Parents For Peace

Are you worried about extremism?

Call our helpline at 1-884-497-3223

Family Peer-Support Network

Helpline & Interventions for Families Grappling with Extremism

The parents who founded Parents for Peace had no one to turn to for help as they watched their children slip into extremism. Determined to make sure no other family felt alone or powerless to intervene effectively, Parents for Peace created a confidential and free helpline to assist families with deradicalization interventions.

Do you need help? Call our tollfree helpline today at 1-884-497-3223.

First launched in 2017, the helpline has assisted hundreds of families from across the country and around the world and addressed a wide range of extremist ideologies. Drawing on lessons learned from suicide hotlines and other mental health helplines, the helpline has a formal protocol for evaluating cases, devising specific interventions, monitoring progress, and coaching families to healthy outcomes. Cases are ultimately resolved based on criteria in P4P’s helpline manual, ideally when it appears the at-risk individual is on a healthy path to recovery.

Complex factors that lead individuals into radicalization, most stemming from an underlying anxiety, trauma, or other mental health issue. Extremism functions as a drug of choice, a short-cut to numbing pain. Our intervention effort involves de-escalating from the ‘shortcut’ path back to a place where the core issues driving the initial turn to extremism can be addressed. When properly understood, the same vulnerabilities that were exploited by extremist groomers can instead become openings for healthy engagement. Our strategic approach involves guiding families and other potential mentors to find these openings and begin to redirect the individual, replacing the unhealthy influence of the traffickers/groomers.

Complex factors that lead individuals into radicalization, most stemming from an underlying anxiety, trauma, or other mental health issue. Extremism functions as a drug of choice, a short-cut to numbing pain. Our intervention effort involves de-escalating from the ‘shortcut’ path back to a place where the core issues driving the initial turn to extremism can be addressed. When properly understood, the same vulnerabilities that were exploited by extremist groomers can instead become openings for healthy engagement. Our strategic approach involves guiding families and other potential mentors to find these openings and begin to redirect the individual, replacing the unhealthy influence of the traffickers/groomers.

Our team brings an array of professional and personal experiences to guide interventions. We are clinicians with international experience, as well as survivors of extremism – including former extremists who understand the radicalization and deradicalization process intimately. Click here to read about our Intervention Specialists.

Family Peer-Support Network

Many families that contact Parents for Peace for intervention help are traumatized by the experience of watching a loved on descend into extremism. Some are filled with shame. Some ask how they could have let their child’s mind be stolen. Others wonder what they could have done differently. Many take their loved ones’ extremist actions as a reflection of their own parenting failures and blame themselves.

Fearing additional hurt by being judged critically by outsiders for “failures,” many parents of extremists keep their pain to themselves, bottling it up inside without a healthy outlet. Sometimes their closest friends or relatives remain unaware of what they endure. This silent suffering takes a toll on their own mental health, which in turn can make them less effective in intervening to help their loved one exit hate.

In order to provide moral support to these parents and strengthen their abilities as direct interveners, Parents for Peace has established a peer support group where families of the extremists from all over the country can come together to share their experiences, insights, and feelings with one another – without judgment. “No one in my life knows what we are going through,” said one parent at the end of a peer support session, adding, “It feels great to finally recognize that I am not alone.”