How do you deradicalise an incel?

ON AUGUST 12, 2021, 22-year-old Jake Davison killed his mother with a shotgun, before going on a rampage in his hometown of Plymouth. Over the course of 12 minutes, he murdered four more people, including three-year-old Sophie Martyn and her father Lee, and injured two others, before turning the gun on himself. It was the worst mass shooting in the UK in over a decade. He left no video, no manifesto, no note and no explanation for his actions.

But in the aftermath of the attack, his digital presence went some way to explaining his mental state. Davison was an active subscriber to a variety of YouTube channels specific to incels, the ‘involuntarily celibate’.

The term incel first dates to 1993, and a woman named Alana, who built a text-only website for people who were virgins against their will. She called it “Alana's Involuntary Celibacy Project”. The rise of incel ideology came much later, though, fuelled largely through communities on sites such as 4chan and Reddit, where self-dubbed incels dabbled in extremist right-wing content.

Unbridled levels of sexism and misogyny brewed in these corners of the internet: for most, women were sex objects, deserving of control and domination; the system was rigged in favour of the conventionally attractive men dubbed ‘chads’. Central to these beliefs is the concept of being ‘blackpilled’ – the nihilistic idea that the game of sex and attraction is rigged from birth by a genetic lottery, and there’s nothing you can do about it.

In the years leading up to his attack, Davison posted his own videos talking about his weightlifting and how he had been ignored by women. As months went on, the videos became more nihilistic and sexist – he recorded himself saying women “are very simple-minded and they ain’t all that bright” and that he had nothing more to look forward to in life than “getting f***ing uglier every passing year”. In his final YouTube video, uploaded just two weeks before the attack, he talked about getting ‘blackpilled’. Eight days before, he posted on the IncelExit subreddit, for people looking to leave the incel community, saying he felt he had been permanently corrupted: “I personally don’t think once you live this life you can really ever change the damage done”.

Depression and suicide are common themes in these communities. And sometimes acts of violence and suicide can be heavily interlinked – on some threads where incels discuss killing themselves, others often tell them to “not go down alone”. Violent incels first burst on to the scene in the 2014 Isla Vista terror attack, when 22-year-old Elliot Rodger murdered six people before taking his own life. In the buildup, he released a YouTube video and manifesto justifying his actions as a way to punish women for rejecting him. In a particularly graphic section, he talked about his desire to put all women in “concentration camps”. As many as 52 people have been killed in incel-driven terror attacks since Isla Vista, with many citing Rodger as a direct inspiration. In one of the deadliest, Alek Minassian murdered ten people in Toronto, Canada in a vehicular ramming attack after posting on Facebook: “The Incel Rebellion has already begun! We will overthrow all the Chads and Stacys! All hail the Supreme Gentleman Elliot Rodger!”.

In March 2020, 22-year-old Anwar Driouich was sentenced to 20 months in jail for hoarding weapons and explosives after trawling incel forums and expressing his desire to carry out a massacre. Later in December, Gabrielle Friel, who idolised incel mass murderer Elliot Rodger, was found guilty of illegally purchasing deadly weapons, allegedly for a potential killing spree. Another unnamed 16-year-old boy from Birmingham in England who was fascinated with inceldom was convicted of three terror offences for possessing gun and bomb manuals. He had talked in the past of how all women "deserve" to die.

As violent incel attacks have increased, researchers and counterterrorism forces have started to look for solutions. Their quest – to answer one simple question: can you deradicalise an incel?

JOHN HORGAN BECAME one of the world’s leading deradicalisation experts almost by accident. In the late 1990s, he was working at University College, Cork doing his PhD, when he found himself interviewing former IRA members. He was supposed to be asking them about the IRA’s involvement in organised crime, but he found the conversations started to follow a similar pattern. “They wanted to talk about why they were increasingly disillusioned with the peace process and the movement,” he says. “I didn't realise it at the time, but they were essentially talking about the seeds of disengaging from terrorism.”

It wasn’t until 2003, long after Horgan had left his native Ireland to lead research into different forms of terrorism at universities in the United States, that he thought back to those interviewees when he was asked by a colleague to contribute to a journal on terrorism studies. He started working on a a piece about “how terrorism ends and how people get out of it”.

But the more he dug into the area, the more he realised the dearth of actual research in the field of deradicalisation – often it was just shadowy programmes run by authoritarian regimes, promising near 100 per cent success rates but never opening themselves up to any kind of scrutiny. In Saudi Arabia, for example, programmes supposedly deliver a 90 percent success rate, despite a litany of failures appearing over the years. In one case, a former ‘deradicalised’ graduate of the programme went on to become the deputy commander of al-Qaeda in Yemen.

Even the UK’s own Prevent strategy, which aims to reduce the threat of terrorism by intervening to stop people from becoming dangerously radicalised, has seen plenty of criticism, particularly from Muslims who are disproportionately and often completely unfairly targeted by the scheme. In 2016, the parliamentary Home Affairs Select Committee labelled Prevent “toxic” for its broken relationship with the Muslim community, and called for it be reformed.

“So much of counterterrorism practice and policy is, is based on gut feeling, it's based on what people think they ought to be doing, rather than what any research says,” explains Horgan. “And I think many of us have lost faith in counterterrorism policymakers, because they are just so far removed from the world of evidence.”

He wasn’t the only one thinking that way. After finishing a philosophy PhD that explored the motivations behind suicide bombings at University College Dublin in 2009, Paul Gill was also starting to get frustrated at the lack of scientific rigour in the field. As he puts it, scores of researchers presented new “conceptual models” but were never able to provide the evidence to back them up. In 2010, Horgan and Gill joined forces at Penn State University to try and solve that. Their aim was to filter through all the data they could find about terrorist backstories, histories, personalities, past crimes and more to try and build up patterns; to find the constellation of factors that drives someone towards extremism and terrorism. They hoped this would enable them to reverse engineer the process: to bring someone back from the brink, or stop them being drawn down the rabbit hole of extremism in the first place.

Although both are from Ireland, their backgrounds are very different. Horgan grew up in County Kerry, about as far from the conflict in Northern Ireland as you could get on the island, he says. His interest in the area was purely academic. Gill, on the other hand, grew up hearing about retaliation killings on the news. “It was that sort of constant backdrop of noise that was going on,” he says. “So you had to do a lot of self learning to try and figure out what was going on.”

The work started with undergraduates sifting through open source information on people who had been convicted of offences associated with the Provisional IRA, but by 2011 it grew into a groundbreaking government-funded project examining the backgrounds of personal histories of lone-actor terrorists. They collected data on every aspect of people’s personal backgrounds to look for clues, but the scope was kept relatively general.

Then Elliot Rodgers killed six people at Isla Vista. At first, Horgan didn’t know what to make of the news. “I remember people in my world looking at that and thinking this is very strange, but it’s likely a one off,” he recalls. “It wasn't until a few years later, when Alek Minassian killed the pedestrians in Toronto. That's when people like myself started to think that there was clearly something here.”

As awareness of the world of incels grew, Horgan became one of the leading experts on incels and deradicalisation. He started by asking why – if it’s such a growing community – so few actually commit violent acts. “Out of the many, why do we have so few? I mean, that's the fundamental question that I'm obsessed with in my research,” he explains. But there wasn’t one single trigger that made him choose to start researching incels. “It doesn't happen like that,” Horgan tells me. “And this is exactly how all terrorist disengagement works by the way. There's no ‘aha’ moment. Often it's just the right place at the right time.”

He secured funding from the US government about the dangers of incel-inspired terrorism for a pioneering research project on the issue. “We wanted to basically compare the kinds of messaging found in the manifestos of people like Elliot Rodger, and others, with non-violent incels,” Horgan explains. “We're trying to find the recipe for prevention.” If you can understand the difference between violent and non-violent extremists, then you can work out the triggers for violence. And if you can do that, you can help pull people out of the rabbit hole. But despite $250,000 in funding, the project is stuck in neutral – awaiting an ethics review before it can get underway.

In the past, incels have been dismissed as a fringe great, but Horgan is adamant about the threat they pose. Studies have found that lone-actor attacks, of which incels are a part, have killed more people and are a bigger threat to the world than other forms of terror. “It's not going away,” Horgan says. “And there is evidence to suggest it is growing with respect to acts of public targeted violence. Incel-inspired violence is a threat to public safety. So we have no choice but to take it seriously.”

UNTIL 1997, THE perception among the public, politicians and researchers was that becoming a violent extremist was “pretty much a one way street,” as Horgan puts it. “You’re in it until you're captured or you're dead.” The field of deradicalisation has it roots in Racist and Right-Wing Violence in Scandinavia: Patterns, Perpetrators, and Responses, a book published that year by Norwegian researcher Tore Bjørgo, who had been studying neo-Nazi groups in his native country and began to see a pattern of members choosing to leave the movement.

Today, deradicalisation is used as a catch-all term for three very different processes. First, there’s deradicalisation itself; the ability to get someone, either a convicted terrorist or an at-risk extremist, to disavow the entire movement they were part of. Then there’s disengagement; more focused on how to stop that person from committing violence, rather than trying to help them change their overall world view. Finally, there’s prevention, essentially applying the lessons of the other two to understand how you can stop people from becoming extremists in the first place.

Around the same time as Horgan and Gill were gathering data on routes into violent extremism, Daniel Koehler was working out how to reverse engineer that information to build a method to deradicalise someone in practice. It’s fraught with difficulty – convincing someone to disengage from violence, or more than that to leave behind extremist movements altogether is a tall order. Just putting one foot wrong during the process can be enough to completely break everything.

In 2014, Koehler founded the German Institute on Radicalisation and Deradicalisation Studies (GIRDS) and the associated peer-reviewed Journal for Deradicalisation. The first thing he learned is that the drive for someone to become an extremist is constituted of a wide array of push and pull factors. “There are basically two things working together in a person who is radicalised, negative and positive factors. Negative ones are bullying, harassment, racism, anything negative that happened to you,” he says. “But this in itself usually does not turn you into an extremist. It’s much more the positive side of it that does so – the promises of greatness, of strength, of loyalty, of camaraderie, of changing society for good, embodied in the ideology.”

Another central finding from his work over the years has been that extremists develop tunnel vision as they go further down the rabbit hole. All of their problems and potential solutions to them get cut down into one thing, in a process known as “de-pluralisation”. For a religious fundamentalist for example, every personal and societal problem they have will usually be explained by a worldwide conspiracy against their religion, and violence on behalf of that cause becomes the only solution to that problem.

The most effective route out is to challenge this “de-pluralisation” of their worries. So if someone is concerned about money, help them hold down a stable job. If they are looking for a sense of camaraderie, help them to socialise with wider society. That doesn’t mean you completely ignore the ideology or ideas. “You cannot address the person's connection to an extremist environment without addressing what they found attractive, it's simply impossible,” Koehler says. But acting like you can win someone over solely in the ‘marketplace of ideas’ is doomed to failure.

But while the framework exists, and groups like GIRDS and more have been using it to support former far right, Islamic or nationalist extremists, until now the practice has focused little on the world of incels. And applying it into that world is much harder than it seems.

The incel community has a few traits that make it particularly impervious to intervention. First there’s the high rate of serious mental health problems. “Most deradicalisation programmes usually do not encounter extraordinarily high degrees of mental health issues,” says Koehler. “I think that might be a little bit more tricky to solve.”

You can’t cure mental health factors in the same way that you can use jobs, education, family therapy, social interventions to give more life stability to an at-risk terrorist. Then there’s the other obvious problem; if incels become incels primarily or partly because of the fact they haven’t had sex, it’s not as if terrorism researchers can solve that problem for them.

As well as making it easier for potential terrorists to access content about how to carry out an attack (Gill cites David Copeland and Anders Breivik, who used the same bomb making manual, but the latter built more deadly devices thanks to help from the internet), technology has muddied the waters for deradicalisation researchers. The internet allows for unlimited access to an unlimited number of ideologies which makes terrorists harder to pin down and predict. In the past, most terrorists were members of a group or a movement with set goals and and a clear outlook, now extremists will mix elements of Q-Anon conspiracy theories, far-right extremism, and incel ideology into their own personalised mix.

In Davison’s case, although he was clearly influenced by incel ideas, there is no concrete evidence that they were the trigger that sparked his attack. He created no political manifestos or posts before the attack. But that doesn’t mean it didn’t play a more distant role. “Although something else may have driven the violence on the day, the ideology might have played a different type of role in that it might have just destabilised his life, it might have caused friction at work, it could have caused the loss of these other types of protective factors,” explains Gill. "We try to sort of give this simple arrow between the ideology and the violence, but the ideology could actually be a cause of the cause.”

As a relatively new, internet-based movement, incels have not been fully addressed or even understood by most authorities. While some countries, like the US and Canada, treat them as a full-blown terrorist movement and have funded projects like Horgan's, by others they have been largely ignored – seen as a weird niche of the internet. The UK government and authorities in particular have been less open to seeing the movement as a bona fide terror threat than their American counterparts. “As a movement it’s quite rare in the UK. It is something that's been kind of imported over from America,” says Will Baldét, an officer for the UK counterterrorist Prevent programme in the West Midlands, before adding that he does expect it to “to seep its way into the UK at some point” in the future.

Researchers in the field are pretty skeptical of that view, not least because as an almost entirely internet-based ideology focused on women’s rights more generally, it is far from limited to just one country or continent. “To say that this is a uniquely American problem is myopic,” says Horgan. “An attack that took place in Christchurch, New Zealand, directly inspired acts of terrorism in El Paso, Texas – these borders, these jurisdictional differences in some ways are now largely artificial.”

That’s not helped by the fact that the concept of deradicalisation is often greeted by a lot of cynicism from members of the public, who may generally think that the government should lock up all potential terrorists and throw away the key, even if practically it could never happen. But people have some very solid reasons to be wary of deradicalisation programmes – because when they fail the consequences can be deadly. Usman Khan, the 2019 London Bridge attacker, who murdered two people, was at a rehabilitation conference after being released from prison for terrorism chargers when he decided to go on a killing spree. With each one of those failures, convincing the public that deradicalisation is a viable option becomes harder and harder.

Now though, the rising focus on incels has caused large parts of the counterterrorism community to rethink the entire discipline.

BETTINA ROTTWEILER CREDITS a few “fan emails” with changing her entire career. Like so many other terrorism experts, she began it focusing on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan and the rise of terror groups like ISIS, until she saw Horgan and Gill’s work on lone actors. After sending some speculative emails to Gill, he accepted her onto a PhD course at UCL, where he is now based after leaving the US, where she now focuses on domestic terrorism.

Years later, Rottweiler released an article exploring the role of conspiratorial ideas in motivating terrorists, but the response was too positive. Many commentators acted like she had solved everything and proven conspiratorial ideas were the only ingredient needed to create a terrorist, something she completely disagreed with. There is always much more to it. So she started re-reading the old manifestos of incel terrorists – and a pattern began to emerge. “No-one spoke about it, but rejection from women, clear hatred, wanting to control them and dominate them, objectify them, saying women are for sex, was everywhere,” Rottweiler explains. “And it wasn't just in the incel-inspired manifestos.” Incels were saying something very overtly and directly that she now realised had actually been an undercurrent in all terrorist movements the entire time.

With the support of Paul Gill, she ran a study into the role misogyny played on violent extremism, which has now been released as a pre-print. She found that those with strong misogynistic attitudes were 20 per cent more likely to have violent extremist attitudes, and 42 and 43 per cent more likely to justify terrorist violence and show a willingness to commit violence respectively. They also wanted to understand how misogyny can be one of the drivers that makes someone prone to becoming violent. What they found was that misogynistic attitudes in men were also triggers for two other things – hyper-masculinity and a violent desire for revenge.

The former, the sense of wanting or needing to achieve some sort of heightened stereotypical masculine ideal usually because for whatever reason you aren’t fulfilling that ideal currently, leads many to become violent, “because for them violence makes you look strong and powerful, and gives you dominance” as Rottweiler puts it. In terms of revenge drivers, if misogynistic attitudes leave you feeling entitled to a control over women you don’t have, it can manifest in a desire to violently take revenge on the society that is denying it to you.

In the case of an incel terrorist for example, you may have someone who because they feel inadequate over their lack of sex, wants to reassert their masculinity through violence. That alongside a desire for revenge on those around them who are achieving that ideal, mixed with a misogynistic attitude that can lead to the dehumanising of women, leaves you heavily at risk of becoming violent.

“Within your society, often you just don't see the wood for the trees,” explains Rottweiler. “You know, you're just so blind to sexism, because it's so around you, because it's so deeply ingrained in our society.” She was far from the only one rethinking the role of misogyny in terrorism in the aftermath of the rise of incels.

One government backed study in the UK earlier this year, Project Starlight, looked into the role domestic violence can play after pressure from author and journalist Joan Smith, who penned a book on the issue (Home Grown: How Domestic Violence Turns Men Into Terrorists). While full results are yet to be published, its early findings were stark. Almost 40 per cent of adult referrals to the government’s Prevent programme had a history of domestic abuse either as perpetrators, witnesses or victims, or all three. As Nazir Afzal, a solicitor and former chief crown prosecutor once explained it: “The first victim of an extremist or terrorist is the woman in his own home.”

But while more and more researchers are trying to put more focus onto misogyny, the authorities are less convinced. Rottweiler says officials she speaks to from government and counterterrorism forces are still largely opposed to the idea of looking at misogyny as a potential factor for radicalisation. Some allegedly felt the organisations they worked for were too sexist to properly address these issues. It’s worth noting many of these people are coming from very male-dominated, often quite sexist institutions themselves. Just in the Metropolitan police force, in the aftermath of the murder of Sarah Everard by off-duty police officer Wayne Couzens, there have been accusations of “widespread sexism” and a culture of fear for female officers. Some 2000 police officers nationwide have been accused of sexual offences in the last four years.

So while projects about specific things like domestic violence may get funding, wider studies into misogyny overall tend not to. They get labelled as too ideological. “We face a lot of resistance,” Rottweiler says. ”Because as soon as you say something like that, you're just like, ‘Oh, she's just a feminist’.”

FOR HORGAN, STUDYING incels and far-right terrorists more widely is like nothing he’s worked on in his career. “I have people calling my department chair saying that I should be deported and fired,” he says. “That kind of persistent threat. I've never experienced it as a researcher before, but it is very real.” For him, it’s an indicator of just how big these problems are becoming, and just how widespread they already are. Be it rising political extremism or even just misogyny itself, terrorists are at the sharp end of problems that affect every corner of society in different ways. In the long run, the hope for deradicalisation experts isn’t just to find a way to stop terrorism, but to help drive governments to start to deal with these much wider issues like domestic abuse and sexist violence, “everyday acts of terrorism” as one interviewee put it. But it’s a science still in its early days; prone to mistakes and in need of more support.

At the very least, in the short-term, the justification for deradicalisation for its supporters is simple; there is no other choice. There are roughly 25,000 men on the radar of police as potential terror threats in the UK. If you were to arrest all of them, not to mention breaching a huge number of human rights of many potentially innocent people, you would be increasing the overall prison population by around 30 per cent, an impossible burden. Not to mention just arresting people after they commit violence doesn’t go anyway towards preventing those attacks from happening and the loss of life that always comes with.

“We can’t simply arrest our way out of this problem,” explains Horgan. “Disengagement and deradicalisation aren’t the soft option, they’re the smart option. The sooner we realise that, the sooner we can get on with building the evidence base for doing this stuff in reality.”

This article was originally published by WIRED UK