Incels waging ‘war against women’ and pose ’emerging threat to children’, study finds
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.
Researchers warned that “unchecked, incel communities have the potential to radicalise further” and called on tech companies to act.
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.”
‘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.
Read more:
Incel killer’s father lives ‘reverse nightmare’
Incel movement of growing concern to UK police
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.”
Rishi Sunak has admitted the Tories may not win the general election after grim defeats in the local polls.
The prime minister suggested the UK was on course for a hung parliament and claimed voters would not want to see Labour leader Sir Keir Starmer “propped up in Downing Street” by the SNP or smaller parties.
In an interview with The Times, Mr Sunak pointed to Sky News analysis of the local election results by election expert Professor Michael Thrasher which suggested Labour would be the largest party in a hung parliament.
Politics live: PM told to ‘wake up and smell the coffee’ after elections
“These results suggest we are heading for a hung parliament with Labour as the largest party,” Mr Sunak told the paper.
“Keir Starmer propped up in Downing Street by the SNP, Liberal Democrats and the Greens would be a disaster for Britain.
“The country doesn’t need more political horse-trading, but action. We are the only party that has a plan to deliver on the priorities of the people.”
Meanwhile, Tory rebels have warned the prime minister to change his political course after the weekend’s local election results.
Read more:
The local election winners and losers
Charts tell story of Conservative collapse
Analysis: Labour’s future success is less clear-cut
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PM on ‘disappointing’ election results
Sunak urged to take party towards right
Former home secretary Suella Braverman urged him to mould the party towards the right in order to win back voters.
But she told the BBC a change of leadership was not a “feasible prospect,” adding: “There is no superman or superwoman out there who can do it.”
Ms Braverman urged the prime minister to adopt several measures to win back voters, including further tax cuts and a cap on legal migration.
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Rishi Sunak ‘up for the fight’ in general election
Tories ‘up for the fight,’ minister insists
But Transport Secretary Mark Harper insisted Mr Sunak and the Tories are “up for the fight” of a general election despite their terrible results in the local contests.
Talking to Sky News’ Sunday Morning With Trevor Phillips, the minister said: “I think the key thing that people need to do now is get behind the prime minister, focus on the things the government is focused on delivering – the British people’s priorities around the economy, dealing with migration – and get out there and take that fight to the country ahead of the general election.”
Labour won 1,158 seats in the 107 councils in England that held elections on 2 May, an increase of more than 232.
The Liberal Democrats won 552 seats, up nearly 100, while the Tories came in third place on 515 seats, down nearly 400.
UK
Rishi Sunak rides out leadership challenge – but faces ‘exhausted and broken’ Tory party when parliament returns
The government at one point considered using Iraq to process asylum seekers – like the Rwanda scheme – according to documents seen by Sky News.
This could have seen people sent from the UK to a country the government advises against all travel to.
The two countries already have a returns agreement – but only for people that are from Iraq.
Politics live: Follow the latest updates here
According to leaked correspondence between high-ranking officials, the Iraqi returns commitments were made with a “request for discretion” and no publicity.
The country was willing to move forward but did not want a formal or public agreement.
The current travel advice to Iraq on the Foreign Office website simply advises against “all travel to parts of Iraq”. However, according to the document, negotiations were fairly advanced and described in one table as “good recent progress with Iraq”.
Other government aims included enhancing cooperation with the Iranian Embassy in order to enhance returns arrangements for migrants and potential asylum seekers.
Returns agreements are also in the works for Eritrea and Ethiopia, according to documents about work undertaken by the Home Office and Foreign Office that relates to countries with the highest number of nationals arriving to the UK by small boats.
In a tranche of internal government documents seen by Sky News, even from the earliest stage of the Rwanda policy, Downing Street advisers knew there were serious problems with their proposals.
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First Rwanda relocation raids carried out
There are even private admissions that many people arriving here on small boats did so without the assistance of criminal gangs – despite their communications strategy.
Comparisons were also made to Australia’s response – to what Downing Street officials understood to be a comparable “smaller problem” than in the UK and admitted it had cost billions of Australian dollars in order for their returns processes to be fully operational.
Read more:
Man, 38, arrested in connection with small boat crossings
Sunak says migrants going to Ireland shows Rwanda scheme is working
In one document submitted to the Home Office, some of the highest-ranking officials at the time wrote that their guidance was to be “prepared to pay over the odds” to get the policy up and running. And that the initial offer from Rwanda was a “modest sum”.
Keep up with all the latest news from the UK and around the world by following Sky News
Whitehall’s official spending watchdog has priced the cost of sending asylum seekers to Rwanda at £1.8m per person for the first 300 people the government deports to Kigali.
It also disclosed that since April 2022 the Home Office has paid £220m into Rwanda’s economic transformation and integration fund, which is designed to support economic growth in Rwanda, and will continue to make payments to cover asylum processing and operational costs for individuals relocated to Rwanda.
It will also pay further amounts of £50m over the next year and an additional £50m the following year.
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A government source said: “The Home Office is spending millions every day accommodating migrants in hotels – that’s not right or fair. We’re taking action to put an end to this costly and dangerous cycle. Doing nothing is not a free option – we must act if we want to stop the boats and save lives.
“The UK is continuing to work with a range of international partners to tackle global illegal migration challenges. Our Rwanda partnership is a pioneering response to the global challenge of illegal migration, and we will get flights off the ground to Rwanda in the next nine to eleven weeks.”
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