'Incels encourage each other to do exactly what Jake Davison has done'
13 August 2021, 16:33
Author Laura Bates tells LBC so-called 'incels' "encourage each other to do exactly what Jake Davison has done", after the 22-year-old gunman killed 5 people and himself in Plymouth last night.
It comes as Davison referred in his YouTube videos to the misogynistic "incel" movement (involuntarily celibate), difficulties meeting women, struggling to lose weight and how his life was "never… the same again" after injuring his ankle while working in scaffolding.
Laura Bates is the author of 'Men Who Hate Women, The Extremism Nobody is Talking About'.
Shelagh Fogarty said: "It looks as though, based on what's emerging from Davison's own online material, that he was a self-confessed incel.
"What is an incel? What should we be worried about in relation to incels?"
Read more: Plymouth shooting: Jake Davison named as killer of five, including girl aged three
Ms Bates replied: "Incels are an online community of men, numbering, conservatively I would suggest, in the tens of thousands. They describe themselves as 'involuntarily celibate', in other words they're not having sex and they'd like to be.
"This is a community that consists of a sprawling web of dedicated websites, forums, communities, groups, social media platforms. They're extremely active online and it's an extremely violent community.
"These are men who think women are objects, they're to be used for sex. They think women who don't have sex with them deserve to be raped and massacred as a result, and they actively incite rape and violence against women, they encourage each other to do exactly what Jake Davison has done.
"They talk incessantly online about punishing women, about massacring as many people as they can as punishment for the fact that they're not having sex."
Plymouth Shooting: Local resident 'heard gunshots going off' outside his home
Read more: 'Unspeakably awful': Community grieves after six die in Plymouth shooting
Shelagh then asked whether incel attacks are "indiscriminate".
"Yes, in a number of incel terror attacks, although they haven't been described as terror attacks," Laura replied.
"The Elliot Rodger massacre in Santa Barbara is a good example of this - men have also died.
"In some cases it's domestic violence related so a male family member is killed. In some cases men who happen to be nearby who happen to be witnesses are killed, and in some cases men are also targeted.
"Because incels not only detest woman for not having sex with them, they also detest the sexually attractive men who they see women do have sex with, who they perceive to be sexually successful - men they describe as 'chads'."
Laura then said 'chad' was a word Jake Davison had used online.
"It's very frustrating to see this explicitly referred to as not in any way related to terrorism," she said.
"He clearly had extremist beliefs that related to hatred against a specific demographic, in this case women, and then committed a massacre.
"If that was the case in any other situation... I would argue rightly that we'd describe that as terrorism, and it's really problematic we can't make that link when the particular form of terrorism we're talking about is the violent hatred of women."
Read more: Woman arrested on suspicion of murder after death of two-year-old boy
