Secular hell or salvation: care, control, and the racialization of “radical” Muslim children in Dutch classrooms

Preventing violent extremism (PVE) programs are central to state efforts to counter radicalization, particularly in educational settings. This unique ethnographic study, based on 68 hours of classroom observation, examines the Educational Youth Program (EPJO), where police officers conduct “radicalization” workshops for primary school children (aged 11–12). Officers perceive Muslim pupils as potential threats, effectively racializing them as a “suspect community” in need of reform. Police braided words of care and love with the language of security and surveillance, a form of “tough love” that serves as a tool of control. Their intimate methods of care/love extract knowledge, or better said, intelligence from children in the form of confessions. “Salvation” is promised only if pupils recast their religious identities to fit a securitized-secular framework. Otherwise, a secular hell—suspicion, surveillance, and exclusion—is awaiting these children in this world.This paper expands the literature on racialized PVE initiatives by revealing how care, security, and secularism intersect, and how invasive efforts are reframed as benevolence. Officers' affective labor transforms classrooms into securitized spaces, turning “love” and “care” into tools of a racialized, secular governance. The apparent success of EPJO reflects its mastery of pastoral, intimate power: presenting control as care and security as love, all while entrenching systemic exclusion under the guise of societal protection. The state has not abolished hell, it only secularized it.