Book Review: “Social work and the psychosocial journey out of far-right extremism” by Danny Carroll II, London, Routledge, 2025 pp172, $52.49USD (hardback) ISBN: 9781032813325.
Keywords:
BTAM (Behavioral Threat Assessment and Management), Grounded Theory, Disengagement, Social Work, P/CVE, United States, White SupremacyAbstract
This review examines Social Work and the Psychosocial Journey Out of Far-Right Extremism by Danny Carroll II, an American social worker and scholar whose constructivist grounded theory study explores how individuals exit white supremacist groups. Carroll’s historical analysis traces the evolution of U.S. white ethnonationalism and highlights the vulnerability of America’s fragmented P/CVE infrastructure, including debates over social work involvement in police-led Behavioral Threat Assessment and Management (BTAM) teams. The book’s major contribution is the “Diverse Journey” framework, which reframes disengagement as a nonlinear process shaped by biographical events, disillusionment, and identity reconstruction. While this construct offers clinical value, its transferability to multidisciplinary risk-assessment contexts is limited. The review argues that Carroll neglects to engage relevant American scholarship on far-right exit pathways and could offer stronger guidance for ethical social work practice within existing systems. Nonetheless, the book is a timely call for U.S. social work scholars and practitioners to engage with white supremacist extremism.
References
Hochschild, A. R. (2024). Stolen pride: loss, shame, and the rise of the Right. The New Press.
Khalil, J., Horgan, J., & Zeuthen, M. (2022). The Attitudes-Behaviors Corrective (ABC) Model of Violent Extremism. Terrorism and Political Violence, 34(3), 425–450. https://doi.org/10.1080/09546553.2019.1699793
McKendrick, D., & Finch, J. (2017). ‘Under Heavy Manners?’: Social work, radicalisation, troubled families and non-linear war. British Journal of Social Work, 47(2), 308-324
Simi, P., & Futrell, R. (2015). American swastika: Inside the white power movement’s hidden spaces of hate (2nd ed.). Rowman & Littlefield.
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