Seen But Not Heard

Youth radicalization is on the rise, posing an increasing threat to public safety worldwide and putting a growing cohort of youth at risk. In response, programs to prevent and counter violent extremism (P/​CVE) across the globe have made youth radicalization a central focus of their efforts. To ensure these P/​CVE efforts are effective, rigorous evaluations are essential; they help identify what works within extremism prevention projects, programs and policies — and what does not.

Despite the growing attention and funding P/​CVE has received since the early 2000s, efforts to evaluate P/​CVE have remained limited. This gap is especially striking for youth programming, even though young people have been made central to P/​CVE efforts. Literature and research-based guidance on best practices for youth-focused evaluations are still scarce. This stands in stark contrast to what evaluation practitioners need to do their work well: specific, research-based and youth-focused P/​CVE approaches are crucial to address the distinct challenges that come with youth radicalization, including the need to adapt to the psycho-developmental stage of the young people they address. 

Based on semi-structured interviews with 14 experts from 7 countries (Canada, Czechia, Indonesia, Kenya, the Netherlands, Spain, Tunisia) as well as several background conversations with experts from Germany and Australia during the process of designing the interview guide, this report provides a cross-country overview of current trends in youth radicalization, highlights the particular challenges and opportunities of P/​CVE work with youth, and offers insights into what evaluations of such activities are still getting wrong, and how they can do better. Across interviews and countries, three overarching findings stand out: 

(1) Extremist groups are targeting increasingly younger groups in increasingly creative ways;

(2) P/​CVE efforts often struggle to reach youth effectively, because they remain too securitized, top-down, or ideologically focused;

(3) Evaluation practices frequently overlook youth-specific needs, thereby missing critical drivers of vulnerability and failing to capture long-term developmental impact. 

These trends underscore an urgent need to rethink how success is defined and measured and, more generally, how P/​CVE engages with youth.

This study suggests a number of starting points for how P/​CVE evaluations can more accurately — and more ethically — capture the impact of youth-focused P/​CVE:

• Evaluations should be designed around youth-specific factors, using indicators that measure protective and resilience-building effects rather than measure radicalization or risk of violence, as these can heavily misconstrue results for youth;
• Survey and interview methods must avoid endangering young people during vulnerable phases of identity development by asking suggestive questions or creating incentives that lead to distorted, overstated, or deliberately provocative responses;
• Evaluators should be trusted adults that know youth and their lived realities well — third-party evaluations are less likely to yield useful results; 
• Because meaningful change for youth unfolds over key developmental stages, short-term, security-driven timelines cannot capture true impact; instead, evaluations should focus on protective and resilience factors and ideally track outcomes over many years. 

This study is part of the international, comparative component of the research and dialogue project ​“PrEval: Evaluation and Quality Assurance in Extremism Prevention, Democracy Promotion and Civic Education: Analysis, Monitoring, Dialogue,” funded by the German Ministry of the Interior from September 2022 to December 2025. It builds on two international expert surveys conducted in 2023 and 2024.