By Sarah Stevenson and Dr Steve Barracosa
Practitioners working in the field of countering violent extremism (CVE) are routinely exposed to confronting and offensive ideas and content, including graphic violence, gore, hate, terrorist propaganda and ideologies. Despite this, there is a relative gap in the literature considering the experiences and well-being of practitioners undertaking this work. Risk assessment and case management are typically emphasised as central features of effective CVE practice, often overlooking the psychological and emotional impact on front-line staff (see Van der Heide et al., 2019; Logan & Sellers, 2021; Schulten, 2024). While the literature is limited, emerging research highlights that exposure to extremist content and rhetoric through CVE work can lead to vicarious trauma, secondary traumatic stress, reduced job satisfaction, burnout and counterproductive work behaviours. Further, for CVE practitioners to build trust, effectively engage and deliver care to clients, they must invest substantial emotional energy, analyse and explore their clients’ experiences, perspectives and situations. Through both exposure to violent and extremist content, and the emotional labour inherent to clinical CVE work, the impact on practitioners and their well-being is vital to consider.
These factors are particularly pronounced for practitioners working with at-risk and radicalised youth. The global CVE landscape is characterised by increasingly fluid extremist themes and movements, mixed and incoherent ideologies, a meshing of personal grievances and extremist ideas, targeted threats, gore, nihilism, apocalyptic thinking, and the widespread availability of violent and extremist content online. At-risk and radicalised youth have emerged as an ever-present cohort on the caseloads of CVE services and programs. This includes increasingly younger individuals whose profiles are defined by psychosocial instability, trauma, developmental vulnerability, clinical complexity, as well as pronounced family and systems challenges (see also Five Eyes, 2025). At-risk and radicalised youth are an awkward cohort for whom vulnerability and violent extremism risk exist in equal measure. Practitioners subsequently face heightened challenges when engaging, assessing and intervening with youth in a CVE context.
Effective practice must therefore ensure practitioners are equipped to assess and intervene in this space. The unique and evolving nature of working with at-risk and radicalised youth requires specific and targeted training, as well as ongoing and intensive professional development. Practitioners would be remiss to assume adult-centric models or generic racialisation or disengagement frameworks are effective when applied to youth. Developmental factors, neurobiological vulnerabilities and social contexts demand a wholly different lens and set of skills. Effective work with at-risk and radicalised youth cannot be undertaken without extensive expertise in adolescent development, youth-specific vulnerabilities and life-course factors relevant to pathways into, and out of radicalisation and violent extremism. This holds irrespective of whether CVE work is conducted with youth in-person or online.
Having skilled practitioners is one part of the conversation. Effectively managing their well-being is the other. The emerging literature on youth CVE highlights the intensity of practice-based needs, the associated resource burden, including potentially elongated assessment and intervention timeframes, as well as the case and risk management responsibilities placed on the shoulders of multidisciplinary practitioners from various services and programs. The weight of the work being conducted with at-risk and radicalised youth in an increasingly convoluted CVE climate cannot be understated. Emotional responses, such as feelings of frustration, helplessness, and fatigue, will at times permeate youth CVE practice. This may be intensified due to challenges engaging and intervening with family networks, and when the path to diversion or disengagement is uncertain, unclear or difficult to achieve. Without adequate support, practitioners’ capacity and efficacy in delivering CVE interventions to youth are eroded.
Consequently, supervision and professional support structures are not luxuries; they are ethical imperatives. Broadly speaking, effective supervision is associated with lower levels of practitioner stress, burnout, and role conflict and greater staff wellbeing. Specifically, in CVE, reflective practice helps practitioners interrogate their biases, emotional reactions and ethical dilemmas. It’s particularly vital when working with ideologically charged or complex youth, where ambiguity, emotional triggers and clinical challenges are common. The guiding principles for supervision frameworks provide a basis through which practitioners may benefit. These principles include offering emotional presence and sensitivity to practitioners, valuing vulnerability and competence, offering knowledge and experience with humility, and developing a transparent and trusting relationship to support continued personal and professional growth.
Specifically, Hawkins & Shohet (2012) propose the seven-eyed supervision model where the various “eyes” refer to different areas of focus, including: the client, the supervisee’s interventions, the supervisee-client relationship, the supervisee, the supervision relationship, the supervisor and the wider context. This model emphasises connection between the different “eyes”, accounting for environmental and external forces impacting the work undertaken by CVE practitioners. It positions supervision in a nonlinear framework where the focus shifts between different areas as they become more prominent. Beyond formal supervision arrangements, the literature has also begun to highlight the importance of team relationships and communities of practice as supportive mechanisms to mitigate the emotional burden of the work being undertaken in CVE. Combined and bidirectional support from subject matter experts, academics, and practitioners with relevant CVE experience is likely to provide additional benefits. In a globally interconnected climate, there is no reason why support and supervision structures shouldn’t traverse international borders and boundaries.
Overall, working effectively with at-risk and radicalised youth is an essential component of contemporary CVE practice. It is an area of immense potential. CVE practitioners, services and programs have a responsibility to youth clients, their families and the wider community to ensure we are adequately addressing vulnerability and risk factors. The consequences of inadequate youth CVE practice are substantial for future generations and the communities in which at-risk and radicalised youth reside. Youth CVE practice can be intense, challenging and underpinned by complexity. The global CVE landscape is continuously shifting. Youth CVE practice has become a battlefield of nuance, requiring highly skilled practitioners, professional humility and relentless reflection. While the focus is rightly on community safety and outcomes for at-risk and radicalised youth, we must consider the well-being of practitioners. If we’re serious about prevention, diversion and disengagement, we need to be equally serious about training, support and professional supervision to sustain our youth CVE practitioners.
Sarah Stevenson and Dr Steve Barracosa are experienced Australian youth CVE clinicians and researchers. Sarah is a clinical psychologist. Steve is the lead consultant for PathwayX, an Australian youth extremism consultancy firm. They provide extremism, forensic and clinical supervision and support to youth CVE professionals.
This blog post is part of a series featuring contributions from presenters at the VOX-Pol Next Generation Network Conference 2025, held at Charles University in Prague, Czech Republic. Dr Steve Barracosa was a keynote speaker.