Abstract

Europe is facing one of the most demanding challenges due to the need to defeat radicalization and terrorism: an increasing number of marginalised youth, with migrant background or not, are more and more targeted by, and sensitive to, terrorist speeches and ideology and are exposed to the risk of being actively recruited. Beside prevention and intelligence activities, aimed to arrest and sentence them, there is an increasing need to develop effective re-education programmes (exit strategies) either in jail or in probation and to foster social reintegration by providing equal educational and integration opportunities toward qualified jobs.

Unfortunately, re-education programmes seem not to be effective in ensuring a positive social reintegration of these youth. Failure in reintegrating radicalised youth not only exposes the youth themselves to the risk of being re-recruited, but also ends up diminishing the efficiency of the entire preventive system, as it proves not to be able to ensure the youth’s cooperation in identifying recruiters and offering fundamental inputs to contrast radicalised speech and strategies.

The Multi Agency Training Exit Strategies for Radicalized Youth (MATES) project seeks to respond to the need to improve the efficiency of the re-education system by elaborating a Common Curricula/Training Toolkit with scientific grounded learning material on how to implement adequate exit-strategies and de-sensitization programmes.

This project is funded under the European Commission’s Directorate-General Migration and Home Affairs, Grant Agreement no. HOME/2015/ISFP/AG/LETX/8772. MATES is coordinated by the Psychoanalytic Institute for Social Research (Italy). It will run from November 2016 to April 2018 involving 8 partners (Universities and NGOs) in 6 different European countries.