Warning: this article contains terms and references readers may find offensive.
The incel movement is waging a “war against women” and poses a growing threat to children, according to a report that calls on tech companies to intervene to stop the radicalisation of lonely men and boys online.
The incel – or “involuntarily celibate” – movement is an online subculture involving men who feel unable to have sex or find love and express hostility and extreme resentment towards women.
Research into the leading incel forum found a “community of angry, belligerent and unapologetic” men that poses a “clear and present danger” to women and an “emerging threat to children”.
Users posted about rape every 29 minutes and the forum’s rules were changed six months ago to accommodate paedophilia.
More than a fifth of posts featured misogynist, racist, antisemitic or anti-LGBTQ language, with 16% of posts featuring misogynist slurs, the study said.
On the forum Sky News found posts saying “women should be sex slaves” and “I feel hate when I see a girl”.
The study of more than one million posts over 18 months found that posts mentioning mass murders increased by 59%.
Perpetrators of mass shootings are known to have been active in incel communities or discuss their ideas, including the Plymouth gunman Jake Davison, who killed five people including a three-year-old girl.
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Researchers warned that “unchecked, incel communities have the potential to radicalise further” and called on tech companies to act.
Image: Jake Davison carried out the UK’s deadliest mass shooting since 2010
‘Not lone wolves’
Imran Ahmed, chief executive of the Centre for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH), a British non-profit group which carried out the study, said: “Incels are not lone wolves or socially isolated.
“They are in fact enmeshed in highly active communities with a coherent, evolving ideology that has radicalised further in the past 18 months.
“They are egging each other on to commit mass violence, normalising sexual violence against women and even codified their approval of sexualising children.”
UK pupil sought incels’ advice after ‘Prevent referral’
In some cases, boys as young as 15 are being led down a rabbit hole of hatred and extremism, the research says.
One user, given the pseudonym Carl in the report, posted on the forum asking for help after he claimed to have been flagged to Prevent for carrying a knife in his school bag.
Other forum members responded with advice on how to avoid scrutiny online and congratulated him on his decision to stop taking psychiatric medication.
Throughout the thread, Carl referred to prescribed psychiatric medicine as “jewpills”, itself a reference to an incel conspiracy theory that psychiatric medicine is part of a Jewish conspiracy to pacify white men.
‘Power-users’
The research was conducted by “scraping” forum posts and analysing members’ activity, trends and keywords.
The forum received an average of 2.6 million monthly visits, with 17,118 members. In the 18 months covered, only 4,057 wrote posts.
Almost half (43.8%) of traffic to the forum came from the US, with 7.5% from the UK.
Discourse is driven by 406 “power-users”, who produce 74.6% of all posts, some spending more than 10 hours a day on the forum.
The forum’s rules were changed in March from “do not sexualise minors” to “do not sexualise pre-pubescent minors”.
Incel content on YouTube
The study found that forum users most frequently shared content from YouTube, where incel channels have more than 136,000 subscribers and 24.2 million video views.
Davison subscribed to an incel content channel that YouTube has refused to take down despite public pressure, the CCDH researchers said.
Another channel posts videos of women covertly filmed in London.
The CCDH urged YouTube to take down all incel channels and called on Google to push “incelosphere” websites down search results.
Mr Ahmed said: “We find in this study a reflexive dynamic between misogynistic communities online and incels.
“They argue with each other, support each other, share ideas, promote each other’s lexicon and values. In short, they are brothers-in-arms in a war against women.
“That’s why a small subculture, numbering in the thousands, has had such an enormous effect.”
Sky News has asked YouTube for comment.
‘Not all violent’
Dr Lewys Brace, a senior lecturer at Exeter University specialising in online extremist radicalisation, including incel culture, told Sky News that he agreed with the study’s recommendations.
“The thing that concerns me personally most about this incel movement, is that people don’t actually need to look for this stuff to get to it,” he said.
Although he said that some people in the community posed a real threat to others, he stressed most are not violent.
“Obviously not everyone in this community is violent,” he said. “In fact, my research has shown that actual violent conversations are the minority of conversations on these platforms.”
The problem for law enforcement is telling the difference between someone acting out on the internet and someone who poses a threat, he said.
He added: “For me, the ones that concern me are the ones that take these ideas, and they’ve written long posts where they’ve integrated these ideas with their own personal offline experiences.”
Given the example of Davison posting long YouTube videos featuring incel ideas, Dr Brace said: “That’s exactly it. Those are exactly the kind of examples we should be concerned about.”
Origins of inceldom
Incel as a form of self-identification is thought to date from a website founded in the 1990s as support for people who found it hard to have sexual experiences.
The risk is that sexual frustration and the blame incels place on women is leveraged into violence.
The most notorious attack was carried out by Elliot Rodger, 22, who killed six people and himself in a rampage in California in 2014.
He left behind a 137-page “manifesto” and a YouTube video revealing that he carried out the attack because he could not secure a relationship with a woman, which in turn led to his hatred for those who were in relationships.
Rodger is frequently idolised and venerated in incel forums where he is sometimes referred to as the “Supreme Gentleman”.
A company linked to Tory peer Baroness Michelle Mone breached a government contract of nearly £122m to supply surgical gowns during the COVID-19 pandemic, the High Court has ruled.
The £121.9m sum, the price of the gowns, must now be repaid by the company, PPE Medpro.
The Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC) brought the case, saying it provided 25 million “faulty”, non-sterile gowns.
On Wednesday, the High Court said the gowns did not comply with the requirement of having a validated process to demonstrate sterility, and it was not possible for the DHSC to have sold them and recoup the loss.
The company, a consortium led by Baroness Mone’s husband, businessman Doug Barrowman, was awarded the government contract after she recommended it to ministers.
As well as wanting to recover the costs of the deal, the government wanted to recoup the costs of transporting and storing the items, which it said amounted to an additional £8.6m, though the High Court denied the latter request, saying the loss was not proved at trial.
PPE Medpro’s counterclaim that the DHSC should have advised it on how to comply with the contract also failed.
Denied wrongdoing
Both Baroness Mone and Mr Barrowman denied wrongdoing, and neither gave evidence at the trial in June.
She had initially denied involvement in the company or the process through which it was handed the government contract.
However, it was later revealed that Baroness Mone was the “source of referral” for the firm getting a place on the so-called “VIP lane” for offers of personal protective equipment for the NHS.
In response to the ruling, Baroness Mone said it was “shocking but all too predictable”.
Mr Barrowman said it was “a travesty of justice” and the judge gave the DHSC “an establishment win despite the mountain of evidence in court against such a judgment”.
“Her judgment bears little resemblance to what actually took place during the month-long trial, where PPE Medpro convincingly demonstrated that its gowns were sterile,” he said.
“This judgment is a whitewash of the facts and shows that justice was being seen to be done, where the outcome was always certain for the DHSC and the government. This case was simply too big for the government to lose.”
Ahead of the ruling on Tuesday, PPE Medpro said it intended to appoint an administrator.
The news has been welcomed by Chancellor Rachel Reeves and COVID-19 Bereaved Families for Justice UK.
“We want our money back. We are getting our money back. And it will go where it belongs – in our schools, NHS and communities,” Ms Reeves said.
“Profiting and corruption during the pandemic cost lives,” the families group said. “Those responsible must be held to account.”
All GP surgeries in England are required to offer online appointment bookings from today.
Practices must keep their websites and app services available from at least 8am to 6.30pm, Monday through Friday, for non-urgent appointments, medication queries and admin requests.
Many surgeries are already offering online bookings and consultations, but services are typically less effective in working-class areas.
The Department of Health and Social Care says there is a lack of consistency, as some surgeries that offer online services are choosing to switch the function off during busier periods.
The British Medical Association (BMA) has argued safeguards have not been put in place, nor have extra staff been brought in to manage what it anticipates will be a “barrage of online requests.”
The BMA has said GPs are considering a range of actions after voting to enter a dispute with the government over the plan.
Health Secretary Wes Streeting has urged the BMA to embrace the plan, saying the union’s resistance is “a real disservice to so many GPs” who have already introduced the service.
Image: Health Secretary Wes Streeting says booking a GP appointment should be as easy as booking a takeaway. Pic: PA
‘As easy as booking a takeaway’
The minister said the government will help practices that need assistance to implement the plan, “but we’ve got to modernise”.
Mr Streeting told the Labour Party conference: “Many GPs already offer this service because they’ve changed with the times.
“Why shouldn’t be booking a GP appointment be as easy as booking a delivery, a taxi, or a takeaway? And our policy comes alongside a billion pounds of extra funding for general practice and 2,000 extra GPs.
“Yet the BMA threatens to oppose it in 2025. Well, I’ll give you this warning; if we give in to the forces of conservatism, they will turn the NHS into a museum of 20th century healthcare.”
Sir Keir Starmer has revealed plans to establish a nationwide “online hospital” by 2027, enabling patients to receive treatment and care from home.
The government said the initiative could provide up to 8.5 million additional NHS appointments within its first three years.
Available via the NHS app, it will allow patients to schedule in-person procedures at local hospitals, surgical hubs or diagnostic centres, reducing delays.
Sir Keir Starmer has said he does not believe Nigel Farage or Reform voters are racist – and also refused to label Donald Trump’s claim that London wants “Sharia law” as such.
Asked if it was racist, considering Sir Sadiq is a Muslim, Sir Keir said: “I have been really clear that the idea that in London we’re introducing Sharia law is rubbish.”
Sir Keir also insisted he does not think Mr Farage or Reform supporters are racist, after targeting the party in his Labour conference speech and claiming its leader “hates Britain”.
Asked if he thinks Mr Farage is a racist, he said: “No, nor do I think Reform voters are racist.
“They’re concerned about things like our borders, they’re frustrated about the pace of change.
“So I’m not for a moment suggesting that they are racist.”
He said he was “talking about a particular policy”, which would see Reform axe the right of migrants to apply for indefinite leave to remain, ban anyone who is not a UK citizen from claiming benefits, and force those applying for UK citizenship to renounce other citizenship.
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3:19
How did the PM perform at conference?
Reform ‘taking country down road of toxic division’
Sir Keir also refused to say whether he thinks Mr Farage is dangerous, saying: “I think the fight at the next election is going to define us as a country for years to come.
“I think it’s a dangerous moment for the country.”
He said he would not “get into labelling the man”.
“I’m talking about the ideas and what he stands for and what I stand for,” he added.
“I think that taking our country down the road of toxic division where you don’t want to fix problems because if they’re fixed, you lose your reason to exist, I think that is dangerous for our country.”
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0:57
Starmer’s ‘anti-Reform party’ gamble
Farage: Starmer unfit to be PM
Mr Farage reacted to Sir Keir’s speech by accusing him of being “unfit to be the prime minister of our country”.
“I used to think the prime minister was a decent man, somebody that I could talk to and chat to,” he said.
“We might disagree on our worldview, but I thought he was a profoundly decent human being. I am completely shocked at his behaviour.
“I hope when he wakes up tomorrow morning he feels ashamed of what he has done. This is a desperate last throw of the dice for the prime minister who’s in deep trouble, a prime minister who can’t even command the support of half of his own party.
“But I’m sorry to say, I now believe he is unfit to be the prime minister of our country.”