Bloomberg Business Week: Prof. DeVoe Shares Perspective on Deradicalizing Extremism
With radical ideologies and misinformation exploding online, more and more parents are trying to prevent their children from adopting extremist ideas that can lead to violence and homicide. One non-profit, Parents for Peace, was started by the parents of a young man who shot and killed a soldier at a U.S. military recruitment office. BU School of Social Work Prof. Ellen DeVoe is one of several social workers who are studying the Parents for Peace’s method for deradicalizing extremism in an effort to better address these issues across the country.
Excerpt from “Can Extremists Be Deradicalized?” by David Yaffe-Bellany and Sophia Cai published in Bloomberg Business Week
In 2015, Bledsoe founded Parents for Peace, a nonprofit that specializes in deradicalizing people who are drawn to extremist ideas, from jihad to QAnon.
The group’s services have never been in greater demand. During the pandemic, Parents for Peace has seen a threefold increase in calls to its national hotline. MSNBC aired a short segment on the nonprofit in April, leading to a burst of 25 calls in four days. Researchers at Harvard and Boston University are studying its methods, as academics, therapists, and social workers nationwide grapple with combating extremism in an increasingly polarized political environment. Much of that work has focused on identifying and combating the roots of extremism in the Internet Age, such as the misinformation proliferating on social media. But Parents for Peace is focusing on a narrower, more pragmatic question: how to respond when a loved one subscribes to a radical ideology. ‘We’re not well-equipped to know what to do if a person walks in with this kind of a problem,’ says Ellen DeVoe, a social work expert at Boston University School of Social Work who’s been observing Parents for Peace. ‘They’re absolutely onto something.’
Run by a five-person staff and a rotating cast of volunteers, the organization has refined a treatment approach that sits somewhere at the intersection of family counseling, addiction recovery, traditional therapy, and cult deprogramming.”
