Abstract

This chapter explores how Muslim women in the context of the UK’s counterterrorism regime have gone from being regarded as silent facilitators in need of empowerment to potential terrorist threats. It traces the evolving policy landscape of Prevent since its inception in 2006 and the role of women and girls within it, highlighting the processes of gendered racialisation, which the securitisation agenda has facilitated. It begins with the empowerment narratives of the early years of Prevent and then examines the gendered politics of safeguarding which emerge after 2015. It draws on the example of Shamima Begum to explore these changes, setting out the contradictory ways in which Muslim women and girls are simultaneously infantilised but also denied the affordances of childhood. It concludes that these narratives represent a form of gendered Orientalism (Abu-Lughod, Do Muslim Women Need Saving? Harvard University Press, 2013) and reflect, re-produce and legitimate gendered anti-Muslim racism.