Charlotte Littlewood, former Prevent practitioner and Counter Extremism Coordinator, now PhD candidate into countering extremism in the UK (an Ahmadiyya case study) at the University of Exeter
The killing of five people in Plymouth by 22-year-old Jake Davison on 12 August has firmly put the debate as to whether incel violence should be classified as terrorism back on the table.
An “incel” is someone who describes himself as “involuntarily celibate”. Incel researcher and author of ‘Men Who Hate Women’, Laura Bates, describes incels as: “an extremely violent misogynistic online community, sprawling web of forums, websites, members groups that essentially advocate sexual violence and massacring women”.[1]
The Plymouth Attack
The attack in Plymouth left five dead, including the perpetrators’ mother and a three-year-old girl and her father. Despite media focus on Davison’s links to incel groups, the attack was very quickly officially designated as not a terrorist attack.
Media figures asked, plausibly: If Davison was acting in the name of an ideology and aiming to bring about fear and social change through his actions, then should he not be designated a terrorist? The definition of terrorism is: “The use or threat of action where the action is designed to influence the government, or an international governmental organisation, or to intimidate the public or a section of the public, and the use or threat is made for the purpose of advancing a political, religious, racial or ideological cause”.[2] And the media reporting heavily stressed Davison’s incel-oriented online activity, leading towards an assumption that his attack fulfilled the definition.
However, whether Davison actually identified as an incel and then massacred five people in the name of the incel ideology is not as clear-cut as the media has suggested.
Naama Kates, creator of the ‘Incel’ podcast, says: “Davison did not self-identify that way. The one time he mentioned the word (incel) in a video, he paused to clarify that he did not include himself among their ranks, but considered them ‘people like [himself]’.”[3]
Whatever the final results of the investigation in Plymouth, that does not take away from the risk the incel ideology poses and the violent attacks that most definitely have been committed in its name.
Attacks in the Name of the Incel Ideology
The May 2014 attack outside a sorority house and subsequent shooting spree by Elliot Rodger that killed six people in California is in many ways the origin point of the violent incels. He dreamed of, as he put it in his 141-page manifesto, of: “A pure world, where the man’s mind can develop to greater heights than ever before. Future generations will live their lives free of having to worry about the barbarity of sex and women, which will enable them to expand their intelligence and advance the human race to a state of perfect civilization.” Rodger described himself as “the ideal magnificent gentleman” and could not comprehend why women would not want to have sex with him. He planned his murderous rampage as a “Day of Retribution” and said he had “no choice but to exact revenge on the society” that had “denied” him sex and love.
In April 2018, Alek Minassian, a self-described incel, killed ten people in Toronto, Canada, by driving a van into pedestrians. Before the attack, he had posted this Facebook message: “Private (Recruit) Minassian Infantry 00010, wishing to speak Elliot Rodgers: The Incel Rebellion has already begun! We will overthrow all the Chads and Stacys! All hail the Supreme Gentleman Elliot Rodger!”[4]
Two years later in Toronto, terrorism charges added to the rap sheet against a 17-year-old boy who had been previously charged with first-degree murder and attempted murder following a machete attack at a north-end Toronto massage parlour. During the investigation, police say they found evidence the teen was inspired by the “incel” movement, which became the crux of the terrorism charges.[5]
Defining the Problem
There is not unanimous agreement about what to call this violence. Tim Squirrel, who has carried out substantial research on incels’ vocabulary, argues that incel violence should be labelled misogynist terrorism.[6]
The scale of the problem is also contested. By some estimates, males calling themselves incels or in sympathy with incel ideology have killed nearly fifty people.[7]
Laura Bates, on the other hand, estimates the death toll from incels at nearly 100 in the last decade and claims there are 10,000 members of the movement in the UK. Bates asserts: “Again and again men acting specifically in the name of incel ideology have gone off line and have committed mass murders. Specifically, incels speak about wanting to murder and inflict pain on women as part of the fact that they aren’t having sex. It is not taken seriously enough—[they are] not described as terrorists or their acts as terrorism and that makes it difficult to tackle it; makes it difficult to work to prevent the radicalisation”.[8]
What, Then, Is the UK’s Current Position?
Preventative Measures
Following the massacre in Plymouth, Bates claimed that “incel violence is not taken seriously enough and that by not describing incel attacks as terrorist attacks it makes it difficult to work to prevent radicalisation into incel groups and to prevent future attacks.” She asserts that tech companies aren’t doing enough, that incel forums have largely migrated to online gaming and to dedicated websites like Incels.co and Incels.net.
However, Sara Brzuszkiewicz, researcher into incel groups, asserts in her paper, ‘Incel Radical Milieu and External Locus of Control’, that: “Reddit started banning incel subreddits for violent incitements and more heavily-moderated versions of the former subreddits began to emerge, such as r/braincels, though this was also banned in 2019. Today, while radical incel subreddits continue to regularly surface, they are banned relatively quickly”.[9]
Bates holds that if redefined, incel ideology could be more effectively tackled. If considered as terrorism, incel ideology could then fall within the UKs Prevent agenda and begin to be tackled in schools, online, and where vulnerable individuals intersect with frontline workers. It would appear, however, that Bates is mistaken: incel ideology, or ‘extreme misogyny’, has been a part of the Prevent agenda for nearly two years.
The Guardian reports that inceldom is classified within a government category known as “mixed, unstable, and unclear” ideologies. This category accounted for more than half of all referrals to the Channel de-radicalisation programme in 2019-20. But this is also not quite right. William Baldét, Regional Prevent Coordinator in the UK, attest that Prevent goes further, with “incel” having existing as a category of its own within Prevent referrals for the last two years.[10]
This confusion in about what is being done to tackle the phenomenon is notable, though it is not unique to the incel issue. That researchers focusing on the topic are unaware that the British government has already put in place procedures to provide bespoke interventions to those have adopted the incel ideology, and that Prevent is already at work on the issue, is disquieting. It is not unusual, however, for Prevent to be misunderstood and the benefits of its work underreported.[11]
Prosecution
Prosecution is another matter. Incel violence has not been classified as terrorism for prosecution purposes in the UK as it has in Canada. The massage parlour attack was the first terrorist attack prosecuted as such in Canada outside of the Islamist ideology. Canada’s federal RCMP, which ultimately decided to press terrorism charges said: “Terrorism comes in many forms and it’s important to note that it is not restricted to any particular group, religion or ideology”.[12]
A report in 2019 from the Canadian Security Intelligence Service (CSIS) specifically names two alleged incidents involving incels as examples of “gender-driven violence” under the category of “ideologically motivated violent extremism” (IMVE).[13] The report specifically names Alek Minassian and Alexander Stavropoulos, a Sudbury, Ont. man who pleaded guilty in January to stabbing a woman and injuring her baby in 2019, as examples of incels and this form of extremism.
The report indicates these IMVE groups are “driven by a range of grievances and ideas from across the traditional ideological spectrum”: “The resulting worldview consists of a personalized narrative which centres on an extremist’s willingness to incite, enable and or mobilize to violence”.
If perpetrators of incel-inspired attacks are at some point prosecuted as terrorists in the UK, akin to the developments in Canada, it could see Prevent go further than specifying “incel” at the referral stage to including incel ideology as something frontline workers are trained in countering and in identifying those found vulnerable to it.
Baldét, however, warns: “We have to be careful, though. While we want to identify genuine concerns of radicalisation to terrorism, we don’t want every sexist or misogynistic comment ending in a referral”.[14] He is concerned that since there remains a lack of clarity amongst researchers in the field of incel ideology as to what an incel group and the incel ideology exactly is, training front line workers to identify those vulnerable to recruitment into these nihilistic communities will be very difficult.
These concerns are echoed in a different was by Brzuszkiewicz, who explains: “While consensus is being gradually reached on considering incel violence as terrorism, scholars do not possess an elective analytical framework for studying the broader incel communities and, in order to partly fill this gap, a proper notion is that of a radical milieu, i.e. a community where radicalisation occurs”.[15] This sets incel apart from other terrorist ideologies. For example, violent Islamist extremism has a clear belief system that radicalises into particular organised groups, which have set ideologies and clear aims.
Inceldom is much more inchoate. Whereas incels appear to share a broad hate for the perceived standard societal approaches to relationships, there are different views on how one should approach the issue that range from treating women with disdain to try and capture their attention to violently attacking both women and men who conform to society’s perceived norms. The potential to radicalise into extreme violent acts has and continues to be realised but there is no clear system of groups to belong to that hold specified aims and groom individuals into joining them and acting on their behalf. This does not mean to say it does not fulfil the definition of terrorism, but it does make it difficult to identify and tackle.
At the initial rolling out of Prevent there were concerns around erroneous referrals for those being drawn into violent Islamist groups. A balance must be struck between the level of risk posed to civilians from attacks and the individual harm to which an erroneous referral may cause. However, one may argue that a conversation with a pupil around misogynistic language when there turns out to be no risk of violence will, nonetheless, be useful as compared to a conversation with a Muslim pupil about extremism when there is none.
Conclusion
If the incel ideology is advocating violence, if there are an estimated 10,000 members, and if scholars are right that “[t]here is ample reason to believe the threat from violent incels will remain grave going forward”,[16] it may be that lead researchers into incel ideology should work on a collective understanding of how individuals are drawn into incel groups, what these incel groups are, and how they may be identified in order to train frontline workers.
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References
[1] Interview for BBC news
[2] Terrorism Act 2000
[3] Naama Kates, “What the media gets wrong about incels”, 16 August 2021, UnHerd, https://unherd.com/2021/08/what-the-media-gets-wrong-about-incels/
[4] Chad and Stacy refer to the perceived stereotypical successful man with women and women that has sexual relations with Chads.
[5] Ben Cousins, “Teen ‘incel’ charged with terrorism could change how we view similar cases: expert”, 20 May 2020, CTV News, https://www.ctvnews.ca/canada/teen-incel-charged-with-terrorism-could-change-how-we-view-similar-cases-expert-1.4947684
[6] Tim Squirrell, “Don’t make the mistake of thinking incels are men’s rights activists – they are so much more dangerous”, 26 April 2018, The Independent, https://www.independent.co.uk/voices/incels-alek-minassian-mra-mens-rights-terrorism-toronto-van-attack-a8323166.html
[7] Bruce Hoffman, Jacob Ware, and Ezra Shapiro, “Assessing the Threat of Incel Violence,” Studies in Conflict & Terrorism, Vol 43, No. 7 (April 2020), p. 566.
[8] Interview for BBC news
[9] Brzuszkiewicz, Sara, ‘Incel Radical Milieu and External Locus of Control,’ The International Centre for Counter Terrorism – The Hague (ICCT) Evolutions in Counter Terrorism, Vol. 2 (November 2020): 1-20.
[10] Interviewed for the purposes of this article, 19 August 2021.
[11] Rupert Sutton, ‘Preventing Prevent? Challenges to Counter-Radicalisation Policy On Campus’, 14 July 2015, HJS, https://henryjacksonsociety.org/publications/preventing-prevent-challenges-to-counter-radicalisation-policy-on-campus/
[12] “Teenage boy charged in Canada’s first ‘incel’ terror case”, 20 May 2020, BBC, https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-52733060
[13] “CSIS Public Report”, 2019, https://www.canada.ca/en/security-intelligence-service/corporate/publications/2019-public-report.html
[14] Interviewed for the purposes of this article, 19 August 2021.
[15] Brzuszkiewicz, Sara, ‘Incel Radical Milieu and External Locus of Control,’ The International Centre for Counter Terrorism – The Hague (ICCT) Evolutions in Counter Terrorism, Vol. 2 (November 2020): 1-20.
[16] Bruce Hoffman, Jacob Ware, and Ezra Shapiro, “Assessing the Threat of Incel Violence,” Studies in Conflict & Terrorism, Vol 43, No. 7 (April 2020), p. 566.
