A university lecturer and psychologist says young Muslim men targeted by anti-terrorism raids were often just “teenagers being teenagers”.

Speaking in a panel discussion at a Charles Sturt University conference on radicalization and Islamophobia, University of Western Sydney lecturer Hanan Dover said the Australian Federal Police had unfairly targeted many young men in the wake of events like the shooting of Parramatta police worker Curtis Cheng, 58, in October.

Hanan Dover was one of many experts on radicalisation and Islamophobia to speak at the conference. Photo: YouTube/Screenshot More

She said the robust tactics could be contributing to the radicalisation of Muslim youths.

“I do have a lot of clients who have been charged with terrorism charges and who may have not been charged but were raided by the AFP and arrested,” she said.

“It is quite unfair, and there is no previous indicators or violence or tendency, yet they are placed in maximum-security prison with other convicted criminals, until the AFP decide they don’t have enough evidence and are released.





“When the Muslim community sees this, they see the double standards, they see the injustice.’’

Ms Dover also works as a psychologist for Psychcentral NSW.

She told the 2nd Australasian Conference on Islam Radicalisation and Islamophobia that some of the language used by the boys targeted by the AFP could be characterised as teenagers ‘acting out’.

“… Yet their acting out is being criminalised,” she told the conference at Bathurst.





AFP and NSW police officers raided the homes of several teenagers and young men in the immediate aftermath of the Parramatta shooting.

Hundreds of police officers were deployed in the pre-dawn raids which saw teenagers and men in the early 20s arrested.

Three of the four men arrested in the October raids were released shortly afterwards without charge.

The incident led to conflicting criticisms of police with NSW commissioner Andrew Scipione left to defend the NSW police force from claims it had been too heavy-handed, and claims it had not done enough to prevent Mr Cheng’s murder.

"When we raid homes, the law's quite clear: only when we have sufficient evidence that can put us in a position to charge an offender with an offence (and) put them before a court, that we can hold them," Mr Scipione told 2GB in October.



"We've taken a lot of material during the course of these searches and that's going to take us a long time to go through."

Justice Minister Michael Keenan said at the time Australians should trust law enforcement agencies, pointing to the disruption of six attacks in the past 12 months.

Mr Keenan disputed allegations the police had "dropped the ball" in their monitoring of the situation.



