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Since 2005, the Australian government has quietly run a number of initiatives aimed at countering homegrown terrorism. The majority of these have been focused on engaging at-risk youth through activities and education programs, but without consistent funding, the results have been mixed, and a number of community programs have collapsed in successive governments. Further, the widely adopted strategy of re-educating radicalised Australian Muslims by simply telling them that their interpretation of Islam was wrong, ignored key reasons why extremist views were attractive in the first place."The very reason why people are becoming radicalised is because they're attracted to young firebrand preachers"
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A proposal from Dr Clarke Jones at the Australian Natioanal University received recent attention but both Dr. Aly and Dr. Kara-Ali have criticized it, with the latter calling it "incoherent" and ineffective to shift the problem of extremism onto psychologists and psychiatrists. Dr. Aly is advocating instead for a family approach, involving caseworkers working closely with families and not just individuals to address problems closer to home. "A lot of the time, the first people who notice the signs of radicalisation are family members," she said. "You can't have police doing the intervention – it has to come from people who have trust in the community, who are part of the community." Dr Kara-Ali agrees. "Radicalisation is a political and religious issue. Intelligence and military force alone do not solve this problem."Follow Emma on Twitter: @emsydo"You can't have police doing the intervention – it has to come from people who have trust in the community, who are part of the community."