Investigating implicit biases around race and gender in Canadian counterterrorism

Abstract

A growing body of research on terrorism and countering violent extremism (CVE) has increasingly questioned the lack of attention to—and myths around—women involved in extremist and political violence, while other research has drawn attention to racial and religious stereotypes that affect national security policies and practices worldwide. While Canada is often heralded as a global leader in multiculturalism and gender equality, the nation’s national security sector still faces significant challenges around implicit biases related to race and gender. This study asks whether gender and racial stereotypes impeding counterterrorism and CVE in other countries are also affecting policies and practices in Canada. Using twenty-six in-depth interviews with practitioners, police officers, academics, and government officials from seven major cities across Canada, this paper argues that persistent gender and racial stereotypes are indeed a key challenge impeding Canada’s efforts to adequately address radicalization into and disengagement from extremist violence.

Keywords

Counterterrorism violent extremism gender implicit bias Canada countering violent extremism

A growing body of research on terrorism and countering violent extremism (CVE) has increasingly questioned the lack of attention to, and myths around, women involved in extremist and political violence,¹ while other research has drawn attention to racial and religious stereotypes that are affecting national security policies and practices in Canada and around the world.² For example, when women are involved in violence, they receive more media attention than male counterparts due to the dramatic departure from established gender norms.³ But these narratives of deviance often emphasize stereotypes of women as emotional, not political, easily manipulated, deranged, or just unintelligent. Similarly, repeated profiling of Muslim individuals in terrorism investigations, alongside frequent portrayals of racialized terrorists in the media, reinforces biases that darker-skinned populations are more threatening and can obscure the threat of white supremacist violence.⁴

Of course, these stereotypes frequently intersect. Racialized men receive a disproportionate level of attention from security services worldwide, including in Canada.⁵ The trope of oppressed Muslim women is also common in “War on Terror” rhetoric, with repeated themes of “empowering Muslim women” in Western-led counterterrorism (CT) programs.⁶ In fact, the very definition of terrorism is prone to gender and racial biases, with the vast majority of CVE and CT attention (including by participants in this study) focused on Islamist-inspired male extremists and much less attention, until fairly recently, on other forms of terrorism, such as right-wing and “incel” violence.⁷

While Canada is often heralded as a global leader in multiculturalism and gender equality, the nation’s CT practices still face significant challenges in terms of implicit biases (i.e., learned cognitive biases that occur at an unconscious level), particularly around gender and race. But Canada’s fairly recent entrance into domestic CVE, compared to other Western nations, means that the government can learn from existing experiences, such as the lessons learned around harmful biases—both implicit and explicit—that have long plagued programs like the United Kingdom’s “Prevent” strategy.⁸

The motivation for this study came from hypotheses generated around gender stereotypes from my earlier research on CT and CVE practices in the United Kingdom.⁹ That study found that stereotypical underestimations of women’s participation in extremist violence were impeding effective deradicalization and disengagement practices. The present study aims to investigate whether this finding also holds in Canada, with added questions around racial bias. The initial expectation was that Canada would fare better than the United Kingdom, given that both gender equality and intersectional analysis are official Canadian government policy. However, based on 26 in-depth interviews with CVE and CT professionals from seven major cities across Canada, this paper finds that, despite official policies to address implicit biases, both gender and racial stereotypes continue to impede Canada’s efforts to adequately address radicalization into, and disengagement from, extremist violence.

After defining several key terms, the paper begins with a brief review of gender and racial stereotypes in the literature on terrorism and political violence. It proceeds with a background overview of CVE efforts in Canada and then analyzes the patterns of biases and stereotypes that emerged in the study sample. Finally, the piece concludes with policy implications and thoughts for future CT and CVE research that is both gender aware and truly intersectional.

Theoretical framework and key terms

This article uses a constructivist lens, which posits that gender and race, and the related levels of discrimination against women and racialized individuals, are socially and historically constructed.¹⁰ While defining race and gender is a complex task over which there is little consensus, this study uses “gender” to refer to the social construction of masculinity and femininity and the values attached to these constructions.¹¹ While gender norms vary across cultures, they are always socially constructed, frequently contested, and affect the distribution of power in a given society; in addition, patriarchal gender norms (i.e., where men are heads of households, politics, business, and war, and women are submissive caregivers, child bearers, and supporting actors) are often exacerbated by armed conflict.¹² Indeed, ignoring the effect of gender norms in security studies can lead to misunderstanding who wields power, why, and to what end.¹³

This paper also defines “race” as a social construct—one rooted in social and economic practices that have, over time, distinguished and marginalized populations based on physical characteristics, such as skin colour and facial features.¹⁴ In the majority of the world, people with the darkest skin tones are disproportionately subordinate to those with lighter skin, and in situations of armed violence, racialized populations generally overrepresent both victims and suspects (or scapegoats).¹⁵ As with gender norms, racial expectations and stereotypes are often exacerbated by armed conflict that establishes violent narratives of “us” and “them.” Race has also been used as a cohesive force for some militant groups, and can be especially effective in this regard when paired with narratives of repression and injustice.¹⁶

A gender-aware and intersectional analysis thus examines how these gendered and racial social constructions interact—along with other aspects of identity, such as socioeconomic class, religion, and language—to organize personal, political, and intellectual life, especially in terms of power structures.¹⁷

“Disengagement” is defined here as a physical departure from an armed group and the cessation of violence, whereas “deradicalization” is an external effort to change radical beliefs.¹⁸ This distinction is especially important in CVE work, as a person may have physically left an armed group but still hold radical beliefs, or a person may remain in an extremist group but no longer believe in the cause.

The definitions as presented here are, of course, highly contested social constructions in debates on political violence and elsewhere. I offer these definitions for analytical clarity in the context of this study, with no claim that they are universally accepted.

Gender and racial stereotypes in counterterrorism

When women are involved in armed violence, even in legitimate armed forces, they often face highly gendered stereotypes that restrict their options.¹⁹ These women violate two sets of norms (i.e., violence as a female perpetrator and violence against civilians), making disengagement particularly challenging. Indeed, women’s violence is often viewed as especially monstrous, even when compared to the same acts perpetrated by men.²⁰ And even though some women join armed groups to improve women’s status in society (or to improve their own personal status), entrenched gender norms often determine how women are treated within the ranks and after they leave.²¹

While initial work on women in terrorism largely focused on their “emotional” motivations, further research has revealed a range of motivations similar to men: social and political grievances; revenge; defending an ethnic group; power; money; adventure; and familial or romantic ties.²² In addition, online activity shows that women are very active, and effective, in recruiting other women into armed groups and in pressuring men to join.²³ However, as Henshaw notes, “there is a tension in many rebellions between a rebel group’s need or desire to mobilize women and its interest in fully recognizing and valuing their work.”²⁴ Indeed, keeping women’s participation invisible makes it easy for armed groups to purposefully exploit stereotypes that women are victims and have no agency. But this framing puts other women at risk who may genuinely want to disengage or who may be legitimate victims.²⁵

When racial stereotypes intersect with gendered expectations, implicit biases with security implications become even more problematic. For example, multiple studies show that people from various racial backgrounds consistently perceive Black men to be stronger, heavier, and more threatening (i.e., more capable of harm) compared to white men of the same relative size and strength; these biases are influenced by physical features, such as skin tone, but also by top-down categorization about different social groups.²⁶ Indeed, the widespread misperception that darker-skinned people (especially men) are more threatening has arguably contributed to the lack of due attention to white supremacist terrorism until quite recently. Similar critiques have recently surfaced in debates over whether to categorize misogynistic “incel” violence as terrorism, where the predominant actors are white men.²⁷ The moral weight of terrorism compared to any other crime makes terrorism cases overly susceptible to these cognitive biases in investigations, prosecutions, and sentencing, which disproportionately affects young people and minorities.²⁸

While Black men are frequently associated with crime and gun violence, the conflation of Muslim men with terrorism remains highly durable, strengthened by tropes of rescuing “helpless Muslim women” from “violent Muslim men.”²⁹ Muslims have long criticized security services for disproportionately targeting their communities,³⁰ and as recently as 2018, the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS) maintained that Islamist-inspired terrorism was the “number one national security threat to public safety in [Canada].”³¹ Indeed, participants in this study noted that Islamist-inspired terrorism continues to receive far more attention than other forms of ideologically-inspired violence, including in their own work, and even when they were aware of this bias.

While there is a vast amount of literature on cognitive biases, gender stereotypes, and racial profiling in various disciplines, the effect of these issues on CT policy and practice in Canada has not been sufficiently investigated. Indeed, Canada’s reputation as being harmoniously multicultural and egalitarian has arguably overshadowed very real biases related to gender and race in national security work. This study aims to critically investigate those assumptions.

Background

Dramatic changes in Canadian CT began in 2013, when intelligence officers realized that Canada was not exempt from the global foreign fighter phenomenon.³² Then, in 2014, two terrorist attacks perpetrated by Canadians in Quebec and Ontario occurred within days of each other, killing two members of the Canadian Armed Forces.³³ What followed was a reactive series of legislative changes, starting with Bill C-44, which gave CSIS authorization to conduct investigations outside of Canada. The controversial Bill C-51 soon followed, which expanded the definition of national security and gave CSIS increased capacities—including the ability to break Charter rights with federal judicial warrants.³⁴ At the same time, fear about future attacks and widespread media coverage of Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) atrocities were heightening racial and political tensions: during this period, hate crimes targeting racialized minorities rose significantly in Canada, particularly in Quebec.³⁵

Recent estimates indicate that between 2013 and 2019, up to 52,808 foreigners from 80 countries travelled to Syria and Iraq to join Daesh, including 6902 foreign women and 6577 foreign minors.³⁶ By 2016, most domestic CT attention in Canada focused on Islamist-inspired violence and preventing citizens from leaving—with far less attention on those who were coming back or on other types of violent extremism.³⁷ But the issue of returning foreign fighters from Syria and Iraq was a rising global problem, with many countries rushing to form responses.³⁸ The 2018 CSIS Annual Threat Report observed that 250 “individuals with a NEXUS to Canada” had travelled abroad to join a violent extremist or terrorist organization in various contexts.³⁹ Of these, 60 have returned, but very few have come back from Syria or Iraq,⁴⁰ and there is little open source information regarding where these returnees are now. Canada and many Western nations have also been reluctant to repatriate their citizens detained in Syria, often due to negative public opinion, security risks, difficulty with collecting evidence for prosecutions, and potential political backlash.⁴¹ Canadian government officials have not issued a clear plan of what to do with Canadian citizens detained in Syria and Iraq (mostly women), while CVE practitioners continue to work with individuals at risk of radicalization (mostly men) or who are disengaging from violent extremism.

In response to these events, the Canadian government has invested considerable funds into domestic efforts to prevent and counter extremist violence. In 2017, Public Safety launched the Canada Centre for Community Engagement and Prevention of Violence (Canada Centre) with the mandate of leading Canada’s efforts to counter radicalization to violence. The Canada Centre had an initial budget of C$35 million, with an ongoing C$10 million per year.⁴² This announcement of significant public funding for CVE, and the explicit shift to include various ideologies beyond Islamist-inspired extremism, garnered the attention of many civil society organizations with a wide array of experience.

But the ongoing lack of gender-disaggregated data for extremist groups continues to impede our understanding of the gender dimensions of both the foreign fighter phenomenon and terrorism more broadly.⁴³ Official estimates suggest that 20% of Canadian foreign fighters (or “extremist travellers”) were women and girls, an unprecedented level of female participation in listed terrorist entities in Canada.⁴⁴ Globally, women who travelled to join ISIS have been repatriated at markedly lower rates than men and children.⁴⁵ The United Nations and the Global Counter Terrorism Forum have issued key principles on the gender dimensions and priorities for returning extremist travellers—but it is unclear how or if these guidelines are being followed.⁴⁶

Another complicating factor is that efforts to address violent extremism in Canada, as elsewhere, have been predominantly focused on Muslim communities. While the present study did not set out to investigate Islamist-inspired extremism specifically, the vast majority of responses still revolved around this topic. Many respondents felt that this focus has racialized CVE practices and increased stigmatization of minority communities, while often acknowledging that their own work still had this same focus. In 2018, the Canada Centre published its National Strategy on Countering Radicalization to Violence, a title which notably avoided the term “violent extremism” and identified various pathways of radicalization to violence, including right-wing ideologies.⁴⁷ At this time there was significant debate around crimes perpetrated by the far right being labelled as “hate crimes” and not terrorism, generating accusations about double standards for violence perpetrated by white people.⁴⁸

Exacerbating these racial tensions is the ongoing controversy in Quebec around the “secularism bill,” which bans public workers in positions of authority from wearing religious symbols; the bill also requires citizens to uncover their faces to receive public services, which many argue blatantly targets Muslim women.⁴⁹ In addition, in 2019, CSIS and the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) visits and phone calls to male Muslim students in Ontario spurred two Canadian lawyers to create a hotline to offer legal advice to those targeted.⁵⁰ Notably, women Muslim students did not report the same level of questioning.⁵¹

In this political climate, officials at Public Safety Canada have voiced goals of making national security work “bias free,”⁵² and the RCMP has long had an official mandate of “bias-free policing.”⁵³ However, to date there is little empirical evidence as to how cognitive biases are being systematically addressed in Canadian CT and CVE, and whether these initiatives are having a substantive effect.

Methodology

This project is a single case study using semi-structured, in-depth interviews.⁵⁴ The project set out to explore the hypothesis that gender and racial stereotypes are adversely affecting CT and CVE practices in Canada and, in particular, practices around disengagement from violent extremism. Respondents were selected through purposive sampling with the following criteria: (a) they were publicly recognized and/or published experts in the fields of CVE or CT in Canada; and/or (b) they were working in a Canadian government department or civil society organization specifically dedicated to CVE or CT. In addition to cold-contacting organizations working in CVE across Canada, the study also used chain-referral sampling (i.e., “snowball sampling”) to access hard-to-reach populations, such as the security and intelligence communities. The interviews were primarily conducted in person, with eight conducted over Skype, from July to December 2019. The sample includes past and present employees from Public Safety, CSIS, the Communications Security Establishment, Global Affairs Canada, and the RCMP, as well as police officers, lawyers, academics, and civil society workers involved in CVE, in the following cities: Vancouver; Edmonton; Calgary; Winnipeg; Toronto; Ottawa; and Montreal. Of the 26 respondents (e.g., see Appendix Table 1A), 42% were women and 35% were Black, Indigenous, or people of colour. As this community is fairly small, and per respondents’ requests, the individuals are quoted only as “government,” “CVE practitioner,” or “academic” to protect their identities. Interviews were audio recorded with participant permission, transcribed, and coded by the author. While representative of many key actors across Canada, these responses do not necessarily represent the views of the entire CVE and CT communities. This research was approved by the research ethics review board at Carleton University, Ottawa (file 106973).

Discussion

Persistent racial and gender stereotypes

While this study initially set out to explore gender stereotypes and biases, respondents often brought up racial issues, emphasizing that both gender and racial stereotypes were affecting both CVE and CT work. Particularly glaring was a lack of understanding around how gender is relevant to national security, a repeated conflation of “gender” with “women,” and concerns about the continued emphasis on Islamist-inspired extremism and racialized communities.

On the policy side, several government respondents were enthusiastic about Public Safety’s new mandate to mainstream the government’s Gender-Based Analysis Plus (GBA+) intersectional analysis strategy in national security work. In other departments, the GBA+ initiative had clearly been embraced by high level officials. Indeed, several respondents said that they had seen significant positive changes in their departments over the last several years, as articulated by one government respondent:

I think on the whole we’re getting better … I always frame it as: the violent extremists and terrorist organizations, they get gender, they understand it, and they know how to exploit it in their marketing. They know how to use it tactically and strategically, which then puts the state apparatus at a tactical and strategic disadvantage if we don’t have the same understanding.⁵⁵

Another respondent was enthusiastic about incorporating GBA+ into police work in order to improve transparency:

People might ask, “Doesn’t it take away your police intuition?” But I would want that to be taken away. If you’re going to stop someone and restrict their movement, you’d better have a good reason. Sometimes we [the police] fail to explain exactly what fed into decision-making.⁵⁶

However, several frontline practitioners in law enforcement and intelligence were unclear as to what GBA+ is or how to do it, and several questioned how it applied to their work. Most respondents in the intelligence sector were highly skeptical of the value or relevance of GBA+ to their tasks, and several of these pointed out that over 95% of the targets they looked at were men (therefore, in their minds, “gender” did not apply). While intelligence analysts said that they would not ignore information about or from women, some emphasized that they simply looked at “information that came to them.” There was little acknowledgement that information is never neutral and depends on what specific analysts choose to value, where they look, and how databases and algorithms are affected by human bias. Indeed, most government respondents said that whether GBA+ (frequently understood incorrectly as “gender analysis”) was incorporated into CVE and CT work often depended entirely on individual people. These responses reveal two common but false assumptions: (a) that GBA+ is only about gender; and (b) that gender is only about women.

Even with government staffers and CVE practitioners who understood GBA+, some felt that domestic CVE was too new to introduce sophisticated methods such as intersectional analysis. One former government employee admitted to deliberately avoiding gender in her work because of the potential repercussions:

Well, I definitely didn’t do gender for work. Because then I would have been in the female ghetto, right? … because if you do gender you can only do gender … you belong in that box and, fortunately, then nobody has to talk to you, which is great [for them], because they don’t do gender so they don’t have to talk about it, and they don’t have to talk to you. There’s an easy out for them when somebody asks a question about it, it’s like, “Oh … that’s this person, I don’t have to think about it or how it affects my work.”⁵⁷

Similarly, one government staffer working on GBA+ in national security admitted that she had asked for other files so that she did not get pigeon-holed as “only” a gender person, and she lamented that hardly anyone understood that GBA+ was not just about gender. Another government respondent admitted: “If there are women involved, well then that clearly has a gender component, so we’ll farm it out to a gender expert”—and these experts are almost always women.⁵⁸ One practitioner admitted that they had received funding to write a report on “gender in CVE” but actually wrote the report entirely on women.⁵⁹ All of the practitioners except one acknowledged that, to date, all referrals to their CVE programs had been men.

These misunderstandings about GBA+ and overemphasis on gender have also led to insufficient critical thinking about race in CT efforts. As noted by a participant at a recent Public Safety symposium, GBA+ has not only been conflated with women but with white women specifically, leaving very little space for critical analyses of how race, religion, and other identity factors intersect with gender.⁶⁰ Muslim respondents and religious scholars repeatedly stated that discrimination against Muslims, alongside a poor understanding of religion in general across Canada, still persists in CT work. One civil society respondent noted that patterns in hotline calls had changed recently in that, instead of the predominance of calls related to Muslims and racialized communities, they were now receiving more calls about suspected right-wing extremism. But he attributed this change to an increase in media coverage of white supremacist violence rather than an actual change in racial profiling.⁶¹ Several practitioners felt that intelligence services would flag any reference to “jihad” (particularly if coming from racialized men), whereas a white, male student drawing swastikas in class, for example, or spouting neo-Nazi values online, would have to cross a much higher threshold to get attention. And women must cross even higher thresholds. One scholar noted that investigations into terrorist financing still disproportionately target Muslim charities, saying: “There’s a systemic bias against racialized minorities and specifically Muslims … and it’s increasingly ludicrous after Christchurch.”⁶² Several respondents pointed to the Quebec charter banning religious symbols as exacerbating discrimination against Muslims and contributing to violent extremism, and multiple respondents were very frustrated at what they saw as a persistent misperception that racism is not a serious issue in Canada. Finally, several respondents did not feel that such biases could be overcome unless demographics changed in government departments. For example, when discussing recent Public Safety efforts to become “bias free,” one scholar said: “They need different biases in the room … rather than being ‘bias-free,’ they need to maximize the bias in the room that are decision-makers.”⁶³

When racial, religious, and gender stereotypes are combined, the impact of intersectional biases becomes even more profound across the CT spectrum. One respondent, for example, noted how police recruits that were Muslim and spoke Arabic would automatically be put into national security and/or CT work, even if they had no interest in that area.⁶⁴ Respondents also took issue with racialized Muslim men receiving the most scrutiny from security services, and some civil society practitioners felt that viewing violent male jihadists as “the most violent extremists” over any other form of violent extremism further mythologized terrorism and exacerbated racial tensions. Another respondent shared a story of a Muslim, racialized officer who was assigned to a CVE case even though his entire policing background up to that point had been in homicide: “That’s just an example of a stereotype where you happen to be Muslim and you happen to be brown, so therefore you must know how to solve this [radicalization] problem.”⁶⁵ Racial and gender biases can also intersect in unexpected ways, as one CVE practitioner described:

I think we’ve gotten better at recognizing women’s agency if they’re racialized women in all these groups. We have further to go recognizing white women’s involvement in these groups … all those things like brainwashing, that someone must have convinced them. It’s just like they were even more duped because they were duped twice. (D15)

As noted above, giving terrorism special status over other violent crime (especially if perpetrated by racialized minorities) makes it particularly prone to emotional reactivity and cognitive biases.⁶⁶ Indeed, some respondents felt that blanket demonization of extremist travellers to Syria and Iraq will have long-term effects throughout the affected Canadian communities from which these people left, especially if individuals are deemed beyond redemption:

With both men and women there needs to be an understanding that the choice to go over may have been misguided … it may have been youthful (aka stupid) … Just like if someone regrets joining a gang or a cell here in Canada … The same could be true here [with returnees]. But they just weren’t able to leave and … that needs to be something we consider in the dialogue. Because we celebrate people who are youthful and get into gangs and then leave, right? So, we need to think about that.⁶⁷

Of course, placing returning foreign fighters and extremist travellers into the same policy category as reformed gang members is not without its problems. But there are many similarities, such as social exclusion, a sense of relative deprivation, race-related and gender-related biases, and appeals to masculinity, that should not be overlooked. While the findings here are not representative of the whole of government, the overall pattern of responses indicates that while most government officials in this study had a strong grasp of GBA+ language and supported the concept, the use of intersectional analysis on the ground is inconsistent—particularly in intelligence and law enforcement—and depends highly on the expertise of individual people.

In short, despite a federally-mandated policy emphasis on GBA+, including within Public Safety, these formal requirements to consider intersecting identities and related biases in CT and CVE work are not yet translating into consistent practice on the ground. Rather, the application of GBA+ largely depends on individual experts, often focuses only on gender, and gender and racial biases persist even among practitioners and analysts who are aware of these patterns.

Disagreements on what CVE means (and who should do it)

A second notable finding of this research was the significant disagreement on what CVE means in Canada and who should be doing it—an issue that was contributing to, and influenced by, implicit biases. As one practitioner said: “PVE and CVE have been really messy. It’s a really messy field. I’m not even sure people know what they are doing when they say they do PVE and CVE.”⁶⁸ In fact, this “messiness” was given by several respondents as the reason why GBA+ was not consistently applied across the country. For example, practitioners in one province emphasized that they were building GBA+ into the core of their programming,⁶⁹ while some in other provinces did not even know what GBA+ was, and others were focused only on the gender aspect.⁷⁰ One CVE practitioner thought that the field was too new to be introducing complex factors like intersectionality when they still had not agreed on basic principles and practices.⁷¹ Muslim activists and religious scholars were especially concerned about Canada’s general lack of religious understanding and knowledge, which they felt was readily apparent in the CVE sphere and not addressed by GBA+.

Some respondents noted that the recent influx of public money for CVE had brought many new actors to the field who did not have experience with terrorism or violent extremism. Indeed, one practitioner admitted that his organization had seen the funding available and tried to figure out how they could adapt their existing work to fit into CVE (an area in which they had not previously worked), but he still expressed concern over this incentive structure:

Law enforcement partners, are saying “You need to tackle the ideology, the ideology is number one”… [But] we’re not experienced in theology when it comes to religiously radicalized individuals or if there’s a danger of extremism on that side … to be very frank, it’s new but … there’s new money … So now, every academic, every non-profit, any government department, will start talking about how they’re addressing national security, how they’re addressing violent extremism and then—poof—here comes the funding, and you get prioritized.⁷²

In fact, several practitioners admitted that they were creating programs “on the fly,” and many were not aware of research on disarmament, disengagement, and reintegration (DDR) or desistance from gangs, for example, that might apply to their work. Here again is where knowledge gaps and inconsistent practices contribute to racial and gender biases. For example, there are many lessons to be learned from DDR in terms of women’s agency in armed groups, harmful masculinities, and reintegration programs that have not adequately considered the special needs of women and racialized populations.⁷³ But these lessons are not effectively crossing into Canadian CVE work. And while some practitioners exhibited a clearer grasp of issues around race, gender, and religion, and the importance of understanding these intersecting identities and related discrimination, they were not necessarily comfortable applying this knowledge to CVE work. As one practitioner noted:

There aren’t a lot of agencies that are prepared to do intervention work with radicalization. It’s just not part of our training as social workers … It’s a new field, right? So, we’re all kind of out of the gate sort of trying to develop concepts. But I’ve been really pushing for a few standardisation pieces so that when we’re talking across the country, we can be relating the same concepts to one another … because I’m frustrated at the fact that we don’t have a lexicon.⁷⁴

Despite the Canada Centre’s National Strategy on Countering Radicalization to Violence, published in 2018, practitioners emphasized that a lack of clarity was especially apparent regarding disengagement and reintegration, including an inconsistent application of GBA+. This confusion has resulted in significant disagreements on the ground in terms of how to proceed, alongside a lack of evidence regarding effective processes and, in some cases, falling into predictable and biased strategies. While many practitioners were trying to create evidence-based practices, the overall process thus far has been ad hoc, with unclear results. This type of “on the fly” planning, based on quick judgments in situations of uncertainty, is highly susceptible to cognitive biases.⁷⁵ Indeed, some practitioners questioned the value of programs if they were not evidence-based:

And obviously a lot of money gets thrown around for various projects. But … through all the money that we’ve spent on the issue of radicalization and countering it and CVE programming and PVE programming, are we any closer to understanding the problem and providing a solution? On a personal level, I don’t feel that is the case. So … when we’re throwing out, you know, three, five million dollars over a number of years and the end result is you’ve only had six people come through the program … On average [the programs] are not getting high attendances, and they’re not doing much work either … So, then we’re spending all this money, but what is it actually being spent on?⁷⁶

In addition, a highly securitized approach to addressing violent radicalization can be counter-productive if it produces the perception that CVE is hostile toward religious freedom.⁷⁷ It can also overemphasize men’s participation while ignoring women or exploiting them as informants, especially Muslim women.⁷⁸ One practitioner felt that certain intelligence approaches had indeed created the adverse effect of Muslim communities refusing to work with government agencies:

Probably the most difficult [relationship] was CSIS, where all they want to do is collect information, they would never give you anything back, they would never give you context, they would never tell you what’s going on. And they just constantly either show up, or call and say, “Hey, can you meet?” So that relationship didn’t go anywhere, pretty much.⁷⁹

Particularly contentious here was the issue of returning extremist travellers, where government and law enforcement are focusing on evidence for arrest and prosecution, and CVE practitioners are advocating for rehabilitation and reintegration—often on the realistic expectation that there will not be enough evidence to successfully prosecute. For example, while travelling overseas to join a listed entity is a prosecutable offence in Canada, there are significant challenges to gathering hard evidence on motives to travel, and on what people specifically did overseas.⁸⁰ On the other hand, some intelligence and police officers expressed concern that CVE programs ran counter to their goals of stopping attacks and arresting terrorists. As one respondent in law enforcement said:

If you talk to CSIS guys, the whole prevention game, the whole intervention game, is in some ways good but is sort of a waste of money. You get way more bang for your buck in other endeavours, like looking at terrorist financing. And CT financing is a huge endeavour. I know in [western province] there is only one guy working on that, but if you ask what they have in terms of countering violent extremism, you’ve got hundreds of guys working on that full time. And that’s not a bad thing, but in terms of triage of resources, I think there is a better way to do it. That’s my personal opinion.⁸¹

However, civil society practitioners felt that an emphasis on “hard” national security since 2014 has undermined other efforts that may be more important in preventing radicalization to violence—such as education, job training and creation, and addressing systemic discrimination. As one practitioner said:

Every single one of these people, they left for a reason. I think it’s incumbent on us to figure out why … Who does that? Why would you do that? How bad is it here? … That to me is far more critically important. And you will never know if we shut the door on them.⁸²

Practitioners working with receiving communities (i.e., communities to which extremist travellers might return) noted that because these communities were predominantly Muslim, there was significant anxiety among the population over increased surveillance by security services and the impact this might have on further radicalization, in addition to reinforcing existing racial biases.

This discord over CVE definitions and practices leaves little room to systematically address bias and stereotypes in programming. At the same time, these disagreements are clearly influenced by differing perceptions on who and what constitutes a threat, which actors should be involved, and what priorities to focus on—all of which are influenced by implicit biases.

Conclusions and policy implications

As the findings above demonstrate, despite an official government commitment to GBA+, there is substantial evidence to support the supposition that biases around gender and race are impeding effective CVE and CT practices in Canada. While several government departments are making notable progress with GBA+, both gender and racial stereotypes—and the special status accorded to terrorism above other violent crimes—continue to hinder objective and comprehensive analyses on both the prevention and disengagement sides of CVE and CT work. The roles of women are frequently overlooked, gender norms as they relate to men are largely ignored, and racialized populations continue to be overemphasized. Although the Canadian government has been an international leader in putting forward gender concerns in global CT circles, these policies are not always translating to domestic work on the ground—and similar approaches to race and religion lag far behind. But as my previous research in the UK found, ignoring the influence of gender norms while overemphasizing the role of racialized populations creates problematic gaps in CVE programming and persistent blind spots in CT efforts.⁸³

In addition, there is a significant level of disagreement on what CVE is, how it relates to—or competes with—CT work, and who should be doing it. This disagreement, and the disparate and/or ad hoc methods of designing programs, has eclipsed concerns around addressing implicit biases. The result is that, while government departments and civil society organizations grapple with the logistical issues of CVE and its coordination across the country, racial and gender biases are not being systematically addressed, if at all.

The policy implications here are clear. First, training on implicit bias awareness, while already in place in some departments, needs to be reinvented and systematized to better address gender and racial stereotypes affecting CVE and CT work. This will require new approaches to make GBA+ relevant to frontline and operational workers, many of whom were skeptical of its application. Such change is, of course, a monumental task that will require years of training, experimentation, failures, and incremental steps forward. But if the government is serious about applying GBA+ to national security work, it will need to improve the relevance of that training, which many respondents viewed as merely a box-ticking exercise. The GBA+ name itself, while unlikely to change given its “brand” in the public service, needs further critical examination, as it overemphasizes gender while obscuring racial, religious, and other intersecting identities that it is meant to address.

Second, the common and persistent conflation of gender with women needs to be systematically debunked. As long as gender is relegated to “women’s work,” it will never be considered as important as other concerns in the national security space, and “gender blindness” will continue to impede CT practices. Given how deeply entrenched this conflation has become in both national and international practice, this task is an uphill battle. However, in both academic and policy approaches to terrorism, there are already signs of change: there has been an increasing awareness that gender norms matter in violent ideologies, including an acknowledgement that we must adequately consider violent expressions of masculinity and the way extremist groups utilize gender identities.⁸⁴

Third, rather than aiming to become “bias free,” Public Safety Canada and other departments should aim to bring more biases to the table (i.e., staff, advisors, and consultants from different gender, racial, and religious demographics), especially in decision-making roles. While this type of institutional transformation is challenging and clearly requires incremental steps over time, it is arguably far more viable than becoming “bias free.” Indeed, this recommendation to diversify biases in the government was voiced by many respondents in this study and was raised multiple times at a recent Public Safety symposium.⁸⁵ In this context, one approach cannot fit all, and some departments may have greater resistance to change compared to others. Addressing implicit bias is complicated and expensive, and there is scant evidence on whether short-term training, such as workshops implemented by many police forces,⁸⁶ actually have a significant impact. Such change clearly requires a long-term commitment with repeated interventions and evaluations. But the level of difficulty does not absolve the government of its responsibility to begin this process. By exposing implicit biases and creating strategies to address them, the government may also have more success in establishing a consistent CVE lexicon and practice across the country.

Finally, Canada’s recent entry into domestic CVE does not mean that it is too early to address complex issues like gender and racial discrimination; on the contrary, awareness of cognitive biases should be built into the core of CVE programming from the start. Policy-makers and practitioners in the national security space need to confront assumptions, emotions, and mythology that they might be utilizing, or perpetuating, in efforts to combat terrorism and violent extremism—not only around gender, but also in terms of race, religion, class, and other identity factors. Canada can learn from the experiences of other countries and address these issues now, before hardline approaches and cognitive biases create more vulnerabilities that may increase, rather than prevent, radicalization to violence.

Supplemental Material

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Supplemental material, sj-pdf-1-ijx-10.1177_0020702020976615 for Investigating implicit biases around race and gender in Canadian counterterrorism by Rachel Schmidt: for the Lothian Audit of the Treatment of Cerebral Haemorrhage Collaborators in International Journal

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

The author would like to thank Patrick Segsworth and Cheshmak Farhoumand Sims at Global Affairs Canada, as well as Dr. Gaëlle Rivard-Piché and two anonymous reviewers, for their helpful comments on earlier versions of this manuscript. Thanks are also due to Women in International Security Canada for nominating this work for the International Journal essay prize at its annual symposium in 2019.

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: This research was funded by the 2019 International Policy Initiatives Challenge sponsored by Global Affairs Canada and the Social Sciences Humanities Research Council.

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Ratna Ghosh,W.Y. Alice Chan, Ashley Manuel, and Maihemuti Dilimulati, “Can education counter violent religious extremism?” Canadian Foreign Policy Journal 23, no. 2 (2017): 117–33; Kathy Laster and Edna Erez, “Sisters in terrorism? Exploding stereotypes,” Women and Criminal Justice 25, no. 1–2 (2015): 83–99.

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Nancy W. Jabbra, “Women, words and war: Explaining 9/11 and justifying U.S. military action in Afghanistan and Iraq,” Journal of International Women’s Studies 8, no. 1 (2006): 236–55.

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“Incel” stands for “involuntary celibate” and is an online movement of mostly white, mostly heterosexual men who believe that women deny them sex because they are not attractive enough. See: Bruce Hoffman, Jacob Ware, and Ezra Shapiro, “Assessing the threat of Incel violence,” Studies in Conflict and Terrorism 43, no. 7 (2020): 565–87.

8

Steven Greer, “Counter-Terrorist law in British universities: A review of the ‘Prevent’ debate,” Public Law, no. January 2017 (2018): 84–105; Kent Roach, “The migration and evolution of programs to counter violent extremism,” University of Toronto Law Journal 68, no. 4 (2018): 588–97; and Schmidt, “Duped: Examining gender stereotypes.”

9

Schmidt, “Duped: Examining gender stereotypes.”

10

Kimberlé Crenshaw, “Demarginalizing the intersection of race and sex: A Black feminist critique of antidiscrimination doctrine, feminist theory and antiracist politics,” University of Chicago Legal Forum 1989, no. 1 (1989); Carol Cohn, “Women and wars: Toward a conceptual framework,” in Carol Cohn, ed., Women and Wars (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2013), 1–35; and Cynthia H. Enloe, Maneuvers: The International Politics of Militarizing Women’s Lives (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2000).

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Telles, Pigmentocracies.

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Raewyn Connell, “Masculinities in global perspective: Hegemony, contestation, and changing structures of power,” Theory and Society 45, no. 4 (August 2016): 303–18.

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John Horgan, “Deradicalization or disengagement? A process in need of clarity and a counterterrorism initiative in need of evaluation,” Revista de Psicología Social 24, no. 2 (23 January 2009): 291–98.

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Anthony King, “The female combat soldier,” European Journal of International Relations 22, no. 1 (5 May 2015): 122–43.

20

Caron E. Gentry and Laura Sjoberg, Beyond Mothers, Monsters, Whores: Thinking about Women’s Violence in Global Politics, vol. Second (London: Zed Books Ltd, 2015).

21

Andrea Mendez, “Militarized gender performativity: Women and demobilization in Colombia’s FARC and AUC” (PhD dissertation. Queen’s University, Kingston, Ontario, Canada, 2012).

22

Alexis Leanna Henshaw, “Why women rebel: Greed, grievance , and women in armed rebel groups,” Journal of Global Security Studies 1, no. 3 (2016): 204–19; and Karen Jacques and Paul J. Taylor, “Myths and realities of female-perpetrated terrorism,” Law and Human Behavior 37, no. 1 (2013): 35–44.

23

Laura Huey and Hillary Peladeau, “Cheering on the jihad: An exploration of women’ s participation in online pro-jihadist networks,” The Canadian Network for Research on Terrorism, Security and Society, TSAS-WP16-07, 2016, (accessed 5 June 2019).

24

Alexis Leanna Henshaw, “Where women rebel,” International Feminist Journal of Politics 18, no. 1 (2 January 2016): 39–60, 51.

25

Schmidt, “Duped: Examining gender stereotypes.”

26

Wilson, Hugenberg, and Rule, “Racial bias in judgments of physical size and formidability.”

27

Jordan Culver, “A Canadian teenager has been charged with terrorism inspired by the online ‘Incel’ movement. What Is an ‘Incel?,’” USA Today, 2020, (accessed 2 April 2020).

28

Michael Nesbitt, Robert Oxoby, and Meagan Potier, “Terrorism sentencing decisions in Canada since 2001: Shifting away from the fundamental principle and towards cognitive biases,” University of British Columbia Law Review 52, no. 2 (2019): 553.

29

Uzma Jamil, “The war on terror in Canada: Securitizing Muslims,” Journal of Islamic and Muslim Studies 1, no. 2 (2017): 105; and Schmidt, “Duped: Examining gender stereotypes.”

30

Ihsaan Gardee, “Government must rebuild trust with Canadian Muslims on national security,” The Hill Times, 11 June 2018, (accessed 6 June 2019).

31

Canadian Security Intelligence Service, “2018 CSIS Public Report,” Ottawa, 2018, 19, (accessed 10 December 2019).

32

Former government (D08), interview with author, 2019.

33

Craig Forcese and Kent Roach, False Security: The Radicalization of Canadian Anti-Terrorism (Toronto: Irwin Law, 2015).

34

Ibid.

35

Benjamin Shingler and Roberto Rocha, “Reported hate crimes jumped in Quebec City in year prior to mosque shooting,” CBC News, 29 November 2017, (accessed 5 May 2019).

36

Cook and Vale, “From Daesh to ‘Diaspora’ II.”

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Former government (D08), interview with author, 2019.

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“2018 CSIS Public Report.”

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Janice Dickson, “Terrorism experts applaud minister’s clarifications on returned foreign fighters,” The Globe and Mail, 16 January 2019, (accessed 15 June 2018).

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42

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43

Cook and Vale, “From Daesh to ‘diaspora’ II.”

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Government (D18), interview with author, 2019.

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Practitioner (D21), interview with author, 2019.

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61

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62

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63

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64

Government (D26), interview with author, 2019.

65

CVE practitioner (D11), interview with author, 2019.

66

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67

Former government employee (D03), interview with author, 2019.

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CVE practitioner (D21), interview with author, 2019.

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CVE practitioner (D09), interview with author, 2019.

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CVE practitioner (D11), interview with author, 2019.

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Roach, “The migration and evolution of programs.”

78

Schmidt, “Duped: Examining gender stereotypes.”

79

CVE practitioner (D11), interview with author, 2019.

80

Former government (D03), academic (D16), interviews with author, 2019.

81

Government (D10), interview with author, 2019.

82

Government/CVE practitioner (D14), interview with author, 2019.

83

Schmidt, “Duped: Examining gender stereotypes.”

84

Katherine Brown, “Gender and counter-radicalization. Women and emerging counter-terror measures,” in Jayne C. Huckerby and Margeret L. Sattertherwaite, eds., Gender, National Security and Counter-Terrorism: Human Rights Perspectives (Abingdon, UK: Routledge, 2013), 36–59.

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Author Biography

Rachel Schmidt is a Social Sciences Humanities Research Council Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Sié Chéou-Kang Center for International Security & Diplomacy, Josef Korbel School of International Studies, University of Denver (2020–2021) and a Senior Editor at OpenGlobalRights.

Appendix

Table 1A.

Interview list.

Interview number	Role
D01	Government*
D02	Government
D03	Government/academic
D04	Government
D05	Government
D06	Government
D07	Academic
D08	Government/academic
D09	Countering violent extremism (CVE) practitioner
D10	CVE practitioner (police)
D11	CVE practitioner
D12	CVE practitioner
D13	CVE practitioner
D14	CVE practitioner (police)
D15	CVE practitioner
D16	Academic
D17	CVE practitioner
D18	Government
D19	CVE practitioner
D20	Academic
D21	CVE practitioner
D22	CVE practitioner
D23	CVE practitioner
D24	Government
D25	Government
D26	Government

Note: *, government may indicate either former or current government employee.

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