Trauma and Community Resilience Center | Domestic Terrorism Prevention

As we seek to understand ways to mitigate threats of violence across the ideological spectrum leading to domestic terrorism, it is critical to understand not only the risk and protective factors related to committing acts of terrorism, but also the upstream factors leading to violent radicalization. In three phases, this project aims to identify the way in which risk and protective factors combine to magnify or mitigate risk for violent radicalization to inform public health approaches to domestic terrorism prevention.

Phase 1 includes a large-scale national survey of risk and protective factors for violent radicalization, including comparisons between different extremist ideologies and an examination of how variables interact. Findings from this study will inform a scoping review of evidence-based interventions that target violence prevention and other public health populations or outcomes (e.g. HIV/AIDS to understand programming that addresses stigma and works with a potentially stigmatized population without worsening stigma) in order to identify practices that best target the identified risk and protective factors for violent radicalization.

Phase 2 will include stakeholder and community visioning meetings within three states to understand community perceptions of how interventions align with community assets and priorities. The goal of these sessions is to lay the groundwork for uptake of evidence-based public health VR prevention strategies through engaging key stakeholders (e.g., law enforcement, local government, educators, mental health providers, faith- or community-based organizations) in three states in the assessment and planning process. Specifically, we will use Community Based Participatory Research (CBPR) and Implementation Science frameworks to understand barriers and facilitators to community uptake of violent radicalization prevention approaches.