Three days after the apparent terrorist attack in Charlottesville, we learnt a new fact about murder suspect James Alex Fields Jr: he had a history of domestic abuse.
On Monday, Fields’ mother described various incidents of violence committed against her by her son. She describes making multiple 911 calls as a result of beatings, being threatened with a knife, and being spat on. At various points, the police were called to the family home.
These revelations were of little surprise to women who have campaigned on male violence against women and girls. All too often, a terrorist’s first victim is the woman in his home.
Take London Bridge attacker Rachid Redouane, whose wife detailed his acts emotional abuse, while her friends reported she’d endured physical abuse at his hands. Or Robert Lewis Dear, whose wife reported being pushed out of a window years before he opened fire on a Planned Parenthood clinic. Then there’s Khalid Masood, who drove a car into people at Westminster bridge, and Omar Mateen who murdered dozens of people in an Orlando night club—both men were perpetrators of domestic violence.
Why domestic violence is ignored
Some of these men were known to the police—Fields’ mother reported that the police came to the house. And yet, their repeated acts of gender-based violence had not led to concerns that they might go on to commit further acts of terror. This speaks clearly to the fact that we still don’t take male violence against women seriously in our society.From the police to the government, we still view gender-based violence as an “isolated incident” or even as “a domestic.” Rather than seeing endemic male violence against women as a crisis, a form of terrorism itself, society continues to see it on an incident-by-incident basis. We’re refusing to make the links between violence, inequality, patriarchy, and toxic masculinity. This attitude is deadly for women—and it is making us less effective at combatting terrorism.
We have to start talking about male violence. What’s more, we have to start talking about its normalisation, its glamorisation, and its role in extremist movements—including the right-wing extremism which appears to be central to the Charlottesville attack.
The alt-right's hatred of women
Women have been warning for years now about the rise of violent and frightening misogyny on the right.First there was GamerGate, a coordinated attack by men against women in the gaming industry that led to death and bomb threats against prominent feminists in the community, such as media critic Anita Sarkeesian.
Then there are the "Red Pill" (a reference to The Matrix) forums on Reddit: spaces filled with men claiming to have ‘woken up’ to the dangers of feminism. Many of these forums feature young white men vowing revenge on women, claiming women and ‘social justice warriors’ are responsible for their lack of success in their careers, relationships, or social groups. In this ‘man-o-sphere’, men fantasise about asserting their dominance over women via rape and violence.
In these online spaces and others, women have borne witness to the threats, stalking, doxxing (publishing personal details such as someone’s address) and abuse that has been allowed to flourish in the so-called “alt-right” communities.
When violence comes offline
We’ve seen before how these threats have spilt out into the real world with devastating consequences. Back in 2014, Elliot Rodgers wrote a misogynistic manifesto online, saying he wanted to create a world "where women fear you" before going out and shooting six people.Racism and white male entitlement also play a huge part in this online world, particularly the white supremacist trope that black men are "taking our women"; when Dylan Roof massacred black worshippers in an attack of a church in Charleston, South Carolina in 2015, he made this ugly and racist claim.
A home in the Trump campaign
The men who espouse this violent rhetoric found a natural home in the Trump campaign. Suddenly, it became acceptable to join groups of other men while chanting “lock up the bitch.” Suddenly, they had a Presidential candidate who joked about supporters of the Second Amendment “doing something” to a powerful woman. Suddenly, they had a President who boasted about committing sexual assault.The language of online misogyny was printed on pro-Trump merchandise. When he invited Breitbart founder Steve Bannon into the White House, the normalisation of sexism and misogyny was complete.
Trump’s Presidency has been accused of emboldening white supremacists and racist— including by the mayor of Charlottesville. It is telling that former Ku Klux Klan Grand Wizard David Duke also credited Trump for inspiring last weekend's march in Charlottesville. There is no doubt that racism and anti-semitism motivated the rally, with men giving the Hitler salute, carrying Confederate flags, shouting racist abuse and beating up people of colour.
Of course, with 53 per cent of white women voting for Trump in the election, we have to ask questions about women’s role in propping up this rhetoric. Yet we can both acknowledge that women can be complicit in right-wing racism while understanding that violent misogyny is a defining element of the alt-right’s extremist ideology—posing a risk to those women who seek to challenge it. Trump's Presidency can be accused of emboldening violent misogyny, too, and the complicity of some women does not stop right-wing misogyny being a red flag.
Time to take violence seriously
This ideology is propped up by a society that doesn’t take male violence against women and girls seriously. The violence of right-wing terrorism is its more extreme iteration, but the racist and misogynist violence that underpins it is not rare. They’re in the forums. They’re in the news headlines. They’re in the police stations. They’re in the White House.And that’s what links us back to the attitudes towards domestic abuse described earlier. When we don’t listen to women talk about the violence committed against them—when police and the media brush off intimate partner violence as “just a domestic” or an “isolated incident”—then the toxic masculinity and male entitlement that underpins that violence is allowed to flourish. When we ignore the warnings of women victims of GamerGate and rabid online abuse, and brush it off as “just online” or tell women to “log off the internet,” we are allowing male aggression to be normalised.
We have to start joining the dots between the vile misogynistic fantasies of men on Red Pill forums and the man crashing his car into anti-fascist protesters. We have to join the dots between terror in the home and terror on the streets.
If we want to talk about stopping terrorism, we have to start talking about male violence.
