It can take just one month to turn a disenfranchised teenage student into an Islamic terrorist, Cardinal Vincent Nichols has told Catholic teachers. The Archbishop of Westminster urged delegates at a London conference to guard against internet recruitment of vulnerable secondary school students by ISIS. He was speaking at the Secondary Leaders’ Conference of the Catholic Association of Teachers, Schools and Colleges last week. A combination of naïvety, isolation, loss of shared values and easy access to the internet are making children in their early teens prime targets for the terror group, he said. From his discussions with young people who had flirted with invitations to join ISIS, he had learned that children, typically aged 14 or 15, were being recruited at astonishing speed. “One said that it was clearly possible to bring a person to the point of being willing to leave all for the sake of their newfound cause, even to the point of embracing violence or suicide, within a four- or five-week period,” Cardinal Nichols said. “One month is all it takes to transform a dissatisfied and disorientated teenager into a terrorist,” he added. “We are talking about the age of children in your schools, in your care. We are talking about youngsters around here.” The cardinal described how one high-achieving girl he spoke to was dissuaded from joining ISIS at the last minute after long discussions “about what she wanted in life and what she stood to lose”. The cardinal told educators that jihadis were targeting such children because they considered them to be “clean skins”, people “as yet unformed by substantive values, left ‘value-free’ by their life thus far”. “It is to teenagers such as these that the call of a definitive, demanding faith, one which asks for a heroic sacrifice in a wide cause for victory ... is cast as a true fulfilment of all the unfocused yearning within them,” the cardinal said. Many recruits, he added, were isolated by the modern world and wished to be part of something greater, and “may be finding life to be rather flat, functional and boring”. Catholic educators, the cardinal said, must have the courage to propose an authentic Christian purpose to young people that is equally as captivating as the false narrative of the terrorists.