Jessica Davis is the president of Insight Threat Intelligence and the author of Illicit Money: Financing Terrorism in the Twenty-First Century.
On June 6, in a landmark ruling, a young man who killed one woman and injured another three years ago in a Toronto massage parlour was found guilty of terrorism. The man admitted that he’d been motivated to commit these acts of violence by the “incel” movement: a loose collection of people, primarily men, who interact online and share frustrations about a lack of access to sex, relationships, women, and social status. The Ontario Superior Court judge in the case found that the man’s actions met the definition of terrorist activity under the Criminal Code.
While the judge has yet to release his reasons, this attack is likely a case of ideologically motivated violent extremism which, along with political or religious motivations, is one of the three possible terrorist motivations set out in the Criminal Code.
To date, however, Canada’s terrorism laws have been disproportionately applied to one particular kind of violence: the kind that is motivated by al-Qaeda and the Islamic State. This violence is often referred to as religiously motivated, although there are political and ideological components to it. As I’ve previously argued, this selective application of our terrorism laws is a problem because other types of violence, including misogynistic and racially motivated violence, have been getting a free pass in Canada, despite being responsible for more than 50 deaths in Canada and the United States in recent years – far more than other forms of terrorism. These attacks have been categorized primarily as hate crimes, rather than part of a broader political movement intended to reshape Canadian society through violence.
Some have argued that this type of violence doesn’t rise to the level of terrorism, and that it should be treated like a hate crime because it is disorganized or small-scale, or because they fail to see how this violence is an effort to intimidate a segment of the public. This myopic view fails to acknowledge that many different segments of society can be targeted by extremist violence.
Our terrorism laws are intended to do two things: the first is to prevent terrorism, while the second is to signal that violence committed for political, ideological or religious reasons is more serious than other forms of violence. This recent judgment achieves the latter: By applying our terrorism laws (or by adding terrorism enhancements to a murder charge) to incel-motivated violence, Canadians now know that this type of violence will be taken seriously as a national security threat, and will be dealt with using the full suite of our counterterrorism tools.
This tool kit includes an entire system designed to detect and disrupt terrorist activity, which ranges from monitoring chat groups to using financial intelligence to follow the money and identify individuals who might be preparing to conduct an attack. These tools were largely developed to combat structured, organized terrorist activity. But the incel movement, and many other ideologically motivated violent extremist groups and movements, are anything but; they largely exist online, rarely interact in person, and conduct low-cost and low-complexity attacks such as stabbings or vehicular ramming. As a result, we need to rethink how we apply these tools, so they can be adapted to the new reality of terrorism.
This will involve having our law enforcement, security services, and yes, the general public, understand that this type of violence is terrorism, and should be treated seriously. We need better detection and triaging of people who might be radicalizing in all kinds of extremism on platforms and forums for incels, but also on those that cater to anti-Muslim and anti-LGBTQ+ hatred and extremism. We also need better interventions that seek to divert at-risk individuals upstream – that is, identifying people who are in the early stages of contemplating an attack, rather than after the fact. Twenty years of counterterrorism has taught us that there are many interventions that can divert such people away from committing violence, including social and psychological interventions – but it has also taught us that in some cases, when other attempts fail, the only diversion is arrest and incarceration.
Tackling ideologically motivated violence will require that Canada’s counterterrorism institutions apply all the lessons that they have learned. After 9/11, we expected our law enforcement and security services to rise to the challenge of combatting global terrorism. With an evolving threat – a shift that has now been set out in our courts – we must demand that they do so again, and expect that our law enforcement, security service, and Canadians in general treat ideologically motivated violence as the serious threat that it is.