What happens when your son converts to Islam at the age of 14? What if you don’t know anything about the religion? And what happens when you then report your son to the police who in turn enrol the teenager on the Government’s controversial anti-radicalisation Channel programme?

Asian Image speaks to a mum who became increasingly worried about her son’s behaviour.

Having nowhere else to turn, she walked into a Lancashire police station to report concerns that her son was being radicalised.

Non-Muslim Ruth (not her real name) told us her son first started looking into Islam at the age of 13.

No other members of his family were interested in Islam.

At the time she was unaware that her son was also autistic.

“It first happened in 2012 when he was in Year 8 at secondary school.

“All of a sudden he said he did not want bacon. Then he did not want to be around the dog and hung a picture of Makkah on his bedroom wall.

“He also wanted halal food and started learning Arabic. He even started fasting.

“He then started wearing shalwar kameez and visiting a local mosque.”

She says her son had Asian friends who he was already spending a lot of time with but he was also getting information from YouTube.

“At the time me and my husband were confused more than anything else. We had no-one to turn to.

“At the age of 14 he said he wanted to change his religion.

“This obviously came as a shock to me.

“I did not have a problem with the religion, but as a mother, when your child of 14 starts to behave differently you don’t know what to do.

“I told him he was too young to be making these kinds of decisions. But he wouldn’t listen.

“At the time we had stones thrown at our window too as people in the neighbourhood did not understand what was going on.

“I knew his friends.

“The thing was when they came to the house some would stroke the dog and whilst others would eat with a knife and fork – he would eat with his fingers.

“I remember one asking why he was dressing like this if he wasn’t going to the mosque. They would dress in jeans.”

She said at the time she did not know exactly what was going on and admits that she had no concerns about him wanting to convert to Islam but did not have the information about the religion.

“My husband didn’t want it to happen. But at the time we didn’t know he was autistic.

“He wouldn’t let me in his room and he wouldn’t speak to us at times.

“He wanted us to learn Arabic to speak to him. He wanted us to get rid of the dog.

“Our son had started to talk with an exaggerated accent and told us he would not speak to us unless we spoke Arabic.

“I bought him halal meat and went to his school several times because I was worried but to be honest they did not want to know.

“I never spoke to anyone at the mosque. I didn’t know how to.

“It was a small mosque on a terraced street.

“How do you approach someone you don’t know?”

Ruth says her concerns seemed to deepen when he ended up meeting an older man.

Her son had thought because he was also dressed in shalwar kameez that he would be religious.

She said: “Once I dropped him to a carnival and he ended up meeting an Asian man who turned out to be a criminal.

“He took him to a canal path and he robbed a disabled girl. My son got implicated in it.

“I didn’t know what was going on in his head.

“Then I found what I thought were drugs under his bed.”

Ruth said things got more serious when he was heard making comments about wanting to behead his younger sibling.

“He had also posted a picture on Facebook dressed as a ‘terrorist’.

“Finally, I was so worried I just turned up at the police station desk and told them my son was being radicalised.

“He had just taken the identity of this other person.

“I thought this other person would encourage him to go to Syria.

“I thought I would lose him forever.

“If I had not gone to the Prevent team I do not know what would have happened.”

Ruth was contacted by the Prevent team and visited by an officer who sought consent for her son to be placed on the Channel Programme.

Channel is part of the Prevent strategy. It aims to identify and provide support to individuals who are at ‘risk of being drawn into terrorism’.

Referrals come from those who have concerns about individuals who may be vulnerable to being drawn into terrorism.

And they can come from a wide range of individuals and partners and could include youth offending teams, social services, health, police, education and local communities.

The ‘intervention programme’ is targeted at young people.

But the whole Prevent strategy has come in for criticism over several years with some organisations boycotting it completely.

A Prevent officer Joanne told us: “We told her straightaway our job was to support her.

“He was the victim here and his family were the victim.

“When we spoke to him he didn’t know what the fuss was about.

“When we looked into his background a lot of things did not appear what they turned out to be.”

The Prevent officers found he had been looking into how to make a bomb but also how to grow cannabis.

The officer said, “There were no concerns from the mosque he was attending. We did not need to visit the mosque.

“We also asked him to attend a bigger mosque in the area where he could speak to someone maybe more qualified.

“We also knew his friend’s were all right.”

The Prevent team made a referral and the boy was diagnosed with Autism Spectrum Disorder which was identified as the underlying ‘vulnerability’ which led to him ‘self-radicalising’ on the internet, in that when he became fixated with a particular idea he was prone to taking it literally.

Ruth said, “It turns out he was autistic – we had no idea about this. Through his autism he was following things literally.

“That’s why he was focused on something completely.

“If I hadn’t gone to the police there is no way we would have realised any of this.

“It was not the conversion that was concerning me at all. My own brother-in-law was Asian.

“If I hadn’t gone to the police there is no way we would have realised any of this.

“Now, my son is at college. He has given up his religion and has blocked it from his mind.”