Incel violence threat ‘still not being tackled’ year after deadly Plymouth shooting, MP warns
Exclusive: Counterterror police insist they are taking the threat from incels seriously but MP says there is no ‘coherent strategy’
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Another mass shooting like the rampage that left five victims dead in Plymouth a year ago will happen again unless the government tackles the threat posed by incels, an MP has warned.
Luke Pollard, who represents the area where the shooting took place, told The Independent it had exposed a “rotten underbelly of our society that we knew little about and have no way of challenging”.
“A year on and we still don’t really understand incel culture – the systems aren’t in place to both identify young men going down that path or how to rescue them,” he said.
“If we want to prevent another Keyham happening again, we’ve got to tackle incel culture. We need a coherent strategy as to how we deal with this.”
Jake Davison, 22, murdered his mother before roaming the streets with a shotgun and killing a three-year-old girl, her father and two other passers-by on 12 August 2021, before shooting himself dead.
It was the worst mass shooting in Britain in more than a decade, and social media posts quickly emerged suggesting that Davison identified as an incel.
Short for “involuntary celibate”, the term describes a loose online movement for men who believe they are unable to have romantic or sexual relationships with women.
Although not explicitly violent, the incel movement has already been linked to several mass shootings that have left more than 50 people dead in the US and Canada since 2015.
An inquest to be held next year will probe Davison’s ideology and the extent to which it affected his actions, and proceedings have already revealed that he had been reported to the Prevent counterterror programme by his mother.
Police did not declare the Plymouth shooting a terror attack, because they believed that Davison was primarily driven by mental health issues and personal grievances, rather than a “political, religious, racial or ideological cause” that would meet the UK’s legal definition of terrorism.
MI5’s position is that incel ideology should not be treated automatically as terrorism, but recognised as a “potential terrorist motivation” and assessed on a case by case basis.
Mr Pollard said he understood why the Plymouth shooting was not officially defined as terrorism but warned: “[inceldom] has to fit somewhere else and it doesn’t fit anywhere else at the moment.
“It’s happening in all our communities behind closed bedroom doors on toxic parts of the internet.
“There is nothing Devon-specific about that tragedy, it could have happened anywhere round the country. Because of that, it still could again.”
Some experts are growing concerned that the current interpretation of terrorism means the potential for attacks driven by inceldom and other forms of mass violence is not being addressed.
Researchers who have been chronicling the impact of online subcultures at the Institute for Strategic Dialogue (ISD) warned that it was still “easy to stumble across and access incel communities” online, and that material is being promoted by algorithms on mainstream social media.
Milo Comerford, the head of extremism research at ISD, said inceldom was more of a “frame through which to view the world and blame others for your problems”, rather than a defined ideology.
“Incels are reflective of what’s going on more broadly with extremism and the way online communities facilitate it… it’s harder to put people into ideological buckets,” he told The Independent.
“We need to have a much better and broader violence prevention architecture that is able to anticipate, respond to and intervene in threats in a much more upstream way that isn’t just counterterrorism policing and a very narrow Prevent-type focus.”
Tim Squirrell, head of communications at ISD, said there was an ongoing threat of incels committing “mass violence”, adding: “We need to understand mass violence and targeted violence as issues in themselves, rather than as issues only insofar as they fit into an ideological framework.”
A 2021 report by the UK’s Independent Reviewer of Terrorism Legislation warned that “novel cause terrorism such as attacks by incels and school shooters” was on the rise, and authorities were becoming concerned about significant numbers of people who did not fall within the “traditional categories” of extremism.
Jonathan Hall QC said counterterror police were still able to investigate incels, but prosecutors later faced the “challenge” of proving a terrorist motivation beyond a reasonable doubt.
His report concluded that the existing legal definition of terrorism was “sufficiently broad to capture modern phenomena such as incel violence”.
Mr Pollard has introduced a bill in parliament that would make “hostility or prejudice towards women” an aggravating factor for sentencing violent crimes.
“The tragedy has given us two responsibilities now; one is to make sure we look after each other and the second is to make sure this never happens again,” the MP said.
“We first all of all need to understand why it happened. We have as a society seen this hate breed on our watch, and I can’t yet see a determination to understand and tackle this.
“We need a cross-government strategy that identifies this as a problem and seeks to provide solutions.”
A spokesperson for counterterror police said officers were taking the threat from incels seriously and have dedicated resources to analysing and assessing the issue.
“While Counter Terrorism Policing does not explicitly define ‘incel’ as a terrorist ideology, it is possible that some incels may cross the terrorism threshold if they use violence, threaten people or encourage action in order to advance their view of how society should be,” a statement added.
A Home Office spokesperson said: “The shooting in Plymouth was tragic and one year on, our thoughts remain with the victims, their families and the community. We are committed to tackling those who promote extremist ideology, violence and hatred in our society, and who radicalise others into terrorism.
“Serious violence or the threat of serious violence for the purpose of advancing incel beliefs is capable of satisfying the terrorism definition. Whether police treat an incident as a terrorist incident is an independent, operational decision for the police determined by the facts of the case.”
To commemorate the anniversary on Friday, a service is being held at St Andrew’s church and a vigil for the immediate community will take place in Keyham.
“The vigil is a time to come together, reflect and remember the people we’ve lost,” said Dr Charlotte Cree, councillor for the Devonport ward where the shooting happened.
Separately, members of the public will be able to light candles near Smeaton’s Tower, the lighthouse by the sea.