Counter Extremism Care: The Dutch Approach

Abstract

Radicalization and violent extremism pose challenges that cut across the security, social care, and mental health domains. The evidence base on CVE has broadened, yet detailed accounts of multidisciplinary exit programs, and the characteristics of the people they support, remain scarce. Drawing on the case of the National Support Center for Extremism (NSCfE) in the Netherlands, this article asks how an integrated, multidisciplinary exit program organizes mental health, social, and spiritual care around individual cases, and who its clients are. The NSCfE brings together (forensic) mental health care, social work, and spiritual care to support desistance, disengagement, and, where possible, deradicalization among radicalized individuals and their families. Approaching extremism as a ‘wicked problem’ expressed across multiple life domains, the NSCfE integrates these disciplines in a strength-based model that links each domain (i.e., mental health, social functioning, and ideology) to targeted interventions and to shared goals of stabilization, resilience, and prosocial reintegration. We describe the organization's development from an ad hoc exit facility into structured, professionalized care delivered by an interdisciplinary team of case managers. The article describes its individual-counseling (“Forsa”) program and characterizes the demographic, sociological, and clinical heterogeneity of its clientele by retrospectively coding the anonymized case files of 69 individuals enrolled between 2016 and 2023. We situate this account alongside two earlier commissioned independent evaluations of the program and the current literature on CVE and exit programs. It thereby contributes practice-based evidence on how integrated, care-oriented CVE is organized, and specifies the longitudinal, outcome-focused research required to establish evidence-based practice.