An 18 -year -old was arrested this week in France for planning a terror attack influenced by the ‘ince’ ideology. The individual, identified by local sources such as Timothy G., was arrested in Saint-Etienne with two knives in his backpack and the authorities identified that he had women’s target.
This attempt at the attack is not an independent case, but is located in a broad spectrum of misogyny and violence that appeared on the Internet during the past decade and soon being taken to society with tragic consequences.
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Misogynist subculture
The term ‘Ince’ emerged on the Internet and is an acronym for the expression “involuntary celibate” in English. It is currently recognizable by the general public due to media murders that mentioned this label and the popularity of the Netflix “adolescence” series, inspired by incidents of this type.
Since the 2010 this neologism was mostly used by young men who developed a subculture that blamed the women of their sentimental and sexual dissatisfaction.
A different origin to the current meaning
Created by a woman
Although it is almost always associated with the male population, the term ‘Incl’ was initially coined by a Canadian university in 1997 who called a Alana in the Internet forums. Originally the word was ‘Invcel’, but it would end up being changed to the current ‘Incel’ in 1999.
The word appeared As part of a student personal project that sought to explore what elements prevented people from establishing relationships and sharing those experiences. From the following decade the original meaning of neologism would be deforming to acquire the current negative connotation.
The attack of a young American named Elliot Rodger (seeing a picture below), which culminated in the death of six people is considered a key turning point within a misogynist line of thought that was becoming more radical within various Internet circles and male communities.
The particularity of Rodger’s case is that before his suicide he left a manifesto in which, in addition to making a retrospective about his life, he channeled a good part of his frustration over women, to which he blamed his lack of affective and sexual success.
Subsequent attacks and attempts would take inspiration in this case, although this time they would already be more clearly framed within the concept of ‘Incel’with which some authors of these crimes said they were directly identified.
Hate attacks
Media cases
1
Vista Island, United States (2014)
Elliot Rodger
A 22 -year -old named Elliot Rodger murdered six people and wounded another 14 using sharp, fire and car weapons. Before the attack, a video with threats had uploaded to YouTube. He committed suicide after committing crimes and left a 137 -page manifesto in which he expressed his hatred towards women, whom he accused of rejecting him.
2
Toronto, Canada (2018)
Alek Minassian
Minassian killed 10 people and wounded 15 by running over them with a van, being the worst attack of this type in the history of Canada. Before carrying out the attack, he left a message on the networks indicating with the Incel movement and citing Elliot Rodger as a reference. The perpetrator was sentenced to life imprisonment.
3
Tallahassee, United States (2018)
Scott Beierle
Beierle, a 40 -year -old man, entered with a firearm in a yoga gym and killed two women, in addition to leaving six other people injured and then committed suicide. It was known that he was active in ‘Ince’ cutting forums and used to make misogyn and violent comments on the Internet. Like other cases of this type, he blamed the women of their frustration and impossibility of maintaining relationships.
Toronto, Canada (2020)
JC initial teenager
A 17 -year -old teenager, whose identity was not revealed for being a minor at the time of the events, murdered a woman with a machete in a spa. Two other people were injured. The attack was judged as a terrorist attack by being framed in the sphere of the Incel movement and the minor received a life sentence condemnation without the possibility of accessing probation in 25 years.
Terrorism and growing trends
With the passage of time these attacks have been classified as terrorist acts in various territories and diverse. The case of murder in 2020 in Toronto was one of the first in which terrorism charges were used within the accusation and subsequent sentence.
A study from the University of St. Andrews (Scotland) cited the growth of attacks framed within the spectrum ‘ince’ as an “emerging trend in terrorism” and that violent facts were framed within the framework of hate crimes.
That same year the International Observatory for Studies on Terrorism He raised the same questioning shortly after the attack registered in Toronto. The entity detected some additional trends among the perpetrators of attacks that remain frequent today: racial supremacism and ideas of the extreme right.
In the United Kingdom, threats of this type are investigated by anti -terrorist agents and, according to the newspaper The Guardian In 2023, official statistics showed that the number of young men who had been referred to the Government’s preventive program had shot due to the influence of ideology ‘INCEL‘.
The British authorities considered the situation an “emerging risk” and mentioned that in 2022 there were 77 cases of derivations of that type to the “Prevent” program.
In April of this year, The newspaper From Spain he also reflected on the ‘Inlel’ culture and realized a study by the University of Kent (United Kingdom) that found a 500% growth in messages of this type in sites such as YouTube and Reddit.
The countries that registered a greater growth of this type of interactions were the United States, Germany and India, while in Spain there are already elements of the ‘incel’ speech in adolescents between 13 and 17 years.
Disturbing manosphere
The so -called Manosphere is considered the field of dissemination of ‘Incl’ ideas and is defined as a group of Internet platforms in which the messages that promote macho and misogynistic attitudes are large. In the nebulous beginnings of the ‘Ince’ movement sites like 4chan and Reddit were spaces in which ideas and even threats framed in that negative ideology began to be shared.
Today this activity has extended to other forums and social networks such as Instagram and YouTube for mass use, where some ‘influencers’ and users with a large number of followers promote ideas of this type partially or more bluntly.
For Stéphanie Rousseau, researcher and teacher of the Department of Social Sciences, the PUCP, although the sphere of dissemination of these messages is recent, the fundamental content is not necessarily something new
“This is part of the speeches that historically consider that women belong to men, who have a reproductive and sexual function, basically that they should serve. They do not consider them as individuals with free will,” he explains.
In the specialist’s opinion, the current Internet environment has found spokesmen identified with this type of aggressive messages and this generates an amplifier effect.
“It is a characteristic of social networks that is manifested in different fields and that occurs for many types of ideas, movements or fashions. In the case of ‘ince’ it has dramatic consequences of exacerbating violent and discriminatory behaviors,” says Rousseau.
“There are people who are empowered in this way, there are people who even decide that this is a way of getting popularity or money and unfortunately they use these ideas probably because they share them and want to get a career as leaders (of opinion),” he adds.
In the specialist’s opinion, the political climate may also have influenced an important degree in the proliferation of trends of this type, because the most coarse forms of politicians such as Donald Trump and other leaders provide a certain degree of “legitimacy” to more aggressive and extremist lines of thought.
Although it is not a set of necessarily homogeneous ideas, there seems to be a correlation that has as binder element violence.
“There are a number of ideas that are gathered in the speeches of these extremist groups the tendency to jointly find racist, supremacist and also against sexual minorities,” he says.
“When one studies the cycles of different social movements, it can be noted that what we are living with the ‘ince’ is clearly an ‘answer’ to different movements that we have seen in the previous years that promote some empowerment women, particularly young women,” says the teacher of the PUCP.
For Rousseau, this reaction is based on “a traditional vision of the social order” often linked to religion, but also to the longing for domain and greater control that males and caucásic people had over other social groups decades ago.
“They try to argue that basically all contemporary problems are due to the different of populations that have been mobilizing and empowering little by little,” argues the researcher.
