage audience, particularly among the extreme Right wing.”
The disturbing trend is not expected to subside in the near future, with today’s digitally native children expected to continue outmanoeuvring the authorities’ attempts at limiting access to online material.
Hall expects more “isolated and unhappy teenagers” to be seen in Britain’s courts, warning that while many have been driven to the internet as a “source of comfort… it’s also the source of terrorist information and inspiration.”