Mother of Radicalized Man Who Died Fighting with ISIS: ‘This Is Not a Religious War’

BOUDREAU: “This is not a religious war or anything along those lines. They've just take you in it to use it as their vehicle to strengthen what they say and to try to get into those minds and hearts of our youth and when they go to them that is not the case. It's a ideology that's right across the border it is similar to gangs, cults, and everything else. So that's the way we really need to look at it."
KEILAR: “Your son, Christianne, was won over. Tell us about your son and also your message to parents of other young people who may be vulnerable.” 
BOUDREAU: “Well, with Damien, I think initially he had met somebody who was looking for that vulnerability within him. And so they found that he had passion to want to help. He wanted to make a difference. And the reasons he went over, he told me, were to help women and children. They were suffering at the hands of Bashar al Assad. It wasn't a religious ideology in his mind; that wasn't just the purpose for him. And once that information was given to him, they led him to areas online to seek out reinforcement to everything they were telling him. Unfortunately, at the time, there was nothing to counter that. There were no other ideas, in a healthy way, of how to help people to counter the ideologies that were planted. And that's basically what's happening. We've got a whole medium out there now that reaches out to our children in their smart phones, in their iPads, through whatever medium there is, that we as parents don't have control over. The world is changing quickly. We can't be there 24/7. Things happen out in the environment. They have other environmental forces and factors that play a huge part in their lives, not just the parent. The parent is such a small piece. And we really need to get past that stigma and that fear to engage them, a) into talking about it, educating them much further in advance. We do it with sex education, with drugs and everything else; why aren't we doing it with this? This is a problem that they face, and we need to arm them with those tools so they have the proper education going into it, so they're resilient to these types of things.”