Within an hour of police confirming that multiple people had been stabbed at Bondi Junction, rumours of terrorism spread across social media. These soon slopped over into mainstream media outlets and were amplified by alt-right accounts on X, TikTok and YouTube.
According to the Global Terrorism Database, 13 people have been killed in Australia by Jihadi-inspired extremists over the past 10 years. Including the women killed at Bondi Junction, the Counting Dead Women project estimates that 24 women have been killed by men in the past three and a half months.
Men’s violence against women is differentiated from terrorism by framing it as a personal crime, committed by individual men against specific women, rather than a public threat driven by religious, political or ideological beliefs. This differentiation becomes tenuous, however, when gender-based ideological beliefs drive violent men to harm and intimidate the public (or at least half of it).
The Australian Financial Review recognised this complexity, but otherwise, apart from a few weak acknowledgments that almost all the people killed at Bondi Junction were women, there is almost universal agreement across media, police and parliamentarians that these killings are “not terrorism”. The immediate fallback position is mental illness.
We now have considerable evidence of online “misogynistic extremism” or “male supremacy” radicalising men and boys in Australia. It can start while our sons are sitting at our kitchen tables watching content produced by malevolent grifters manufacturing male shame for profit. It ends in a spiral of shame and self-loathing vented onto women’s lives and bodies. Innocuous videos on how to shave or style hair are only five hops from violent incel content that paints all as a threat to be violently suppressed.
Incels (short for “involuntarily celibate”) started in the early 2000s as a niche group of young men who gathered in the dark corners of Reddit to share their sullen rage against the women who denied them what they saw as their rightful entitlement to sex. Their cult-like commiseration over their shame of failed masculinity has found a new home on TikTok, racking up millions of views from young men barely out of nappies when the first incels took to their keyboards.
The apotheosis of the incel movement was Elliot Rodger, a 22-year-old man who, in America in 2014, killed six people and injured fourteen others before then shooting himself. Before committing these crimes, he published his autobiography, My Twisted World, in which he outlined his crushing loneliness and shame, his loving family and happy childhood, his hatred of women for denying him love and sex, his hatred of the men who were given love and sex by women, and the retribution he planned to exact on all of them.
After this document laying out his ideological motive went viral, he was dismissed as mentally ill, despite never having had any diagnosis of mental illness. He was diagnosed as having what was then known as Asperger’s syndrome (now recognised as a form of autism). Autism is not a mental illness, but it was close enough for media looking to supply a quick explanation to a frightened public without bothering to question why only one of the millions of lonely, insecure boys on the autism spectrum chose such a vicious path.
Rodger’s murders were not personal; they were ideological. He didn’t want to kill a woman; he wanted to kill women and the men who had sex with them. He had a meticulous plan to create fear and die a martyr to his cause. He was, by any reasonable definition, a terrorist.
It is too early to know the motive of the man who killed and injured so many women at Bondi Junction. It’s too early to know why he targeted women. And it’s definitely too early to say he wasn’t a terrorist.
If you or someone you know is affected by sexual assault or violence, call 1800RESPECT on 1800 737 732 or visit 1800RESPECT.org.au. In an emergency, call 000.
For counselling, advice and support for men in NSW, Victoria and Tasmania who have anger, relationship or parenting issues, call the Men’s Referral Service on 1300 766 491. Men in WA can contact the Men’s Domestic Violence Helpline on 1800 000 599.
