TRAVIS FRAIN | GRADUATED: 2020 DEGREE | MA INTERNATIONAL AND MILITARY HISTORY


PROFESSION | NATIONAL CHAIR OF THE UK COUNTER TERRORISM YOUTH ADVISORY GROUP AND LECTURER AT SALFORD UNIVERSITY


Countering Terrorism: My Role in its Future


The instant that Travis Frain was thrown into the air by a car in a terrorist attack on Westminster Bridge in March 2017, his long-held plan to be a history teacher was shattered. But studying at Lancaster two years later, he clarified his need to dedicate his life to countering terrorism - and that nothing less would be enough.


Travis was a first year History and Politics student at Edge Hill University on a field trip to the Houses Of Parliament when he was mown down by a driver in an 82-second attack that killed five people including PC Keith Palmer, and injured more than 50. He himself sustained serious physical injuries which required months of operations, two years of physiotherapy, and healing of deep psychological scars.


Recalling the aftermath, Travis says: “After the attack I couldn’t put my feelings into words. I’d been thrown in at the deep end having been injured and having to deal with these issues viscerally on a day to day basis. At the lowest level, I wanted to understand what had happened to me and why, but also what role I could play in the future.


Having spent two years as Chair of the UK’s National Counterterrorism Advisory Group, Travis entered academia - first at Salford University training officer recruits joining Greater


8 | STEPS 2024


Manchester Police, and most recently as a lecturer at the University of Central Lancashire, where he currently teaches on their Criminology, Policing, and Counterterrorism programmes. He says: “My goal had always been to be a secondary school history teacher but the second the attack had happened, that totally disappeared. After what had happened, it would not be a big enough ambition.”


His path to a master’s at Lancaster came after he’d completed his undergraduate studies alongside intensive medical treatment for his injuries, and had begun to work in counter-terrorism - first giving talks and workshops, mainly in schools, about his experience, and then in a part- time position at the Counter Terrorism Policing Headquarters in London. In a sense his traumatic experience had given him unique qualifications - but he soon realised education would let him make the biggest contribution in the fight against terrorism.


For him, Lancaster was the perfect combination - proximity to his family in Darwen, a rural campus and a taught MA course in International and Military History that would put his own experience into a historical context going back to the Ancient Greeks, as well as to study modern-day terrorism and conflict.


“My goal had always been to be a secondary school history teacher, but the second the attack had happened, that totally disappeared. After what had happened, it would not be a big enough ambition”


Talking to his lecturers, in particular Dr Mark Lacey and his dissertation tutor Dr Marco Wyss, was mutually useful. He says “It was really useful for me to see that what I had been through was part of history. I found it very interesting to see my experience contextualised over 2-3,000 years.


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