Where is the Mother?: - The Securitization of Mothers in Preventing

Feeding into this narrative of mothers or mothering (through the ethics of care) as a resource for prevention is the idea that women as mothers have the innate ability and are uniquely positioned in their families and communities to detect signs of radicalization in their children and spouses.3The role carved out for mothers operates on two levels- strategic and tactical levels. [...] Given the assumed complementarity of women’s role in intelligence gathering and mothering, women assume a new subject position, I refer to as ‘Mother Spies’.4 At the strategic level, the gendered expectation of P/CVE programs that focus on mothers in the words of an interviewee is “that young people are shaped by the women who are in charge of nurturing them. [...] TSAS Research Brief the leniency the courts may grant to mothers often sits in the gendered desire to preserve the mother-child bond as the more time the mother devotes to the child, the less vulnerable they are to radicalization and the better for the child, the family, and the society. [...] The spotlight on mothers creates a gap, which is the consideration of the whole family as mothers are not the only caregivers, and in some cases (particularly in non-Western contexts), youth live or have close contact with multiple generations of a family.43 Also, in many cultures, many women express motherhood through the ethics of welfare provision and not by maternal presence. [...] The aim is to investigate areas where the expectations and desires of the participants complement or contradict the expected outcomes of the P/CVE initiatives and what visions they seek to pursue.