The Emergence of the Incel Community as a Misogyny-Motivated Terrorist Threat

Demeter Lockyer, Michael Halpin and Finlay Maguire

Terrorism and Political Violence, 2025, vol. 37, issue 3, 369-385

Abstract: The incel (involuntary celibate) community is characterized by misogynistic beliefs surrounding women and a fatalistic outlook on society. Incels have committed, or have attempted to commit, several acts of mass violence globally, which suggests they are an emerging terror threat. In this study, we discuss how incels position their violence as ideological terrorism, how this violence is tied to misogyny despite incels’ additional targeting of non-women, and finally, the extent to which incels are, or at least claim to be, anti-violence or otherwise non-violent. To do this, we inductively analysed over 1000 comments from a popular incel forum, Incels.is, detailing how incels discuss three mass-murderers associated with the incel community: Elliot Rodger, Alek Minassian, and Jake Davison. Through revealing the ways incels discuss these three men, we conclude that incels view their own violence as terrorism with ideological aims, thus qualifying the community as a terrorist threat.

Date: 2025
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://hdl.handle.net/10.1080/09546553.2023.2296515 (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:taf:ftpvxx:v:37:y:2025:i:3:p:369-385

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.tandfonline.com/pricing/journal/ftpv20

DOI: 10.1080/09546553.2023.2296515

Access Statistics for this article

Terrorism and Political Violence is currently edited by James Forest

More articles in Terrorism and Political Violence from Taylor & Francis Journals
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Chris Longhurst ().