- Elizabeth Johnston
Welcome to the Efus podcast, a podcast produced by the European Forum for Urban Security. This episode is produced in collaboration with the INDEED Project and the IcARUS Project. I'm Elizabeth Johnston, the Executive Director of Efus, the European network of 250 local and regional authorities dedicated to urban security policies. Today we are joined by Malin Martelius, Safety and Security Coordinator at the city of Malmö in Sweden. and by Werner Van Herle, head of the Prevention and Security Department of the City of Mechelen in Belgium. In this episode, we'll focus on the challenges that cities face in designing and implementing effective, evidence-based PCVE initiatives. First question, what does PCVE stand for in your city?
- Werner Van Herle
P in PVE stands for Prevention of Violent Extremism, and in Mechelen, we try to fill that in as reconnecting young people to social institutions where they feel alienated from. Often they have a lot of frustrations, low self-esteem, anger, grievances. And we try to turn that around by reintegrating them.
- Elizabeth Johnston
So Malin, what about your definition for Malmo?
- Malin Martelius
Well, when it comes to P-CVE, the definition is kind of preventing and countering violent extremism. But in my point of view, it's not a municipal assignment to counter violent extremism. But of course, we are responsible to prevent whatever antisocial behavior we find in our city. And if I should kind of elaborate further on the words, I would say that the language within this field violent extremism, for example, is problematic in many ways when we talk to our citizens. Why we in Malmö try to avoid that? Because it's kind of a professional language when we try to frame certain parts of the antisocial behavior. But when, because our civil society actors have objected to those words, and we try to understand why, but and understand of course because they can stigmatize certain groups. So when we talk to our civil society colleagues in Malmö we kind of have an open discussion on how they view the overall situation in Malmö for them and for whom they represent. So whatever they say it's our kind of common picture that we start working from so we don't need the words. If I ask civil society actors in Malmö, what do you see is the major challenge for our city? They might answer, well, the members of my community says that child poverty is the overall problem for us. So, and then who am I to say that we should work on preventing violent extremism? Maybe it's connected, maybe it's not. But the important thing is that we work with problems that we acknowledge together. And I think we can come a further way because then we can coordinate our efforts.
- Elizabeth Johnston
What about PCV initiatives based on evidence?
- Malin Martelius
I don't know if you want to answer that first and I can try.
- Werner Van Herle
I can totally relate to what you are saying and try to avoid some terms and some words because they can create objection from the persons for who you work with. We also focus on the talents and on the positive sides of vulnerable young people who are in Mechelen. Not seeing them only as a threat, but also, first case, as talented young people who have to bring something to local communities. And they bring something to local communities. And that creates resilience. So, yes, we had some evidence based on that. We had a project called Orpheus, which is a project funded by the Indirecht to Seize program, in which we work together with a research team, research team specialized in youth work. They created for us a methodology, how can we create a safe environment for young people. people to speak out and to express their opinion because often as you know PVE, CVE is top down. You are a threat as young people because of that and that and that criteria you are meeting. We try to capture the voice of those. And how do they encounter their living conditions and all the situation in time with ISIS in Iraq and so on and so on. And you are surprised what answers they give you and what they bring in the discussion against their peers. And it's far more stronger than when you say you are a threat and I'm going to protect you against their threats. protect themselves against those threats. So it's important that we have this methodology that could have been tested and structured and systematic so we can scale it up and take it out of a specific context and make it work in different contexts. So yes, it's important to have these academic researchers doing that type of work.
- Elizabeth Johnston
So is that about evidence?
- Werner Van Herle
Yeah, I think so. It's about evidence because they work. tested and evaluated and people were saying when you before the program after the program and did it change you did it help you um and yeah young people are very happy to have their voice also in the debate because they do have something to say about what
- Malin Martelius
about evidence malin i'm not completely satisfied with our national strategy on the topic But at least I think in waiting for better tools or better efforts to help preventing all kinds of antisocial behavior, I think we should all live on the principle at least of no harm. Doing no harm because we're not on a playground here. It's people's real lives and we're not set in place to harm. these people's lives in any way. So if we're not sure about something that we're going to do, it's going to do good or do nothing or do harm, I think we are better off not doing anything. Of course, there are evidence of certain things when we try to tackle complex challenges in the world. And I would say that there are some evidences that if you have strong relations to stakeholders in your neighborhood, you're going to do better than if you don't. I think that the work in Malmö has been aiming to build strong relations and having two ears and one mouth, which means listen twice as much as you speak and take it from there.
- Elizabeth Johnston
Does your city have PCV initiatives based on evidence?
- Malin Martelius
In a way, we have a toolbox, I would say, especially within the social welfare system. We have tried to develop ways of helping young or older people struggling with challenges regarding the PVE question. But I would say that it's not, you know, it's tailor-made efforts made for every individual. I think one thing also is really important to stress while we talk about the PVE challenge. We have a team in Malmö consisting of all municipal branches, because we all view this complex challenge differently from our professional point of view. It's different when you look at it from a cultural, leisure, social, safety, security, even police perspective. But we also have other organizations in the room. And I think it's crucial that we don't overstep our main... objective as an organization. I do not want to see the municipal representatives trying to become some kind of amateur police. We should be safeguarding our citizens. It's a police task to safeguard society against unwanted behavior. That's not something municipal or an NGO should involve in. So I think it's really, we should cooperate, but we should strengthen our main assignment. and value our own perspective in not becoming each other. It's crucial so that we can both support individuals or groups or phenomena in society that we worry about. But repressive efforts, it's not something the municipality should do.
- Elizabeth Johnston
Werner, I see you nodding. Do you agree?
- Werner Van Herle
I do agree on the fact that you should collaborate with each other and that you also should respect every organisation's mission and goals that we have. and that you find a common agenda on how to work together and what you want to achieve as a whole not as an organisation separately and that you talk to each other and that i find it important that as well as civil society municipality social work police justice work together everyone should work together from his point of view and the one is not better than the other
- Elizabeth Johnston
What about your city? What are the PCV initiatives in Mechelen?
- Werner Van Herle
One example I gave just earlier on, another is we have with Kent. They gave us this self-assessment tool in which we can assess collaboration between municipalities, civil society, social work, youth work, police, justice. and to see if we don't put too much priority in one direction or the other, to have this discussion, to see the gaps, so that we can map out what are we doing and how do we find it. Just to have this discussion of are we really in a good way working together. So this tool, it helps us.
- Elizabeth Johnston
What are the unique challenges and opportunities in that framework?
- Werner Van Herle
We're still looking for the dimension of the online, because we do notice that a lot is going on online, like hate speech, misinformation, polarisation, and so on. And our youth and prevention workers, they are very much focused on the offline. And also their skills are very much on the offline world. building trust, doing animation with young people and so on. So we try to find a way of raising awareness and finding maybe tools or instruments that they can be also more involved in this online dimension, understand it and include it in their day-to-day work. And then, of course, all the online dimension is also linked to an ethical discussion. The ontological discussion also. Are you going to, as we were saying, monitor what people say online as a municipality? You have the right to express yourself, to have an opinion. Even though you are not very polite in expressing that opinion, you do have the right to express an opinion.
- Elizabeth Johnston
And what about the opportunities?
- Werner Van Herle
The opportunities is that you can reach out to a lot of young people and that it's part of their day-to-day life. It's one big virtual ecosystem.
- Elizabeth Johnston
How about Malmö? What are the opportunities and the challenges there?
- Malin Martelius
I always wanted to speak so well about the civil society actors in Malmö. We have an extremely strong civil society in Malmö, and I'm smiling saying that they will never leave us alone, but I'm proud of that. I can say on the online question that we For a couple of years, with the Nordic Safe Cities has piloted a project called Malmö Safe and Secure Digital City, where I won't go into any depth about the project, but we, and I don't think all municipalities in the world have to go through this process. It was really tough. And it's also a contradiction in terms to make the internet local. But, you know, Malmö is a crazy city, so we do crazy things. But on the dynamics on what connects the on and offline world, I would say that, as you say, young people see it as just different dimensions in real life. But we as old people don't. But we have tried. really hard for a couple of years to try to make similarities between our squares and streets in the offline world and the groups and pages on social media, for example, be viewed the same because it's actually the same. We pass each other, we eardrop, we react or just pass by. And we need us to do the same as we do in the real world if we do something. And that's why I think it's easier to educate the prevention officers to see the similarities between the worlds than to make the communication people understand prevention. So that's, and there are so many more people that can, you know, handle the prevention role. So, but we're not there yet. It's really hard. As you say, we don't want to monitor people. And also we have to rely on civil society actors to be ears and eyes and to. cooperate with us when it comes to giving correct information if it's disinformation and to the police if it's criminal activities.
- Elizabeth Johnston
According to you, is there a gap between the academic knowledge and the local practitioners?
- Malin Martelius
Yes, and don't misunderstand me here. I love academics. I like reading on my personal time, but in my work time, I don't have time. to read any longer research reports and I would really love if the academics would see the local level as a subject of study. It's really different to look at right-wing extremist movements in Sweden for the last hundred years but I'm not interested in that. I'm working in chaos more or less always. I work with people from the day that That they are born to the day they die. I do it when they're happy. I do it when they're angry. And I do it on a geographical area. And I would love to see researchers interested in the complex municipal life. Instead of on this small research question. Even if we need that too. But can we be the subject of research someday?
- Elizabeth Johnston
Do you have an answer to that question, Werner?
- Werner Van Herle
I do agree that r esearch should come down into day-to-day local life, local or, I don't know, organisational life. We had the opportunity once to work with a PhD student from the beginning in a project. He did a very good job trying to link insights from research into this policy process, which sounds easy when you say it, but it's not easy to do so. It takes a lot, a lot of time and sometimes a lot of compromise that you should make. We do. Okay, let's try and focus and trust the process, academic. And the other way around, that academics need to learn to make pragmatic choices and understand that it's not everything theoretically. And that's the only truth. There are a lot of truths. on there. But I think bridging the gap between academic research and policymaking locally by including researchers in the policymaking process could be a beginning of an answer.
- Elizabeth Johnston
What would you like to remember about our discussion here today together? Did you learn something from each other?
- Werner Van Herle
I learned that it's possible to make the internet local and that you can do some some interesting things about it so uh I'm really looking forward to the report in in malmo um so yes it's always enriching yeah it strikes me always when i have a colleague from another city doesn't matter where in the world i always feel like i'm home we have so many similarities we also have differences of course but we can always connect in so many ways. And I also, I've spoken to Airfus about this many times, and I would love to see some kind of development of, I don't know if we could call it twin cities project, where you match two municipalities from, I don't know where, it doesn't matter. And you can match if you're very much alike or very different. And it's really a cheap project because then you can, you know, follow each other for many, many years, say regarding a topic that you both work on. Doesn't have to be harder than that. So I agree. Just put two municipal representatives in a room and you have a project. Yeah.
- Elizabeth Johnston
Thank you, Malin Martelius. Thank you, Werner van Herle. Many thanks to our guests and thank you to our audience for listening. We hope you enjoyed this episode, which was produced in the framework of the IcARUS Project, funded by the European Commission. We look forward to sharing more insights and discussions with you in the future. So don't forget to subscribe to this podcast and visit our website of the European Forum for Urban Security. Stay tuned for the next episode of the Efus's podcast.
