‘Downpressor Man’: securitisation, safeguarding and social work

The Counter Terrorism and Security Act came into force in July 2015 in the UK. This places a statutory duty on many frontline organisations, i.e schools, social services, and prisons for example, to work within the PREVENT agenda, a policy arising from Britain’s overall counter-terrorism policy, CONTEST. We argue that PREVENT is representative of increasing securitised social policies, that serve to firstly, view people within particular individualised neo-liberal discourses and thin narratives, and, secondly, serves to coerce the profession of social work into hitherto unknown areas, namely, national security and counter-terrorism. We note the unapologetic linkage of traditional forms of what we term here, “welfare safeguarding” customarily the domain of social work, with what we term “security safeguarding”. If the profession of social work in the UK, and we suspect other Western regimes, wishes to avoid becoming a profession of “downpressor men”, the uncritical incursion into issues of national security and counter-terrorism must be highlighted.