Boys as young as 13 are being radicalised by the “incel” internet subculture believed to have motivated the Plymouth gunman Jake Davison, an expert in extremism has warned.
New figures reveal that three of the biggest forums frequented by those who support the woman-hating ideology are pulling in half a million clicks from UK visitors each month. On Thursday, when Davison, 22, shot five people dead, radicalised “incels” goaded others to commit mass shootings.
Incels are people, usually young men, who are “involuntarily celibate” and blame women for depriving them of sex. They often hate people in relationships, and in extreme cases they advocate violence or “retribution”. They have been linked to at least six mass shootings in America.
In one exchange on Discord, a chat app popular with children, a man describing himself as an incel said he planned to kill himself and posted a photo in which he was holding a shotgun similar to the one used by Davison. Discord said it took a “zero-tolerance approach” to content promoting “extreme ideologies”.
“If you hate females so much why not shoot some,” another man replied. “You’re gonna kill yourself anyway. Use that shotgun to shoot some bitches.” Other users wrote: “Do a shooting”, “livestream it” and “the Las Vegas shooter did it best”.
The discussion took place in one of 291 “servers” or chatrooms on the site tagged with the term “incel”. Several members of the “Depraved Weirdos” server where the gun photo was posted said they were in the UK. It has since been suspended.
Davison, who had immersed himself in propaganda on the internet, shot himself dead after his attack. After breaking down the door of her house and shooting his mother, Maxine, he killed three-year-old Sophie Martyn and her father, Lee Martyn, 43, who is said to have died trying to protect her. He went on to kill Stephen Washington, 59, in a park and Kate Shepherd, 66, outside a hair salon.
Davison had immersed himself in incel propaganda on the internet
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Davison, an apprentice crane operator, had posted online that he was a “f***ing fat ugly virgin” who had been “defeated by life”, and discussed his hatred of women, including his mother. He signed off his final video on YouTube with the words: “I am a Terminator.”
The mass shooting — the first in Britain for 11 years — has led to calls for the government to formally proscribe incels as a terrorist group, which would lead to greater resources being devoted to monitoring the threat they pose.
Davison had legally obtained a licence and a gun despite spouting hatred on social media. He had been accused of an assault, which led to the gun and licence being taken away, but they were returned to him in July after he attended an anger management course.
Today a former teacher revealed that Davison, who went to a special needs school, should have had support from the state up to the age of 25 because of his autism and other conditions. Jonathan Williams, who taught Davison between the ages of 14 and 16 at Mount Tamara school, questioned why he was not barred from a firearms licence given his background.
Williams told the Mail on Sunday: “How is it possible that a police officer read Jake’s history of obsessive compulsive disorder, anger issues and depression and concluded he should be allowed to own a firearm? It was a catastrophic mistake with utterly tragic consequences.”
Williams said that Davison was obssessed with guns as a teenager but was never violent. He questioned whether the intensive support he received at school had dropped away once he became an adult.
Tributes are paid to the victims at a candlelit vigil
More details emerged of the assault that led to his licence being revoked in December and then returned in July. The Sun on Sunday reported that Davison punched a 16-year-old boy at a skate park a mile from his home.
Police at the time released CCTV in a bid to identify Davison, who was said to have screamed “I f**king hate women” during the incident. It was claimed he also spat at and hit a girl.
The former chief crown prosecutor for northwest England, Nazir Afzal, said Davison should have been on a watchlist, adding that it appeared police had not considered his social media activity before returning his gun and licence.
“He was exactly the kind of person that you would be keeping an eye on or the authorities should be keeping an eye on,” he said. “There were all these social media posts talking about the violence he believed in or felt was necessary, how he felt about women. None of that seems to have been taken into account.”
There have been calls for police to widen their background checks to social media before granting a firearms licence. Lord Stevens, the former Metropolitan police commissioner, called for an online trawl to establish whether applicants posed any threat.
He told the Sunday Telegraph: “The gunman was clearly a dangerous man — there is no doubt he was a threat. The videos he made should have been taken into account when he applied for a shotgun licence. There needs to be trawling of online content for an in-depth assessment of who these people are and what they think. We need to ensure that guns do not fall into the hands of dangerous people.”
Local MP Luke Pollard questioned current gun laws, asking how Davison’s firearms licence was restored to him. He told Times Radio: “That’s the kind of question our community here in Keyham and in Plymouth deserve a good answer to and at the moment I don’t think they’re getting a good answer to that.”
The Independent Office for Police Conduct is investigating after a mandatory referral by Devon and Cornwall police.
Lee Martyn and his daughter Sophie were among those who lost their lives
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Experts say the incel threat is growing in the UK. Laura Bates, a researcher and author who went undercover in the incel movement, said membership had “increased dramatically” in the past two years and described it as a “real blind spot” for the authorities.
“This is an extremist group advocating for women to be massacred, but at every level we don’t treat this in the way that we would any comparable form of extremism and hatred,” she said.
Bates, author of Men Who Hate Women, visits 50 schools a year and said children “from rural Scotland to inner-city London”, mostly aged 14 to 18, were coming into contact with the ideology.
“They might not be fully paid members of these forums but they’re still coming across viral YouTube videos and Instagram memes that are conduits for this same extremism and misogyny. It’s that filtering-down that is quite worrying, particularly in light of the wave of sexual assaults in schools,” she said.
“It tends to be completely under the radar of teachers and parents. They aren’t aware of this as a form of radicalisation at all.” Resources needed to be devoted to the threat, she said, including training teachers and schools to spot warning signs and flag at-risk pupils.
The three biggest websites devoted to the “involuntary celibate” subculture record 506,227 clicks from UK users a month and about 4.5 million worldwide, according to research by the Centre for Countering Digital Hate, using data from SimilarWeb. The three — which we are not naming — are thought to be the tip of the iceberg. Davison had profiles on YouTube and Reddit, where he discussed his beliefs. After the shooting, his videos were flooded with comments declaring him a “new hero” and a “supreme gentleman”, a term frequently used by incels to refer to Elliot Rodger, who killed six people in California in 2014.
Callum Hood, head of research at the Centre for Countering Digital Hate, a not-for-profit group, said: “There’s no question in our minds that this is a radicalising community. This should be a wake-up call that online misogyny is not an online-only problem. There is a real danger this could happen again.”
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