The number of juvenile terror suspects being arrested rose by 60 per cent last year in a new sign of the problem of teenage extremism and online radicalisation, official figures revealed on Thursday.
The Home Office statistics show that 32 of the 166 people arrested for terror-related offences in 2022 were aged 17 or under.
That is 12 more than the previous year and the highest proportion of juvenile arrests in the overall total on record.
The number of those aged 18 to 20 was also up, with 11 additional arrests, in a further illustration of the increasing prominence of teenagers in terror investigations.
Both counter-terrorism police and MI5 have expressed concern about the trend, which has been attributed to the volume of toxic material circulatingonline, including an increase of far-Right and misogynistic content in addition to the longer-standing problem of Islamist propaganda.
The statistics also show a leap in extreme Right-wing convicts in prison, with 59 such inmates accounting for a quarter of the 226 terrorist prisoners at the end of last year. Islamist prisoners, who totalled 149, still made up the bulk of those in custody, however, with a further 8 per cent of terrorist inmates holding what are described as “other ideologies” in today’s figures.
The statistics also show that the 166 terror arrests last year involved 153 men and 13 women and that three quarters were British, including dual nationals.
An ethnic breakdown shows that 44 per cent of those held were white, while 24 per cent were Asian.
A total of 27 terrorist prisoners were released during the year, of whom 17 had been serving sentences of four years or more.
In the other direction, prosecutors achieved 51 convictions out of the 58 terror suspects tried during the year.
Just over a third received sentences of less than four years, including five jailed for under 12 months. A total of 14 offenders escaped prison altogether and received non-custodial sentences instead.
But there were also two life sentences handed out and five sentences of ten years or more.
